Can an experienced player gives us a summary of what's the "vibe" of the EVE online community these days? I was lightly involved ~15 years ago.
larnon
I started more than 15 years ago and recently got back into it. I would say that game has stagnated a lot more, character numbers may seem like it isn't that low but in reality most people who play it has around 5 accounts which they multibox with. So number of actual people who play it went really down. It is looking bleak for the future, and i can confidently say that it is all CCP's fault (called Fenris Creations now). They started aiming for short term gains and they probably realized themselves long ago it won't last so they started investing in other IP's but they were all mega failures so far.
ricardobayes
Keep an eye out for EVE vanguard, an Eve-related extraction FPS. It might scratch the itch for many who perhaps enjoyed the universe but don't want to (or can't) spend the enormous time to ramp up again.
Loughla
EVE is on the list with Dwarf Fortress for me. I'm interested in it. I absolutely see the appeal of them, and wish I had played them instead of WoW back when I was 20.
But today? Ain't nobody got time for that.
wincy
As someone who really no life fit and played WoW, Dwarf Fortress, and EVE in my 20s, you didn’t miss much. My most momentous EVE achievement was betraying my online “friends” who had mostly stopped playing, blowing up all their expensive ships for the insurance payout, then like a true space pirate losing all my ill gotten gains playing Space Poker.
EVE (and other MMOs) had their moment and the ideas of MMOs with a persistent lived in world were very cool but the moment for them seems to have sadly passed beyond the horizon for whatever reason. If you had asked me 20 years ago I would have told you MMOs were the future of gaming.
scrapcode
I still can't figure out what the appeal of WoW was, but I'm guessing it was the insanely large community?
MarkSweep
As someone who used to have a WoW problem and now and then relapses, it tickles me the same way Cookie Clicker does. It’s nice to see number go up.
Back when I was playing with my friends and the game was a little harder (BC & WotLK), there was a sense of shared accomplishment when overcoming difficult regions and raids.
gertrunde
There was a time when the community was the attraction, although I wouldn't say "the insanely large community", given that at the (for me anyway) best/peak WoW times, your specific community was the server, which was maybe a couple of thousand or so?
Around that sort of time you would encounter known groups/people, e.g. characters that had a reputation as extremely good in PvP etc.
Then along came the cross-realm stuff, and fairly quickly community ceased to matter, you just queue up, play, and move on.
Great for ease of play etc, terrible for community.
(Well, that was how I saw it anyway).
Cpoll
Grind addiction aside, the gameplay was legitimately good. PvP was compelling, raiding was compelling, even the grind was pretty fun (especially compared to your usual free-to-play MMO).
mdavidn
For many, it's an online third space. Cooperating to overcome shared challenges reinforces social ties. The game provides a weekly schedule of activities and new challenges quarterly.
My credentials: I played every expansion (but not every tier) since vanilla with the same group of people. I only stepped away in The War Within after family obligations and time zones got in the way.
EA-3167
It's worth saying that whatever they call it, GTA: Online is basically an MMO and it's one of the top three most popular game on Earth iirc. In fact I think only Tetris and Minecraft beat it.
Looking at what GTA6 is shaping up to be, and wondering how R* is evolving the online side, I think we might simply have seen MMO's turn into something people our age don't recognize.
I had a friend who was really into EVE online and showed me about 20 years ago. It felt too much like waiting and spreadsheets for me.
I got into Dwarf Fortress around 2015 and I was hooked. These days it's something I often play together with my son. I love how dynamic and deep it feels. It was such a privilege to get to buy a copy when it finally came to Steam.
mikrl
Dwarf fortress is the “reading a book” of vidya for sure.
But sometimes I personally forget that it’s allowed and enjoyable to just read 20 mins here and there…
larnon
My comment included EVE Vanguard. I tried it. As someone who played FPS all his life starting from Quake 1 and Wolfenstein 3D, and all the AA and AAA FPS that came afterwards, EVE Vanguard feels like a money laundering scheme at this point. Nowadays a single person with access to he SOTA AI models and engines like Unreal, can make a much better and polished game in less time. It's gonna be an absolute DoA. The only reasons CCP is still able to operate is the addicts (mostly old men with no other hobby) that has spent thousands upon thousands on their accounts can't let go.
TiredOfLife
Which console is this exclusive this time
sph
The thing I miss the most about Eve Online is the immersive free market economy. I long for a true, in-depth economic MMO more than the space veneer around the order book. Buy low, sell high. Specialize in industry, trading, transportation. Add a little bit of light PvP to inject chaos and it's more fun than playing the stock market.
