Can You Build A Private Server for EVE Online?

CCP Games title EVE Online is run on one of the largest clustered super computers on the planet, with 5,000 star systems and several million unique objects in play at any one time.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.

Luckily, not being able to run an EVE Online private server is actually a good thing.Although some might disagree, the player experience actually benefits from a lack of EVE Online private servers.Sharing a universe with 50,000 other users – simultaneously – is where much of EVE Online’s appeal comes from. 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. Singularity, the test server run by CCP, is the third server cluster, and all players are recommended to install a test client and give input to 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 database to explore.

Luckily for CCP, an EVE Online private server is beyond all but the largest research institutes and supercomputer sites – most people don’t have solid state drive arrays and massively parallel servers at home.

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