Is it me or is the new Tranquility cluster suave? And a lot of skillpoints

Well, this upgrade went according to plan. Ok, not according to plan, it went a lot better than planned and for a while we were wondering if we were really CCP anymore, delivering before the schedule. We're at least grateful that this upgrade was the one Mr. Murphy took a vacation from and we think you'll agree.

It hasn't been a completely smooth road though. Our websites (which also moved to the new hosting center) have had dns problems, the load balancing protocols has been acting up causing three days of intermittent availability and our download service didn't propagate the mini-patch which told the client to connect to the new Tranquility IP address.

Next, we intend to upgrade our database layer to 64-bit 4-processor monsters allowing us to cram in a "couple" of Gigabytes of RAM. Does 64 Gig worth sound ok to you? It does to me! We're also looking into more RAMSAN solid state disk storage in that upgrade. Nothing but the best for EVE! ;)

Blood looking good

The Blood patch is going through the process of exterminating the last few bugs, the only problem being that we haven't had larger scale testing of the last candidates due to Singularity being the test bed for the hardware upgrade. We'll start that over the next couple of days and would appreciate mucho testing help. We estimate a release next Tuesday, if the reborn Tranquility keeps behaving and the bugs keep out of Blood.

Skillpoints don't really matter?

Lots of skill point conversations on the forums lately, well, at least when they are up. :)

I covered a question about skill points in an interview with MMORPG.COM the other day and was doing some followup data mining on how many people actually had an amazingly high number of skillpoints.

The basic premise of the skill point system is that skills are balanced via the system's built-in tools, such as rank adjustment, new content which increases attributes and of course the diminishing returns involved with time spent to learn the fifth level opposed to the time spent on the first four.

As a result, the gap and possibility to keep up (or even reach and surpass) the 3 year old player is more than realistic, especially since the more you train, the more you are specializing - or getting more versatile. Therefore, as a new player you can quite quickly approach competitive levels with much older players in certain fields.

However, on to the good stuff, data mining! Here is the breakdown of skillpoints of active characters on Tranquility:

between 0 and 1 million skillpoints: 358353
between 1 and 2 million skillpoints: 14035
between 2 and 3 million skillpoints: 8149
between 3 and 4 million skillpoints: 5826
between 4 and 5 million skillpoints: 4696
between 5 and 10 million skillpoints: 14859
between 10 and 15 million skillpoints: 9875
between 15 and 20 million skillpoints: 7861
between 20 and 25 million skillpoints: 6194
between 25 and 30 million skillpoints: 4373
between 30 and 35 million skillpoints: 2568
between 35 and 40 million skillpoints: 1313
between 40 and 45 million skillpoints: 257
between 45 and 50 million skillpoints: 4
between 50 and 55 million skillpoints: 7
between 55 and 60 million skillpoints: 1

Not as many high skillpoint players after 3 years as you would have thought. We should also remember, that time is in favor of new players, the average EVE player only stays for 7 months.

However, this doesn't say very much about the character behind the skillpoints, since skillpoints are quite relative, some fields have more higher rank skills than others and some are simply hard to train for a lot of players.

As an example, a person might be really good in leadership, but that person would have spent a lot of time training that ability if he has low Charisma. The next person might have high Charisma and can easily train the leadership skills, but at a faster rate. Therefore, both end up having the same amount of skillpoints, but one spent 1 month to achieve the ability, the other spent 3.

So, in a way, does the number of skillpoints really matter?

That's it for now folks, I'm going to try to get some pictures from the new cluster, we should be getting them shortly.