(I am actually designing such a game, but I'm open to suggestions)
My main activity in the game was stealing loot from under carebears' noses to sell for profit. A true rat scouring the battlefields for scraps. That must say a lot about me.
knicholes
Dune: Awakening tried this. Was kind of fun while it lasted (and before the bug stole all of my resources I was trying to sell. The support was zero help on getting that resolved. That killed it for me immediately).
jvuygbbkuurx
Usually I don't care about the economy in MMOs, but in New World it was fun and different when it launched. I played almost exclusively for the economy. Buy and sell orders and separate auction houses between cities. There was many unexpected ways to make money with trading and crafting. The only major source of gold was a single main story quest early in the game, so if you weren't careful you would go broke and struggle. The economy wasn't that advanced, but it was fun watching the players ping pong back and forth with supply and demand.
sph
The crafting systems were so trivial that didn't make the economy game of New World particularly engaging. One core mechanic I seek is the division of labor; if everyone can and is expected to become a master in every skill, there is no niche to corner, and trivialises the experience.
There are very few games (actually, only EVE comes to mind with its skill system) that require you to specialize if you want to compete over everybody else.
wmchen
I haven't played it, but a commonly suggested alternative for EVE Online that revolves around spreadsheets and a free market is Prosperous Universe.
squigz
What has changed about the EVE economy that you don't like?
> Buy low, sell high. Specialize in industry, trading, transportation
I did all of this, quite profitably and for quite a long time, in EVE?
sph
I don't like how EVE is run, and the pay-to-win mechanics added over the years to entice the whales.
I'm looking at the problem with the eyes of a prospective game dev, and saying that there should be more games focused on free market economy, which is often just a half-arsed mechanic on the side, not the core game.
simonebrunozzi
Check out Offworld Trading Company.
VirusNewbie
>I long for a true, in-depth economic MMO
Schwab?
azalemeth
I too would love to know the answer to this question. I loved Eve as a teenager / young adult. It was a brilliant burst of nerdery, and the first time I ever met someone who wrote linux kernel modules for a living.
I sometimes think about logging in (I think I ragequit likely in a pod inside a wormhole in the middle of nullsec) and then I realise that way madness (and much sunk time) lies.
chorizo
If you ever do wish to go back, request Signal Cartel to rescue you. Rescuing people from wormholes is exactly what they do. I was with them for years.
ceejayoz
Wait, EVE has a volunteer search-and-rescue group?
chorizo
Yes. If you are stranded in a wormhole, go to Services > Eve Scout Rescue at https://signalcartel.org/
WJW
I love it. I've never played the game myself but everything I read about it just makes it seem so much more "alive" than other MMOs.
mafuy
Not a player myself, but I recall there were some articles about a player organization that helped people who were stranded, or something along these lines. It sounded quite wholesome and fun.
efromvt
Yeah if I ever have the need to occupy an inordinate number of hours of my life again I’ll log back in, the temptation to dust of the account(s) arises sometimes. Think I managed to log off in lowsec but who knows!
HappySweeney
This is why I had to quit. I enjoyed it way too much and would spend nearly all my free time playing it, much to the detriment of the rest of my (non-professional) life.
causality0
It was kind of a blessing for me that I was forced to quit after they introduced PLEX and in doing created a conversion rate for ISK to dollars. Suddenly I was too aware of how worthless everything I was doing was. It's one thing to spend an evening grinding to buy that new ship, it's another when you know you were grinding for 73 cents an hour. Risking losing a ship you spent a week earning the ISK for is thrilling and scary, losing a ship you can replace for eight dollars is just annoying.
terrut
For me, that was the thing that made the game feel real. The feelings of actual dread and anger when losing a a ship made for some of my best and most intense gaming moments ever. The times I managed to come out on top were amazing.
Participating in the big corporation wars was boring in comparison to small scale stuff. In the big wars, I was just a pawn for the commanders that actually made decisions and could play a giant strategy game.
HappySweeney
I was a criminal, and me and my crew would pull in about $200 worth of isk daily
wincy
Yeah it made my day when I’d pop some T3 cruiser gang in wormhole space with my buddies.
It was substantially less fun when I was on the other side of that and got scanned down in my officer fit Archon and popped. Finally I said to myself “why am I doing this to myself?” and quit. My wife approved.
andrepd
> I enjoyed it way too much
Well if you enjoyed it it's was not a waste of time! Much human endeavour (and _all_ hobbies!) are ultimately pointless.
If it negatively affects other aspects of your life it's a different story though.
ohyes
I played in the early days and quit to have a life, came back for a bit to check it out.
Basically the community is people checking it out, bots, and the terminally addicted multi boxing 30 accounts.
nntwozz
I started in 2004 and played on and off until 2015 with a quick stint in 2020.
It was amazing in the early days, it felt like nothing else. I had a background in Ultima Online and Dark Age of Camelot. I liked PVP and I wanted full loot drop on kill.
EVE online has many times been referred to as the spiritual successor of UO, what made it really special however was the one server architecture (until China shard).
My name was Dieter Rams—I ganked, scammed and griefed. I probably made a lot of people quit the game; this was the appeal. I wanted to play a game where I could be the villain (successfully).
