This is true, but although the devs made a great effort to keep the game playable with time dilation (colloquially known as "TiDi" by the players), in practice the game will never slow down below 10% of "realtime", even in situations where the players create fights so complex that it would require slowing to 5% or even 1% of realtime in order for the servers to process every command correctly. This means that in the biggest fleet battles, many commands pilots issue are ignored by the server since it runs out of time to process every interaction before the next server tick. So those mega-battles that make headlines are typically dreaded by players due to the pain of playing when the game becomes unresponsive. Large alliance leaders typically tip off the devs before big battles so that the solar system the battle takes place in is simulated on the best servers that the developers have access to, which helps a little.

One other fascinating thing about EVE is that it has extremely slow server ticks - one full second, which would be unthinkable in any other online game I've played. Partly because it's very old (2003), partly because it's unsharded and every player on the globe from Australia to Germany is playing in the same persistent universe, in the same servers in London, and having high ping to the server isn't as noticeable.

I worked on EVE at the time this was done, although not on Time Dilation itself. It’s really even more interesting because EVE is written with Stackless Python. The team also outs out a lot of technical blogs about the features including TiDi so rather than explain it I can let the guy who wrote it do so from the past.

https://www.eveonline.com/article/introducing-time-dilation-...

That naively means EVE simulation could be about 10x as fast if written in something else? Or did you speed up some modules in a native/JIT language?

Well EVE is written in C++ with Stackless Python embedded so as you might expect parts like the renderer were already written in C++ but plenty of core systems have been rewritten over the years from Python to C++ although that those have been pretty herculean efforts of some very smart people.

Thanks! The renderer is to be expected to be in C++, but I was thinking about the server side more (the simulation).