X47 Fight is NOT OK

Communications Center General Discussion
41

But why would you talk about killing the rest of the game, if killing the rest of the game does nothing to help fix this problem?

This was already a reinforced node. I’d be happy to see CCP put more effort in making this kind of gameplay smoother, but do not see why that should mean ‘killing off small gang content’ or ‘reducing the size of the game universe’.

To me it seems you’re just (sarcastically) complaining about how this issue, which does not affect your own playstyle, is getting more attention than your personal issues.

42

And I think what Gerard is saying here is that there’s a practical limit to how much a node can be reinforced, and that cannibalizing other space, which is probably doing fine on fairly modest hardware anyway since it doesn’t need much, would not be of significant benefit to these large fights. That’s where the ‘if it does nothing to help fix the problem’ comes from, I think.

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43

Thanks for the translations, Qia! :stuck_out_tongue:

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44

Resources and manpower is zero sum. You believe it does nothing. I am stating the opposite belief.

It’s clear you don’t like my belief and want to treat it like a shitpost. That’s fine, I’ll stop blowing up the thread. I made my point, it was genuine.

45

Available technology and its price is the limiting factor here, not the design, focus or dedication. If there was tech available and implented to have a 10.000 player fight with no TIDI, EVE players would still be able to overload it.

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46

It’s just Io being a tool again.

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47

This is one of the examples of why I did not joined a nullblock after coming back to the game. I was tempted many times in doing so, but I know for a fact that the servers simply can’t handle a properly traditional several thousands player fight. I also know that if they improved the server to handle “n” players in a fight, we’ll bring “n+1” and crash it again, it is what we are known for historically.
Until we get a quantum server or something - if Eve will be around- , I’ll stick to my j-space.
Nevertheless I have to give credit to CCP , out of the all MMOs out there, Eve is still the one that can handle the most players in a battle. There’s nothing that comes close to it.

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48

This is probably just going to get me in more trouble, but here goes.

This is a pretty hack analogy, so forgive me for not thinking of a better one, but let’s say Eve is a kitchen, and a fight is a sandwich. Some fights are bigger or smaller, some sandwiches are bigger or smaller.

An order comes in for a really really big sandwich. You can allocate as many cooks to make it as you want, and while 10 cooks could make 10 sandwiches in the same time it takes 1 cook to make 1 sandwich, putting all 10 on a single sandwich does not get the sandwich done in a tenth the time. More people works up to a point to speed things up, but each extra person has diminishing returns until eventually they just get in each others way.

This is more along the lines of what we’re dealing with. A single very fast piece of hardware is what we ideally want, but what we have are lots of pieces of slower hardware that have to work together, and after a point they’re better off just staying out of the way and doing their own thing. The zero sum of resources and manpower doesn’t necessarily hold when a workload can’t be neatly divided into single individual tasks that don’t require coordination.

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49

I feel the OP is valid, even without proposing a solution, because it highlights the fact that CCP consistently advertises the “huge single shard massive space battle” experience without being able to deliver.

I’m well aware that CCP has no problem with a total disconnect between what they spin/promise/advertise and what they actually deliver. Part of the difficulty in attracting new players to the game is that CCP/Eve is treated with considerable disdain whenever the game is mentioned in other gaming venues (at least, in my experience).

Basing much of the game hype and having many game design features push players towards large alliances and large battles which the game is incapable of supporting is unsustainable. CCP shoots themselves in the foot every time a large-scale battle breaks down into unplayable lag and then crashes.

The combat system needs to be reworked, from both ends. Large battles happen a handful of times a year - you lose players if that’s a significant “hook” you’re using to attract and keep them. There needs to be more emphasis on smaller-scale combat and viable reasons for engaging in same.

Large-scale battle mechanics need a full rework. @Dyver_Phycad 's notion of breaking large battles up into distributed “node point” battles across multiple systems is interesting. I don’t feel it resolves the issue of thousands of players piling into one system, but could perhaps be blended with other solutions.

