Quasar Tests Well And Could Pave The Way For Tremendous Changes To The EVE Online Universe

This can get very tech-heavy and in some ways theoretical, so you EVE Online players will have to bear with me a bit as I take you through the latest Dev Blog from CCP.

If you took part in a number of EVE Online activities over the last few years, most notable EVE Aether Wars, ESI, or the EVE Portal mobile app, you've not only taken part in some cool features, but you've also been taking part in the testing of a bigger idea when it comes to taking EVE into the next decade of its life.

Today's dev blog reveals some of the ideas behind that larger concept and even gives it a name, dubbing it Quasar. Quasar is compounding a number of earlier concepts for the game with really one larger goal in mind: "moar lasers."

In short, and I mean VERY short as the dev blog is rather difficult to read for those that don't do this work for a living, Quasar is a plan to change the way EVE runs when it transmits messages. Don't think chat here, think pieces of information going places. Take an action of some type in game, that sends a message. These massive amounts of messages have (and still largely do) interface with the Tranquility server in some way as they pass. Skill Plans, introduced earlier this year, was the first big foray into changing that.

Skill plan operations never touched Tranquility or its database because of the new tools provided by Quasar. In testing, large amounts of messages were able to run through with no crash to Tranquility and little to almost no impact to players.

Long story short, Quasar could (and it is a "could" right now) really change the game for EVE in the future. This opens up tremendous possibilities for message management and more which, in the end, results in battle having more ships, more players, and the aforementioned "moar lasers."

There are still a LOT of considerations and testing that needs to be done and the dev team does take a bit of a peek into that aspect of Quasar towards the end of the post, but this new technology could literally change the game.

Take a peek at the dev blog for the full details, but remember, it does get a bit technical as I've kind of streamlined the overarching concepts here for you.

All said though, EVE's future could be bright if they can expand on these concepts and tests in a meaningful way, but what it can't address is the game's natural aging of code. It'll be interesting to see if CCP has a plan up their sleeves for those types of overhauls as we move forward.