Over the years it lost its soul as the internet grew, social media became more prevalent and information disseminated more rapidly (watch madseasonshow on youtube for a great coverage on this topic) around the optimal ways to play etc.
All MMOs suffered for this, you could look everything up before doing anything and so the sense of discovery and adventure was lost. The frontier was no longer undiscovered, and once pay to win came into play everything came off the rails.
This is when I quit for real or as the EVE players say "won EVE".
A better comedic version of the video is this one by Honorable Third Party (typical EVE humor):
This is REALLY EvE
https://youtu.be/LmS9vcVNr5A
I came back in 2020 for a month but it's like that saying you can't step into the same river twice. I was older but the game had also changed so much. Other players were pressuring me to multibox (play multiple accounts), it felt terrible.
I knew a guy who played 30 characters at the same time, his setup was a technical marvel but it made me sad what gaming had become. There was a similar issue with buffbots in Dark Age of Camelot.
The fact that EVE needs a new player tutorial says everything you need to know about the state of the game (and gaming in general). Everyone needs a lot of handholding these days, in 2004 you were just thrown into the universe with nothing but the chat and other players to help you out.
Figuring things out was part of the game.
There were no YouTube guides, no tutorial and no real money to make things easier. The playing field was equal no matter who you were.
The magic was lost because of money, it's always the money in the end.
cbm-vic-20
I miss the insane adrenaline rush when getting into small fights (1v1, 1v2, etc.). You go so long doing doing whatever it is you're doing- PvE, hacking data sites, transporting stuff- it's all a bit mundane.
But nothing raised my heart rate like getting into a fight. 30 seconds of terror. I would have to take a break after these, win or lose, until my HR returned to normal and my hands stopped shaking.
I've never experienced that in any other game.
cgh
I get that from the Souls games (including Bloodborne and Elden Ring). They are all I can play now.
reactordev
It's one guy and 40 alts now
Vaslo
I’ve played off and on for years - even multiple accounts, lots of hours, and a very helpful org, there was too much to do, and I quickly felt overwhelmed. I just can’t imagine them getting many new players, but it’s clear the game is 20+ years of upgrades and content.
Cakez0r
> So how do you migrate 2.4 million lines of code?
> Very carefully, and in multiple stages.
That answer is so 3 months ago
wavemode
Knowing game codebases, I'm guessing their test coverage was not fantastic. Agents weren't gonna get it done.
fy20
"Claude, migrate the code. Do it fast. Make no mistakes."
callbacked
bonus points if you tack on "I believe in you, you can do this!" at the end
ch0wn
* and commit no felonies
perching_aix
highly optional
asimovDev
No, you gotta tell Claude that you believe in them
BurningFrog
Does Claude claim a gender/pronouns now?
ButlerianJihad
"Claudine" is a traditional feminine-gendered variant of the name.
It may be helpful to point out the definition of "Claude" as "lame; crippled" since the Roman Emperor and his gens.
limping, halting, lame, crippled
c. 347 CE – 420 CE, Hieronymus, Vulgate Matthew 11:5:
Caeci vident, claudi ambulant […] The blind see, the lame walk […]
As the sibling says, Claude was named after Claude Shannon, but TIL, thanks!
jrflowers
That is why Claude needs a harness — the penis. The harness is for Claude’s penis and in this essay I will prov
moffkalast
Or maybe there's multiple running in parallel.
Cantinflas
/goal code migrated to python 3
tripleee
yeah I'm sure they never considered AI
est
Stackless python had such potential, it could be extremely useful in Agent era for long running tasks with durable state.
modern Python went in a somewhat different direction with asyncio, but with tasklet and continuation it could be a much powerful combo.
bfung
1/2 troll side-galley comment: use AI and translate to Rust.
If the outcome or outputs / test cases are known, AI is great at language translations.
hoppp
Not sure if it's worth it. I don't see them complaining about speed and they use specific python dependencies then they would need to translate that to rust also.
The server isn't fast enough and it ends up slowing the game down to 10% speed as a workaround.
ShinTakuya
Rewriting it in Rust isn't automatically faster and more importantly Eve's gameplay is constantly being iterated on and Rust has proven to be bad for that.
Moreover, most of Eve's bottleneck isn't single server speed, it's mostly network IO and database queries and latency. The big TiDi skirnishes in particular are slow due to this.
tacomagick
Ladybird situation is wild...
tescreal
What happened?
throwitaway222
Second this but with Go
andrewjf
Why choose a second rate backwoods language if you could choose one that actually has guardrails for AI with an actual functioning type system?
Half joking.
markkitti
If I were Fenris Creations, I would make a copy of Allegiance
What happened with the stackless python? Did they get rid of all the stackless stuff?
orsenthil
> 50 uses of <>, a way of writing "not equal" so old that many working Python developers have never seen it.