Limiting player numbers can also work, contrary to what some posters have stated. It just requires significant changes to the process and some loss of freedom of action. For instance, once combat is engaged and more than say 600 players are involved, the server creates 3 ‘factions’ based on the FCs of the two largest opposing fleets: faction A, opposing faction B, neutral faction C.

1,000 slots are reserved for A and B, 400 slots for neutral C. All players in-system, or warping in, answer a dialog declaring their status as A, B or C, just like the current “System is controlled by X, continue?” dialogs. Anyone not declaring is warped out of the system or blocked from entering. Once a side is declared, it can’t be switched until battle is complete.

It would be clunky and tedious perhaps, and still may not even solve all the problems. That still beats “unbearable lag followed by complete node crash” as a result. It also resolves the “better performance will just lead to more numbers crashing it” issue - as CCP improves performance they can adjust battle limits to fit.

As @Gerard_Amatin pointed out, it’s not up to players to resolve this. CCP created the problem, advertises the issue as a key selling point, and it’s up to CCP to create a viable solution.

50

Ye most anciente ande honoured rules of blaming :

  1. Always blame CCP, whatever the cause.
  2. When in genuine doubt about who to blame, see 1.
  3. Especially when doing dumb sh*t, still blame CCP
  4. Always try to break new stuff first, then blame CCP that new stuff can be broken
  5. Invoke the right to ignorance, and blame CCP for not educating you
  6. Always pretend to know better than CCP
  7. In the event there is no one to blame, blame CCP
  8. Never consider to not blame CCP
  9. Always demand higher efforts from CCP, then break stuff, and then blame CCP
  10. When you are wrong, blame CCP for you being wrong

You’re most welcome.

The server for X47 snuffed it.
image

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51

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Going by this, if they put down X defenders, or Y attackers and more than what they thought showed up, wouldnt that cause an issue?

52

Sure, and in principle I agree. In practice, very few problems can’t be broken down into individual tasks and even for those that can’t: many smart people have already applied coordination communication overhead mitigations on distributed software to simulate a single thing across massive distributed machines. Governments do it, private tech companies do it, so „one grid has to be on one single fat piece of hardware“ is not a fundamental constraint that must be adhered to at all times, it’s simply an assumption of today.

One I believe requires significant manpower and resources to rethink.

Now I’m for real done. Put me back in the toolshed. Thanks for the dialogue.

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53

No self accountability, always blame others for one’s choices, cry a lot. I see similarities in game and irl.

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54

TBH I don’t see how “it’s the whiney players fault and they blame CCP for it” is a factor here. This is a pure game design and hardware limitation issue. Are players expected to be able to manage server load and adjust the numbers of combatants on the fly in response?

The battle reservation system is more of a resource-allocation/scheduling notice for CCP to assign certain systems to nodes that can handle more transactions. It’s not a limit on the actual size of the battle.

In a side-limited system, it would still help to notify CCP in advance so they can put the affected systems on a reinforced node. However it can actually work anywhere, on the fly. Every system would have a default A/B/C size based on server capacity for the node it’s running on. Whenever fleet combat is engaged and number of players in-system >= (A+B+C)/2, for instance, the “declare side” system would kick in. It would be dynamically limited by the handling capacity of the current combat node, not by guesstimates entered in advance.

In fact this would have a tendency to naturally evolve into the “distributed combat” system proposed by @Dyver_Phycad. As combatants are eliminated and exit system, both sides would seek to reinforce by bringing new combatants in. Which would lead to both sides trying to choke off the supply of reinforcements from warp-in points, creating related conflict in adjacent systems.

55

A possible “solution” (or rather, workaround for the real issue) was to allow subcaps to han-solo into a keepstar and any other structure. Inside the structure, have an abyssal deadspace style combat grid made out of several rooms each of limited size where warp drives and cynosureal field generators can’t be used, and checkpoints (abyssal filaments) that connect the rooms have to be passed in order to get deeper into the hangar, but unlike abysal deadspace, can be jumped back, including the first filament allowing to leave the hangar and go back to space.

