Nothing's Perfect.

Nothing's truly perfect, and even the most forgiving of players will find fault in EVE Online. Dont get me wrong, its a great game, just that as I've said, its the players who demand godlike perfection, or bias, or something that CCP simply can not deliver on time/not at all.

First off, EVE runs off one single server-cluster, aka one persistent world. Unlike many other MMO's out there that rely upon "sharding" or splitting the playerbase into different server worlds to maintain control of latency and the limits of current technology, EVE breaks the mold by creating one persistent virtual world for everyone to play in. This is a double-edged sword for CCP. On one hand, everything you do in this game affects everyone in some way, unlike for example, you're the most elite gamer on Server 1 in this other MMO, yet are unknown in Server 2. Personally, I find that completely aggravating.

The downside to this is server maintenance, operating costs, and latency issues.

CCP are on the cutting-edge in server technology because of the huge strain the playerbase places upon the server-cluster. In fact, the server in question is not one single machine, but multiple machines set up as a "cluster", wherein they share the load. Currently, CCP still needs work in their load-balancing server programming, since on heavy gaming days, its not uncommon to suffer a "node crash" wherein the "node" in charge of the solar system you're in cant take the load of so many people and just fails.

This, thankfully, is rare enough for the majority of the playerbase that it's more or less a once-a-month thing, and only when really pushing the numbers.

You can probably deduce the cost of maintaining so many nodes for the amount of players that play everyday (as of now, average maximum number is 30,000, yes, thats thirty thousand players in a single persistent game-world).

And we come up to the lag. In heavily-trafficked areas in EVE, lag can, and will, aggravate players. I've have had more than my fair share in Jita (the vernerable "trade hub aka laghouse" of EVE) to the point I've been forced to login 3-4 times just to get out.

Of course, this is an extreme example, and most other areas of EVE (around 80%) are practically bare, mostly because either nobody wants that slice of space due to lack of obtainable resources, or is just too far off the beaten path to even consider occupation. Such places are silky-smooth in terms of gameplay latency (not accounting for natural "distance lag" since the server is in London, so half-a-second waiting for me, 500ms, is normal).

The good thing is that CCP is actively taking care of EVE Online, constantly upgrading, improving, and, if they do make a mistake, they make it up to the playerbase. In fact, the last update introduced a nasty "desync" bug (desyncronization from the server, leading to odd behavior like being hit by something you've already escaped from, unable to use modules/attack, etc) that's being hunted down and squashed as of the moment, and continual updates of old, and addition of new features, etc.

This leaves another topic open: the playerbase aka the community. Thats quite a entry in itself so that's for another post.