Check out this dev blog for an after action report on the first EVE: Aether Wars playtest which occured on March 20th, live at GDC!
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It was good fun, already looking forward to the next one.
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3,852 players.
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Interesting!
My Nvidia 1060 card was working hard but not overloaded. FPS was good, lowest it ever got was >10, no noticeable lag, no crashes. Automatic respawn after dying was fast.
The solid clunk as torpedoes bumped into my ship was amusing. The main combat problem was the zillions of missiles being spammed out by the bots which made actual targets difficult to see, less of those next time please!
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A colossal 14,710,908 torpedoes fired. ALMOST FIFTEEN MILLION.
I swear a good 20k of those are me wildly clicking (and failing) 
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thousands of players but not all seeing eachother, what kind of grid magic is this?
not sure how it helps CCP.
Iâm interested the most in how big was the tidi in this test if this new engine is even supposed to affect it.
As it was run on a completely different software and not CCP servers - TiDi did not exist, BUT (and a big one) while your flight might have been smooth every other player you saw on screen have been a laggy mess teleporting around.
Meh. STADIA just made all this obsolete. 
What will you talk about now when youâve lost the last selling point ⌠mass battles ???
i tried and it failed hard, it starts my VR head set for no apparent reason.
Then after 2 seconds it crashed. I know it was a test but for me personally a failed one.
to me it looks like a leggy catastrophic failure for a test
Which means in time we will be stuck with it. 
I know this was just a system test, but I think there are a lot of things to improve.
- The client is unstable, it crashed a lot. This makes it difficult to actually participate.
- The connection was laggy too, objects were teleporting in and out constantly.
- Iâm not sure if this is accurate, but it seemed like the ships actually fly faster than the missiles they are launching sometimes. I would suggest for the next test to equip lasers instead. The fighters of Amarr look better anyway.
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Feedback from a potato-moder:
- FPS for me was ~20 before bot-invasion, 2-13 after (blame my poor GPU, not the servers), but even so was relatively smooth considering. Decent performance for lesser machines is actually impressive! The vanishing mouse on the options menu before entering meaning inability to adjust settings would be a good thing to fix before next round testing to get a better picture of performance from people like me.
- Saw many players/streamers encountering random crashes, but none here at all. I did get a black-screen lag on initial loading, and on respawns where I popped too near the core of missile-spamming from the bots, but again that may be helped by access to adjust graphics settings.
- The bots were dumb. They basically boxed the area and spewed missiles into the centre, creating a glut of missiles firing at nothing, making it very hard to find actual ships. If theyâre being used again, making them a little more mobile would be a plan.
- Ships were hard to find even without the missile-spam, because they were the same colour as missiles and the target-lock couldnât tell the difference between a ship and a missile, so unless you were right on top of someone - at which point the limited motion controls made it hard to keep them on screen - it was hard to tell if you were shooting at rocks, ships, or missiles. Made it more of a âspray-n-prayâ than actual combat at times. Either a graphical change to ships to make them obvious, a locking mechanism similar to Eve, or making the non-ship elements not trigger the lock would make it easier to actually shoot things that need shot.
- Bot invulnerability towards the end was a little demotivating. Many of the bots, if âkilledâ, didnât actually die or add to kill count: theyâd stop shooting and just spin in place soaking infinite missiles. Again, lots of wasted time on that meant me and several others stopped trying to kill things and just explored the area. Let the bots die, or make some distinction between bot-ships and player-ships to encourage combat to continue.
- Based on this report, the start delay was due to log-in server overload, if iâm reading this correctly? Before the server was due to go live, people were testing their key, and getting an unintuitive error (to the effect of âthatâs not a valid keyâ), which meant I saw multiple people trying it several times thinking they needed to remove the hyphens, had made a typo, etc. Iâd seen the announcement on the discord server beforehand, so didnât contribute to this spam, and passed the word on where I could, but having a more coherent error, or allowing log-in without ship-load prior to start time would be a better plan to avoid both confusion and people hammering repeat attempts at log in causing unexpected strain on the log-in servers. No matter where you announce it, only a handful will see before trying to log in, so that needs to be countered. Especially given the number of people that were there for the 17:30 start, and left when it was delayed, which could have been enough to get that record broken.
- The leaderboard being broken was again a bit demotivating. Having no frame of reference for where you are compared to others meant there was no drive to push harder, which might have caused more activity to pull data from. Making that active could make a difference to how much players push, and how many stick around for the full duration.
- The HUD opacity was a little lacking. Facing the wrong direction could make it impossible to see if your shields are full or empty, again contributing to either unexpected deaths or overly-cautious play. For full load, you want folk going all out, and thatâs hard when distracted trying to work out whether thatâs the blue of the shield meter or the blue of the backdrop.
- The mini-map was trash. A spam of yellow with a handful of red on it, what did it even mean? There wasnât enough red to be âplayersâ with the yellow missiles/bots. Maybe damaged ships versus healthy? Active aggression versus non-combat pilots? Who knows. Some kind of information on that would be helpful so we could hunt a bit more, again getting some more action happening.
- The boundaries were unclear. Obviously we couldnât reach the Titans (several tried and got bounced back to spawn), but there was no obvious demarcation of the field, and no âstuffâ up/down that would indicate a too-far like the ship and planet art on the sides. This meant a glut in the middle, and frustrating attempts to get outside that to find actual ships sometimes meant you got teleported randomly. Making the field boundaries clearer would encourage more movement and activity.
- Rubber-banding was infrequent, but frustrating. I got it a little, but less than expected. However, shooting someone and just before they should be about to die, having them pop off to another point denying me my kill was demoralising. Again, demotivated players donât push as hard, so some focus on smoothing that out would be a boost to activity.
- Maybe a third stat to the K:D count, Kill Assists? I know many times Iâd get someone almost dead, then theyâd bounce off, or get sniped, or whatever, and I donât get credit. Especially if the leaderboard functionality gets activated, having a tracker on Kill Assists would encourage activity even where thereâs not a guaranteed successful kill in it for you.
Overall, good fun, and performed better than expected given the focus on stress testing. But the above tweaks would help make the next test more fun and participants more active. Iâd also say it was a mistake to close registration before the event: given how so few turned up compared to expected/wanted, maybe having the option of a waiting list so that if halfway through thereâs not enough, more keys can be generated for latecomers to get players who didnât decide they wanted in until the last second rather than the mediocre AI.
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would have been more if it had been another hour or two longer, many got home from just after it ended.
I was trying to keep a low profile and explore. I thought that even if I donât participate in the deathmatch itself, the data I make would be useful. I was mowing fast between the server nodes (or whatever you call them). I experienced huge lag and rubberbanding the further from the main battle I went.
However, there seemed to be invisible damage-fields further from the battlefield, which I suspect had killed me a few times.
It seemed as if all the processing power went to the âspawn serverâ. Most people were there and it went more smoothly.
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Thats the general EvE problem: welcome to Caldari Space skybox background - the one that is bright enough for players to lose any ability to read white text because it lacks shadowing or outline.
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Why have they never reduced ships on far zoom out from textured models to elongated pyramids of different class sizes?
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It was fun to watch, saw it on YT by Markeedragon.
Nice sounddesign but it was difficult to find out if and why your target got hit or not.
I guess it was the enormous amount of torpedoes ^^
Good stress test.
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