Players that can undock from the station can opt to start in room 3 instead, while players that come from outside the station start in room 1.
If the attacking party fails to take control of all the hangar in a given amount of time, the shields come up and the attackers are trapped, though still able to wreck havoc among the defenders. Also, enable the citadel’s core, fuel, and ammunitions to be stolen and/or destroyed by taking control of the hangar, and make citadel primary weaponry significantly more powerful to motivate attackers to han-solo into the citadel to disarm/disable it rather than to try wrecking it in a frontal assault.

Maybe have it have more rooms for the larger structures, and make it a nontrivial connection grid, e.g. 3x3 rooms with random connections allowing for at least one route from the entry to the core/hangar for medium structure, 5x5 for medium structures and 7x7 for supersized structures. The random connections with at least one route mechanic would turn the hangar into a maze that needs to be mapped before combat can take place, but it also generates 9 combat room instances for medium, 25 for medium and 49 for large structures, although for the 5x5 grid there should be at least 2 and for the 7x7 grid at least 3 routes, so the fleets circumvent an obvious encounter by taking a different route than was anticipated, or dispatch smaller subgroups to create a diversion instead of just all smashing each other in a frontal assault in one of the grids only.

That might help a bit with the X47 fight but eve still has a horrible performance with many players on the same grid, an issue that will have to be addressed sooner or later, too.

In highsec, the mechanic would provide a significant advantage to small corporations defending against memes from grieve corps that come to shoot a medium structure with 2 leshlaks like they love doing, as the attacker would have to close into the third room, w/o local, then attack the structure’s core and supply infrastructure while the defenders can field “real fleets” on them. Or, with upgraded weaponry, shoot the attackers with the structure more effectively if they don’t dare venturing into the structure.

56

As said, it does not do that. However, it makes it so that you do not have to bring everything to one grid to win everything. You need to spread your forces over several systems. This can still lead to 5k people in one system and a complete system shutdown. That’s fine with me. There are other systems, however, where people also have to fight, and they can do it in a much more responsive and better performing environment. While huge groups of coalitions duke it out in whatever turned into the center of action, smaller organizations of the coalitions can get busy in other systems and help with the progress.

What I have in mind is a system where huge battles still happen, but people have a choice to go to other places in the constellation, fight in a better environment and contribute to the overall goal. Since you cannot know which KS node turns into the biggest possible slugfest, you’d still want to/need to notify CCP for node reinforcements. The reinforcement would be for all systems of a constellation, which also helps with improving the combat experience outside the eventual slugfest system.

57

This is the only game on this planet that can handle thousands of players on a grid at the same time. Of course there are limits to what is technologically feasible at any given moment. CCP on the global scale is the frontrunner of that technological effort to keep increasing those numbers. And I’m sure we players will always find a way to cross the limit.

Players, or at least those calling the shots in any combat deployment of this scale, know full well what the risks are. It’s not the first time they jumped off the cliff, and it won’t be the last. When this happens once too often, some people will start having second thoughts about joining these fights. In the best of battle scenarios, simultaneous engagements in multiple systems at the same time would reduce numbers per system - there’s a limit to what any coalition can put out there, purely based on their membership numbers. Perhaps that is something CCP could consider when reworking sov/Upwell mechanics.

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58

Is this the REAL PvP I keep hearing so much about?

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59

INstances of limited sizes and ship types that need fulfilled…

For Example:

100 man fight, 50v50:

5 Titans
10 Supercarriers
10 Dreads
15 BS
10 Misc, any subcapital combination.

Up to 500 or 1,000 man battles, or whatever the limit is that allows only slight time-dilation, same general idea with different options.

It’s time. Also, carriers and dreads in HiSec. No Keepstars without fair and proper balance to eliminate them.

Instances are the only answer for limited, large fleet fights.

60

I think this was a third category next to PvE and PvP, called PvS.

Players versus Server.

I’m still waiting for the killmail of node X47.

I wonder who did most damage and who got the last hit. Were it the fighters, or those EDENCOM weapon calculations that killed it? We’ll probably never know.