“This acquisition will be excellent for CCP, for our games, and especially our players,” Hilmar Veigar Pétursson, CEO of CCP Games, said cheerfully as he patted the server hardware sitting next to him on an Icelandair flight to Seoul the morning of September 9, 2018. Speaking to reporters on Saturday, EVE Online’s slowest time of the week, Péturrson assured those gathered that any disruptions in service for CCP’s hit sci-fi MMORPG would be barely noticeable.
That was before the CCP team missed the connecting flight to Seoul in London’s Heathrow Airport.
“I’m not sure we are going to make it,” Hilmar said impatiently as the CCP Dev Team slowly snaked its way through Heathrow’s byzantine queues and transportation services, laden with backpacks of their office belongings from Reykjavik while carrying or pushing server equipment. Looking back over the caravan of polo-clad staff and employees, Pétursson muttered to reporters, “It may not have been a good idea to do an office move at the same time as a server transfer.”
In order to better accommodate the move and to provide as little disruption to EVE Online as possible, twenty percent of the server architecture was left behind. A senior CCP server technician, speaking on condition of anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the Pearl Abyss acquisition, stated, “We believed that twenty percent would be sufficient, considering the traditionally low player turnout on weekends and the numbers of players who had reported they were unsubscribing and uninstalling our client over the last few days.”
Expecting that the lower player population would translate into less stress on the servers, the remaining twenty percent was designed to primarily accommodate Jita station traders, players using the autopilot feature, and to support the monetary transactions on the EVE Online website. When players began activating modules, undocking their ships, and transferring items between hangars, however, the remaining architecture began to cascade in failure.
Players immediately noticed the slowdown in service. The r/Eve subreddit was especially active in voicing disappointment, with many users lamenting they might “have to go outside.” Players purportedly from Australia, on the other hand, believed the lag to be a new game feature designed to equalize latency.
At the gate, the CCP team let out a collective sigh of traveler’s disappointment as they watched their British Airways flight depart for Seoul. After taking nearly half a day to navigate through Heathrow, the team was exhausted. Server equipment and office supplies were heaped in the waiting area while CCP staff worked to book the next earliest flight to Seoul, though British Airways was unprepared to accommodate such a large party on any flights for some time.
CCP Falcon attempted to take to the forums to address user concerns, but his responses were delayed by up to thirty minutes or more. CCP Guard, who had been carrying server equipment under both arms and had subsequently disappeared behind the stacks of equipment, could not be reached for comment. When pressed on when he believed the servers would be back online, Péturrson declined to answer directly.
“All acquisitions have unexpected situations and we just need to be patient,” Péturrson said as he opened his smartphone to a surface vessel shipping company’s website.
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