“An anonymous source close to ATLAS reports that the “K25 battle saw less than 30 losses in a fight which was [heavily affected by spatial anomalies interfering with our fleet operations].”
The story that a world like EVE tells about itself is that it is a coherent, self-contained, and persistent world that a player’s computer gives them a window into. CCP has done a particularly effective job at constructing this fiction in theEVE Chronicles section of the EVE site. Most of the stories there are about setting the tone of the world, characterizing the races of the world to help new players align with a particular racial identity, and portraying parts of the world that aren’t represented in the game. They also include bits of fiction to explain why pilots have the abilities they do. For example, this article justifies the third-person-ness of the game by introducing “camera drones” into the fiction. You’ll never actually see these in the game, but articles like this serve to define a magic circle: a boundary within which all activities can be understood in terms of the fiction of the game.
The moment when this fiction collides with the reality of the worlds’ technical limitations is jarring.
For 0.0 pilots, the boundaries of the magic circle break down most obviously when the node (a part of a server, basically) powering their system crashes. The frequency of these crashes has generally gone down over time as CCP finds and fixes bugs in the node software, but the latest major expansion pack – Dominion – seems to have dramatically increased the rate of node crashes. Crashes are nearly always the result of lots of people being in one system at the same time. These crashes often short-circuit large fleet battles. (Much more on this issue of lots of players being in the same place here.)
This puts CCP’s reporters in an interesting place. They want to write about the major events in the geopolitical world of EVE, but they’re faced with major events in the world that hinge on node crashes. Instead of ignoring it, they’re bringing node crashes into the fiction of the world as “spatial anomalies.” No one in-game adopts this terminology, though, so you get funny stories like the one at the top where the reporter edits away what was almost certainly a complaint about a node crash.
For players, these immersion-breaking events migrate inside the magic circle in a different way. Node instability has developed substantial strategic significance. When a new fleet is entering a system with an enemy fleet in it, it can take minutes for the new fleet to load the system. During that period, the fleet is quite vulnerable; their ships are visible and attackable, they just can’t fight back. As a result, fleet commanders have developed a range of coping techniques. So in strategic terms, being in-system first is a significant advantage until CCP fixes these server problems. Until then, though, most big fleet fights are probably going to involve me staring at the login screen, hoping the node is back up and my ship is still alive.
Logging back in after a node crash.
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