EVE Online has a single game universe – all 5000 solar systems and millions of unique game objects are shared amongst the players, powered by a giant server cluster built by CCP Games, the developers behind EVE Online.A daily downtime of an hour a day is all that’s required to keep this giant server cluster running, supporting over 50,000 users at peak times.
The requirements of EVE Online are such that running private servers becomes impossible – unless you have hundreds of 64bit processors and some ultra-fast solid state storage.
In large part, the lack of EVE Online private servers is a good for the overall play of the game.Unlike other games, EVE Online actually benefits from the lack of private servers.No other game boasts as many simultaneous users in such a large shared universe, and this is the real appeal of EVE Online. Because EVE Online runs on a single cluster, there’s never a choice, like in World of Warcraft, or City of Heroes, to decide which server you’re going to be on based on the server your friends are on.
You’re either on the Tranquility server (if you use the English language interface) or the Serenity server (if you’re using the Chinese language interface), and there are usually ten thousand or more players on simultaneously to interact with. By logging into the test cluster, Singularity, players can test upcoming features and EVE Online ships, and help shape the game’s development.
By contrast with World of Warcraft, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of private servers out there, that will let anywhere from a hundred to maybe a thousand players log in simultaneously. For WoW, this is an opportunity to “grind in private”; if you tried doing that on EVE Online, you’d have a hard time hooking up with other players at all, due to the massive size of the game to explore.
Without the huge amount of expensive hardware and expertise required by CCP to build these server clusters, an EVE Online private server will remain nothing more than a player’s dream.