This hit me. Not sure when this was used and was deprecated.
chews
It really speaks to how great the technical team can be. As crazy as it sounds Goldman Sacks and JP Morgan both maintained 2.7 Python as a core language until just a few years ago (yes, it's still used in production).
This is fascinating, thanks for the link. I love to learn about big systems that are developed in the same room where the problem they're solving lives, so to speak.
Too few of these are revealed to the rest of us, as the piece notes. It's a shame, there's lots to learn there. Instead most will be lost to the mists of time, and some dumpster diving digital archaeologist will have to get lucky for us to hear about them.
diroussel
That was a very interesting read, thanks.
lokar
I have run into other large (well known) financial companies on 2.x as well. They were using our old unsupported SDK and some long planned and communicated service API change broke them. They could not update to any recent SDK. I did gently point out their python version was 10+ years out of date.
NooneAtAll3
if anything, it only shows just how bad breaking backward compatibility is - py3 was released in '06, 20 years ago
7bit
Or insane
cyberpunk
Python is used as a kind of 'visual basic' language in a lot of banks especially in front-of-house trading software, e.g murex or frontarena. Migrations between major versions of these can take years, costs 100s of millions and involve thousands of devs. Mistakes can be _expensive_.
It is kind of 'insane' but also, meh..
There's more dragons out there than we've been led to believe :}
zulux
It's a great 'glue' language to tie a lot of systems together, especially when you think of MS Excel as a system.
elmo125
Although i really love or maybe have some memories, but isn't ms excel outdated , kinda, except the idea that it's always have easy fast solution
zbentley
> isn't ms excel outdated , kinda, except the idea that it's always have easy fast solution
“People shouldn’t use this tool, unless they want stuff quickly and easily”.
Excel isn’t outdated, and has no competitor (there are many things that compete on sub parts of what Excel does, but nothing that competes on all or even most of its capabilities). Business-side people are creating fairly massive application-type tools in Excel every day, by the thousands. If I had a nickel for every new, growing, modern business I’ve worked with that uses Google for an office suite but has a few departments with Windows/MS Office just so people can process data in Excel, I’d have a lot of nickels.
mohamedkoubaa
Maybe the bank bailouts were a mistake
sitzkrieg
the eve client is pretty incredibly well made these days. but when the server side solution was to exponentially reduce time , i think they fundamentally lost somewhere else. maybe something good will come out of (some?) that server c++ code being released as well
santiagobasulto
When python started incorporating asyncio my initial reaction was fairly negative. I was behaving like a grumpy graybeard programmer ("kids these days should learn how to use concurrency instead of working on a new runtime altogether!" [0]).
But after using it for a production project I have to say I'm deeply satisfied and surprised by the maturity, quality of APIs and performance in general.
I was proven wrong and I'm happy about that :)
[0] Old man yell at clouds type of meme
belorn
asyncio has always looked interesting, but whenever I have run into a problem which could use asyncio I have always gone with multiprocesses instead. I am not sure if async would makes my code easier for others to read and debug, and none of my problems seems to be of the kind where process overhead would make a noticeable difference in performance.
Did you find readability to be improved by going async?
greatgib
For me it is quite bad, but just we are now used to it.
In the same way that when you ask Windows users about all the bugs and problems they have with their system, they often say that they don't have any.
And ten seconds later, will click "ok" on a random crash popup they didn't even read the content of.
hluska
You made a wild claim about ayncio and backed it up with a wild anecdote about windows and its users?
santiagobasulto
Can you elaborate? Why is Python asyncio bad?
vladms
Not the OP but my impression with asyncio was that it's great for the uses case it was built for (hence the "no problems") but if you need to do something a bit different it can become an annoyance (hence the "unexpected bugs").
I see it for a specialized solution for a specific class of problems, which can lead to surprises if your problem evolves. There are always trade-offs to be made (performance, flexibility, hardware cost, etc.), asyncio just has different characteristics than the alternatives. Maybe since a upper bound of concurrent users it is always a great (the best?) solution, someone with more experience along all the design and requirements space could comment.
kjs3
I am always amused by "it's bad because it's bad at things it wasn't designed to be good at" rationalizations.
vladms
There are things that are quite good for other than what they were designed for.
I find it interesting when someone mentions that X is bad for something it was not designed for, as much as I am interested when someone mentions that X is good even if it was not designed for something.
IshKebab
Yeah I dunno, the first time I tried to use asyncio I ran into a bug that nobody knew how to solve. Can't remember what it was but generally if I use something for the first time and immediately hit a bug... Yeah I'm not using that thing if I can help it.
I mean that's true for Python in general, but sadly these days you can't really avoid it.
q8zd3
It's kinda funny to read a headline like this in 2026
p1anecrazy
> The classic example is division: in Python 2, 1 / 2 is 0; while in Python 3 it is 0.5.
