They have to slow down the game tick-rate to accommodate, something they call "Time Dilation": https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Time_dilation

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.

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.)

> 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.

The Jehovah's Witnesses of programming

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.

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 :}

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 affect (e.g. 1 // 2 --> 0)

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!