QCon London’s 2026 session description says EVE Online’s team will discuss instrumenting New Eden to identify important traffic, including real-time interactions that may express player personality. It names head-based sampling, dynamic and deterministic sampling, exponential moving averages (EMA), and the cost of observability as topics. The abstract describes the session’s scope; it does not disclose the game’s sampling rules, metrics, or results.
What is the EVE Online session about?
QCon London lists “How Eve Online Leverages Head Based Sampling to Observe ‘Fun’” as a 50-minute session on Tuesday, March 17, 2026, at 11:45 GMT. It is scheduled in Whittle at the QEII Centre in London, under Distributed Tracing. The conference identifies Nicholas Herring as the speaker and gives his role as Technical Director, Eve Online at CCP Games. The official session page is the source for these details.
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The abstract frames a challenge specific to multiplayer games: real-time interactions can express the personality of users, and an observability system must help identify traffic that matters. It says the talk will cover instrumenting New Eden, EVE Online’s game universe, to observe those interactions without making telemetry costs unsustainable. The conference page characterizes the underlying system as a 20-year-old legacy system operating alongside modern technologies; that is the speaker’s description, not an independently verified measurement of the system’s age.
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1Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problems2Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitches3Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errorsHow does head-based sampling work?
In distributed tracing, a trace follows work as it passes through components or services. Sampling determines which traces are kept for analysis. With head-based sampling, the system makes its keep-or-drop decision near the start of a trace, before it knows the trace’s complete outcome. This can limit collection and storage, but the sampler cannot choose a trace because it later turns out to contain an error or unusually slow operation.
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By contrast, tail-based sampling makes a decision after the trace has completed, when later errors or latency are available to consider. That timing distinction is explained in OpenTelemetry’s sampling overview. The QCon abstract names head-based sampling, but it does not say EVE Online uses tail-based sampling as an alternative.
| Approach | When the decision is made | What is known at decision time | Practical implication |
|---|---|---|---|
| Head-based sampling | Near the start of the trace | The eventual errors or latency may not yet be known | Can limit collected telemetry, but cannot select a trace based on its later outcome |
| Tail-based sampling | After the trace completes | The completed trace, including later errors or latency | Can make selection based on the full trace; the QCon abstract does not establish that EVE Online uses it |
Why is observing “fun” difficult?
The abstract’s phrase “the traffic that matters” points to a selection problem: a system may generate many traces, but only some capture interactions useful to understand the game. The session describes those interactions as potentially expressing player personality. In a real-time multiplayer environment, the relevant behavior may not be reducible to whether a request succeeded or failed; the abstract’s focus is on finding meaningful activity while keeping observability performant and affordable.
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Sampling creates a trade-off. Keeping fewer traces can reduce the telemetry volume to process and store, while also leaving fewer traces available to diagnose behavior. In dated 2020 guidance, Splunk recommends full-fidelity traces where possible, head-based sampling if sampling is necessary, and avoiding sampling between services. That is general guidance, not a description of CCP Games’ design or a statement of what the QCon talk recommends.
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The official abstract lists a “100% Head base sampling ecosystem,” a blend of dynamic and deterministic sampling techniques, and “The blessing and curse that is the Exponential Moving Average (EMA).” It also includes the goal of observing “fun” without breaking the bank. These are the speaker’s stated subjects, not a published technical specification.
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An EMA is a method of smoothing a changing signal by giving recent observations more weight than older ones. The abstract does not state what signal the session’s EMA smooths, how its dynamic and deterministic samplers are combined, or what “100%” means operationally. It also does not explain how player activity is classified as “fun” or how the team evaluates the cost and benefit. Those implementation details and results cannot be inferred from the session description.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What is confirmed—and what remains unknown?
- Confirmed by QCon: the session’s speaker, role, schedule, venue, Distributed Tracing track, and stated topics.
- Not established by the abstract: sampling rates or rules, system metrics, the EMA’s input, the definition of “fun,” measured cost savings, diagnostic outcomes, or whether the system uses any particular tracing vendor.
- Publication status: the reviewed session page does not establish whether slides or a recording are publicly available.
Accordingly, the session is best read as a conference case study about a difficult observability problem—not as public documentation of EVE Online’s production architecture. The abstract establishes what Herring plans to discuss, but not the implementation or its measured effectiveness.
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