Can someone kindly explain this?
edit: I misread it as “In Python 2 2.1/2 is 0, while in Python 3 it is 0.5”
smoe
From long ago memory: in Python 2, 1 / 2 did integer division. You had to do something like 1 / 2.0 if you wanted floating point division.
kingforaday
Spot on. Py2 was integer division, Py3 was true division. In Py2 you could get the true division with an `from __future__ import division` (Can't recall which Py2 version this became an import). Fun fact too: In Py3 you can do a // to get back to the floor division effect (e.g. 1 // 2 --> 0)
3eb7988a1663
PEP 238 lays out the story if anyone is curious. Well into the Python 3 transition, I still had a habit of multiplying the denominator by 1.0 to ensure it was a float.
I thought I was a Python 2.7 holdout for a long time.
shevy-java
> Some of you may remember upgrading to Stackless Python 2.5 in 2007, then to Stackless Python 2.7 in 2010. That was the last time EVE changed its Python version.
Yikes. 2010 ... python is built forever.
But, ignoring this - I think when the "scripting" languages can bridge the speed penalty towards C, even if not reaching it for many reasons, then they become real contenders here.
I wish there was a test instance people were allowed to play around on. I never did it but for a while the game client wasn't really secure & you could just talk to the python repl basically, and script the game. I think that would be an incredible experience all unto its own, to teach coding, to be an interesting experience. Feels like with Carbon being open source, there's need for just a little more to get back around to that halycon moment.
BurningFrog
Eve Online used to be great.
Is there anything similarly great around now?
tripleee
Eve still is great - haven't had time lately but I got really into it last year and had a blast
Does the game have performance issues? I don't see the need to rewrite unless there is a problem with it
NitpickLawyer
> Does the game have performance issues?
Yes, it has had huge concurrency issues for the entirety of its life. Their solution to large fights has historically been "let us know in advance pls", plus "move systems to beefier hw nodes" and "tidi" which stands for time dilation, where the "tick rate" of the whole server goes down and a fight takes 10-20-100x longer than it should.
It's an amazing concept of a game, but software wise it has been a mess since forever.
Rohansi
Switching away from Python would not fix this. EVE Online runs its world without instancing or shards, meaning you cannot scale out the simulation when a single zone is overcrowded. Pretty much every other online game avoids this problem by making it impossible to have thousands of players in the same area because networking every players' actions to thousands of players is always problematic
dyauspitr
But one of EVE’s biggest selling points is specifically the 1000s of players in one area.
Rohansi
Yes, I am saying time dilation is a necessary compromise because of that.
buddhistdude
I have to remember the "time dilation" excuse for the next production issue lol
edit: maybe the path to unlimited processing speed is to send a data center through space near speed of light. That's how it works right?
rvba
Universe must run on same software... since stuff since to slow down near black holes too
How much of that is down to processing time is unclear, but I think it's fair to say there is scope for improved performance.
Secondary to that, if you have general performance improvements then you can afford to run a smaller server cluster or smaller servers, reducing costs.
swdunlop
Oh my yes. EVE Online can experience issues when a conflict in a solar system exceeds a certain number of players. Each system in EVE is a monolithic process, so, if a conflict gets out of hand, things get slow.
This is referred to as Time Dilation (TiDi) in EVE -- https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Time_dilation -- it's an interesting engineering rathole, Fenris f/k/a CCP has been pretty open about their stack, and the challenges that have built up.
Anything that speeds up EVE lets more players cram in without experiencing TiDi, and this might let the devs escape Stackless Python, which is another interesting engineer rathole. (It's ratholes all the way down, and this is the one that got EVE on my radar, and has kept it there.)
dragonwriter
My understanding is that the performance issues it has are more big-O issues of the problem space than issues that would meaningfully be resolved by the multiplicative speedup of moving to a more efficient language (the point at which they start to bite would shift a bit, though.)
dcrazy
> Every character, every skill point, every asset in every hangar, every ISK in every wallet was written in Python 2 code, and all of it must read back under Python 3 exactly as it was.
This task would be even more challenging under such a dramatic rewrite.
winrid
Python 3 will likely be faster by itself.
[deleted]
Comment removed.
alexaholic
The Jehovah's Witnesses of programming
WarmWash
Can someone explain to my non-programmer self what the deal is with Rust?
Even not being in the tech space, I have long picked up on this quasi-religous aura around it.
alexaholic
Rust is a tool that allows one to build cars for humans to drive, in order to avoid certain accidents. If you try to put your dog in the driver’s seat of a Rust-powered car, Rust will stop you and ask you to produce proof that the dog is a qualified human driver.
The world is a pretty big place, so of course there are people who sometimes put their dog in the driver’s seat. Sometimes by accident, sometimes out of necessity, and sometimes because they think it’s mighty fun. Since Rust is strict about who or what gets to drive the car, these people build their cars using other languages.
