Was watching streams of that big keepstar battle in Delve earlier today and ‘looting the field already started’ was mentioned several times in there.
Occured to me that maybe it would be beneficial to fleet battles if TIDI mechanic would be expanded so all the unecessary entities generated during the fight (wrecks, abandoned drones from dead ships, etc…) that are not vital to the battle would be sucked into a void until the battle is finished. Less entities on the field, smoother ride for people fighting.
They could start popping back into normal space after TIDI has gone away, so people can still loot the field.
Neither one of those seem very beneficial in really big fights which TIDI affects.
Both sides have bookmarks and more can be created by scouts for bombing runs any time they are needed. And at least i would not even consider to start hunting and scooping up abandoned drones mid fight which would probably take 20+minutes to do in heavy lag.
Maybe in ti-di systems they can disable all the graphic effects that are so hard to generate from the weapons and just throw the numbers to the computer as food. The downside of course would be the loss of those really cool shots of focus fire and DD volleys.
I think you underestimate the usefulness of wrecks. That being said, I’m sure many people would prefer that wrecks disappear than the server crash. So, perhaps it could be used as a last ditch effort to keep that from happening.
I’m quite confident that if you ask participants of these large fleet fights if they rather had wrecks on field or smoother fight, vast majority would pick the latter one.
2,000 supers with ~50,000 fighters between them kind of craps up the server as well… as it has to calculate the disposition of each and every one of them from one tick to the next. That’s how GSF lost out on a KS timer in the East last year - they spammed the system so hard with fighters they tidi’d themselves out of the final timer.
TIDI 3.0: all drones or fighters you have out are consolidated into a single super drone/fighter. Lose flexibility of attacking multiple targets, but cut entities on the field making it harder to kill the node. (bit like Gila. Can launch very minimal drones but gets huge damage bonus instead)