I had the privilege today of being able to leave work early. Pretty slow day and not much work to do. So on my way home I determined that I was going to log in to Eve and get a little mining done while I maybe worked on learning some CSS. So I go to log in to eve and it’s saying I can’t connect to the server. “Well that’s odd,” I say to myself. I check my internet connection and everything seems to be fine. Then I try to access eveonline.com, no luck there either. I’m left scratching my head wondering if maybe there is some kind of server maintenance going on that I didn’t catch wind of.
And then I find the following article…
EVE Online server offline due to DDOS attack
I’m thinking, huh? Who would want to hit EVE with a DDOS? Turns out the culprit is some guy named LulzSec. Their reason for hitting EVE with a DDOS? Well it apparently can be summed up as, “For shits and giggles.”
Hmm… So let’s do a little math here. According to Eurogamer.net, back in 2009, EVE Online was reporting that they had reached 300,000 paying subscribers. It’s been 2 years since and we can assume that those subscription numbers have kept steady if not increased. Now let’s consider the monthly cost of subscriptions for EVE Online. Typically, the average play is going to spend $14.95 a month USD for a subscription. Now multiply that by 300k and you come up with approximately $4.5 million that subscribers are paying monthly for EVE services.
Now let’s break that down further. Average month is 30 days, each day is 24 hours. That’s 720 hours on an average month, 720 hours that subscribers pay to have access to Eve Servers and play. Now take that $4.5 million that us subscribers are paying per month and divide it by the amount of available hours in a month. You’ll come up with approximately $6,300 an hour. That’s $6,300 an hour that is disappearing into the ether because someone decided to do a DDOS again EVE Online for “shits n’ giggles.”
“But dude, there is no guarantee that you would have even been playing during the hour or hours that the service was down!”
Fair enough, so let’s look at who would have actually been playing. According to eve-offline.net, the average population on the server for the last year was approximately 30,000 subscribers at any given moment. Which means we can effectively take our $6,300 per hour statistic and cut off 90% of that, leaving us with $630 an hour. Not so bad right? You’d be wrong, and here is why.
Your average player does not use all 720 hours of available game time in a 30 day period. Therefore the real value for a player is in how often they play the game. Let’s assume that you are a hardcore EVE gamer who plays 80 hours a week, which works out to be 343 hours a month of playing Eve. Suddenly that $630 an hour can turn in to $1,300 an hour that those 30k subscribers are losing. But let’s be real here. Who has 80 hours a week to play EVE? Let’s scale it back to 40 hours a week, for those of us who actually have a job but still devote all of our free time to this game. Now our 30k players a week are losing an average of $2,600 per hour for the game time they lost. And for the 30k subscribers that can only manage 20 hours a week? $5,215 being lost per hour. Heaven forbid if the average hour usage per EVE subscribers is 10 hours or less. Because guess what, those 30k subscribers that could not log, just lost $10,400 worth of value for the money they spend on paid subscription time.
All this lost money and why? Was it a political statement? Was the person who did this DDOS disgruntled or dissatisfied with how they were treated by EVE Online? Were they trying to hack EVE and get your money? Nope, that would all make sense. It’s happened before and it will happen again. But no, the reason why you can’t log in to EVE Online, is because someone decided to hit EVE with a DDOS, “for shits n’ giggles.”
Bravo LulzSec. Your asshatery may not go down in history as the biggest disruption to services the internet has ever seen. But today, you have made your mark. And for that, the EVE community salutes you… 132 my friend, 132…
oh waw i have been trying to access eve onlien for hours
it wasn't working so i figured i would type it on google and found out that its down thanks to lulzsec