Some Rust-heads, however, are pretty adamant that cars are to be driven by qualified humans only, and therefore keep nagging everyone about how all cars should be built with Rust.
whytevuhuni
> cars are to be driven by qualified humans only
As a Rust programmer I'm fine with cars driven by dogs, I just want that to be clearly acknowledged as unsafe, and if that car is be driven in public roads, I would also like a safety comment stating all the precautions taken to make that safe for others, preferably reviewed by the police as well.
gosub100
before rust, if you wanted to use a "fast" programming language you had to use C or C++, which are fraught with sharp edges. Rust gives you all the performance benefits of a compiled language, with barely any sharp edges.
llm_nerd
Using python for a purpose like this is extremely strange -- it clearly is just technology debt they've been carrying around from a silly decision over a decade ago -- so someone mentioned a contemporary, more acceptable alternative. I don't really see why this threatens some people, much less the incredibly stupid "religious" nonsense.
Rust has lots of inertia behind it, a fantastic core library, fantastic concurrency and scalability and excellent LLM support. If someone were greenfield building a service like this today, instead of being bound by poor decisions in the past, had infinite knowledge of every toolset and language and option, there is a very good chance they would settle on Rust. They might not, but it's definitely a finalist. So not remotely surprising someone would mention it.
That this caused someone to flip out is hilarious though.
CrazyStat
> it clearly is just technology debt they've been carrying around from a silly decision over a decade ago
Almost three decades ago—development started in 1999 and the game was released in 2003.
Joeboy
This is a weird conversation. Python was a strange choice back then, but is now probably the most popular programming language in existence. If anything the choice of Python (and C++) was remarkable foresight / luck.
llm_nerd
If Eve were green-fielded today, there is a 0% chance they would choose Python anywhere in the service layer for an online game. Zero chance.
Python is a fantastic "glue" programming language. A duct-tape language. It's awesome for little scripts, or for gluing together some AI scripts, where you're basically atomically gluing a series of calls to giant native C/C++ libraries like pytorch that are then doing a series of calls to giant native C/C++ libraries like CUDA. Where the overhead of python is negligible compared to some heavy lifting being done by a better language/system.
The simple fact that we're talking about a service that was stuck on Python 2 two decades after it was replaced, half a decade after it was fully deprecated, reveals this to be 100% just debt. The fact that they talk about millions of lines of Python code, and that Python 3 represents a big speedup for their operations, again betrays it to be nothing but debt. They have Python code in the critical flow, not just as a light glue over intensive code, and they have almost certainly spent untold dollars on extra hardware, delivering a worse experience for their users, because they had a "python enthusiast" in a critical position decades ago.
goodmythical
i-use-arch-btw
nilamo
That's totally ok. "It works on my machine" with no info on what that machine looks like, is much worse
goodmythical
skill issue
Ygg2
Python is very strange programming language for a MMORPG. I'd imagine they would write it in C++ or something. They don't quite explain what they use it for.
And yeah, using a faster but safe language could help immensely.
flohofwoe
Python is just a part of the tech stack, there's also a lot of C/C++ code. How much Python vs C/C++ is hard to say from the outside though, but the parts that have been open-sourced are pretty much all C/C++:
Say "stackless tasklet" five times fast.
More Music, Less Nessman
But today? Ain't nobody got time for that.
EVE (and other MMOs) had their moment and the ideas of MMOs with a persistent lived in world were very cool but the moment for them seems to have sadly passed beyond the horizon for whatever reason. If you had asked me 20 years ago I would have told you MMOs were the future of gaming.
Back when I was playing with my friends and the game was a little harder (BC & WotLK), there was a sense of shared accomplishment when overcoming difficult regions and raids.
Around that sort of time you would encounter known groups/people, e.g. characters that had a reputation as extremely good in PvP etc.
Then along came the cross-realm stuff, and fairly quickly community ceased to matter, you just queue up, play, and move on.
Great for ease of play etc, terrible for community.
(Well, that was how I saw it anyway).
My credentials: I played every expansion (but not every tier) since vanilla with the same group of people. I only stepped away in The War Within after family obligations and time zones got in the way.
Looking at what GTA6 is shaping up to be, and wondering how R* is evolving the online side, I think we might simply have seen MMO's turn into something people our age don't recognize.
I got into Dwarf Fortress around 2015 and I was hooked. These days it's something I often play together with my son. I love how dynamic and deep it feels. It was such a privilege to get to buy a copy when it finally came to Steam.
But sometimes I personally forget that it’s allowed and enjoyable to just read 20 mins here and there…
(I am actually designing such a game, but I'm open to suggestions)
My main activity in the game was stealing loot from under carebears' noses to sell for profit. A true rat scouring the battlefields for scraps. That must say a lot about me.
There are very few games (actually, only EVE comes to mind with its skill system) that require you to specialize if you want to compete over everybody else.
> Buy low, sell high. Specialize in industry, trading, transportation
I did all of this, quite profitably and for quite a long time, in EVE?
I'm looking at the problem with the eyes of a prospective game dev, and saying that there should be more games focused on free market economy, which is often just a half-arsed mechanic on the side, not the core game.
Schwab?
I sometimes think about logging in (I think I ragequit likely in a pod inside a wormhole in the middle of nullsec) and then I realise that way madness (and much sunk time) lies.
Participating in the big corporation wars was boring in comparison to small scale stuff. In the big wars, I was just a pawn for the commanders that actually made decisions and could play a giant strategy game.
It was substantially less fun when I was on the other side of that and got scanned down in my officer fit Archon and popped. Finally I said to myself “why am I doing this to myself?” and quit. My wife approved.
Well if you enjoyed it it's was not a waste of time! Much human endeavour (and _all_ hobbies!) are ultimately pointless.
If it negatively affects other aspects of your life it's a different story though.
Basically the community is people checking it out, bots, and the terminally addicted multi boxing 30 accounts.
It was amazing in the early days, it felt like nothing else. I had a background in Ultima Online and Dark Age of Camelot. I liked PVP and I wanted full loot drop on kill.
EVE online has many times been referred to as the spiritual successor of UO, what made it really special however was the one server architecture (until China shard).
My name was Dieter Rams—I ganked, scammed and griefed. I probably made a lot of people quit the game; this was the appeal. I wanted to play a game where I could be the villain (successfully).
This was the original trailer for the game, in my opinion the true vision: https://youtu.be/GwpgXFA3UQk
Over the years it lost its soul as the internet grew, social media became more prevalent and information disseminated more rapidly (watch madseasonshow on youtube for a great coverage on this topic) around the optimal ways to play etc.
All MMOs suffered for this, you could look everything up before doing anything and so the sense of discovery and adventure was lost. The frontier was no longer undiscovered, and once pay to win came into play everything came off the rails.
The developer made this video in 2014:
This is EVE - Uncensored https://youtu.be/AdfFnTt2UT0
This is when I quit for real or as the EVE players say "won EVE".
A better comedic version of the video is this one by Honorable Third Party (typical EVE humor): This is REALLY EvE https://youtu.be/LmS9vcVNr5A
I came back in 2020 for a month but it's like that saying you can't step into the same river twice. I was older but the game had also changed so much. Other players were pressuring me to multibox (play multiple accounts), it felt terrible.
I knew a guy who played 30 characters at the same time, his setup was a technical marvel but it made me sad what gaming had become. There was a similar issue with buffbots in Dark Age of Camelot.
The fact that EVE needs a new player tutorial says everything you need to know about the state of the game (and gaming in general). Everyone needs a lot of handholding these days, in 2004 you were just thrown into the universe with nothing but the chat and other players to help you out.
Figuring things out was part of the game.
There were no YouTube guides, no tutorial and no real money to make things easier. The playing field was equal no matter who you were.
The magic was lost because of money, it's always the money in the end.
But nothing raised my heart rate like getting into a fight. 30 seconds of terror. I would have to take a break after these, win or lose, until my HR returned to normal and my hands stopped shaking.
I've never experienced that in any other game.
> Very carefully, and in multiple stages.
That answer is so 3 months ago
It may be helpful to point out the definition of "Claude" as "lame; crippled" since the Roman Emperor and his gens.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/claudus#Latin
https://bible.usccb.org/bible/matthew/11?5Some examples of women named Claude: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Pompidou
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Bessy_(dancer)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Sarraute
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Jade
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Shannon
modern Python went in a somewhat different direction with asyncio, but with tasklet and continuation it could be a much powerful combo.
If the outcome or outputs / test cases are known, AI is great at language translations.
The server isn't fast enough and it ends up slowing the game down to 10% speed as a workaround.
Moreover, most of Eve's bottleneck isn't single server speed, it's mostly network IO and database queries and latency. The big TiDi skirnishes in particular are slow due to this.
Half joking.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegiance_%28video_game%29
This hit me. Not sure when this was used and was deprecated.
Too few of these are revealed to the rest of us, as the piece notes. It's a shame, there's lots to learn there. Instead most will be lost to the mists of time, and some dumpster diving digital archaeologist will have to get lucky for us to hear about them.
It is kind of 'insane' but also, meh..
There's more dragons out there than we've been led to believe :}
“People shouldn’t use this tool, unless they want stuff quickly and easily”.
Excel isn’t outdated, and has no competitor (there are many things that compete on sub parts of what Excel does, but nothing that competes on all or even most of its capabilities). Business-side people are creating fairly massive application-type tools in Excel every day, by the thousands. If I had a nickel for every new, growing, modern business I’ve worked with that uses Google for an office suite but has a few departments with Windows/MS Office just so people can process data in Excel, I’d have a lot of nickels.
But after using it for a production project I have to say I'm deeply satisfied and surprised by the maturity, quality of APIs and performance in general.
I was proven wrong and I'm happy about that :)
[0] Old man yell at clouds type of meme
Did you find readability to be improved by going async?
I see it for a specialized solution for a specific class of problems, which can lead to surprises if your problem evolves. There are always trade-offs to be made (performance, flexibility, hardware cost, etc.), asyncio just has different characteristics than the alternatives. Maybe since a upper bound of concurrent users it is always a great (the best?) solution, someone with more experience along all the design and requirements space could comment.
I find it interesting when someone mentions that X is bad for something it was not designed for, as much as I am interested when someone mentions that X is good even if it was not designed for something.
I mean that's true for Python in general, but sadly these days you can't really avoid it.
Can someone kindly explain this?
edit: I misread it as “In Python 2 2.1/2 is 0, while in Python 3 it is 0.5”
https://peps.python.org/pep-0238/
Yikes. 2010 ... python is built forever.
But, ignoring this - I think when the "scripting" languages can bridge the speed penalty towards C, even if not reaching it for many reasons, then they become real contenders here.
I wish there was a test instance people were allowed to play around on. I never did it but for a while the game client wasn't really secure & you could just talk to the python repl basically, and script the game. I think that would be an incredible experience all unto its own, to teach coding, to be an interesting experience. Feels like with Carbon being open source, there's need for just a little more to get back around to that halycon moment.
Is there anything similarly great around now?
googled it so this becomes a PSA: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Aug/25/eve-online-move-to-pyt...
so it's neither, it's their own: https://github.com/carbonengine/scheduler
so that's interesting
https://github.com/carbonengine
https://fenris.com/carbon
Yes, it has had huge concurrency issues for the entirety of its life. Their solution to large fights has historically been "let us know in advance pls", plus "move systems to beefier hw nodes" and "tidi" which stands for time dilation, where the "tick rate" of the whole server goes down and a fight takes 10-20-100x longer than it should.
It's an amazing concept of a game, but software wise it has been a mess since forever.
edit: maybe the path to unlimited processing speed is to send a data center through space near speed of light. That's how it works right?
How much of that is down to processing time is unclear, but I think it's fair to say there is scope for improved performance.
Secondary to that, if you have general performance improvements then you can afford to run a smaller server cluster or smaller servers, reducing costs.
This is referred to as Time Dilation (TiDi) in EVE -- https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Time_dilation -- it's an interesting engineering rathole, Fenris f/k/a CCP has been pretty open about their stack, and the challenges that have built up.
Anything that speeds up EVE lets more players cram in without experiencing TiDi, and this might let the devs escape Stackless Python, which is another interesting engineer rathole. (It's ratholes all the way down, and this is the one that got EVE on my radar, and has kept it there.)
This task would be even more challenging under such a dramatic rewrite.
Even not being in the tech space, I have long picked up on this quasi-religous aura around it.
The world is a pretty big place, so of course there are people who sometimes put their dog in the driver’s seat. Sometimes by accident, sometimes out of necessity, and sometimes because they think it’s mighty fun. Since Rust is strict about who or what gets to drive the car, these people build their cars using other languages.
Some Rust-heads, however, are pretty adamant that cars are to be driven by qualified humans only, and therefore keep nagging everyone about how all cars should be built with Rust.
As a Rust programmer I'm fine with cars driven by dogs, I just want that to be clearly acknowledged as unsafe, and if that car is be driven in public roads, I would also like a safety comment stating all the precautions taken to make that safe for others, preferably reviewed by the police as well.
Rust has lots of inertia behind it, a fantastic core library, fantastic concurrency and scalability and excellent LLM support. If someone were greenfield building a service like this today, instead of being bound by poor decisions in the past, had infinite knowledge of every toolset and language and option, there is a very good chance they would settle on Rust. They might not, but it's definitely a finalist. So not remotely surprising someone would mention it.
That this caused someone to flip out is hilarious though.
Almost three decades ago—development started in 1999 and the game was released in 2003.
Python is a fantastic "glue" programming language. A duct-tape language. It's awesome for little scripts, or for gluing together some AI scripts, where you're basically atomically gluing a series of calls to giant native C/C++ libraries like pytorch that are then doing a series of calls to giant native C/C++ libraries like CUDA. Where the overhead of python is negligible compared to some heavy lifting being done by a better language/system.
The simple fact that we're talking about a service that was stuck on Python 2 two decades after it was replaced, half a decade after it was fully deprecated, reveals this to be 100% just debt. The fact that they talk about millions of lines of Python code, and that Python 3 represents a big speedup for their operations, again betrays it to be nothing but debt. They have Python code in the critical flow, not just as a light glue over intensive code, and they have almost certainly spent untold dollars on extra hardware, delivering a worse experience for their users, because they had a "python enthusiast" in a critical position decades ago.
And yeah, using a faster but safe language could help immensely.
https://github.com/carbonengine