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TiDi - A bandaid solution to a Big Problem
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Anthar Thebess
#41 - 2013-11-25 09:36:27 UTC
EI Digin wrote:
If you ask any hardened veteran who was around a long time ago, they will tell you that big fights were generally Not Fun because of all the disconnects, black-screening, etc. Time Dilation did a lot to fix this and made big fights a lot more bearable.

The question is, even with this why is it that nearly all fights over timers these days cause node crashes, are slowed down to their maximum TiDi percentage and are generally not a good time? Why are we headed back to the old days of lag and unplayability?

Today's meta-game has shifted towards having the biggest bloc, as weaker blocs have died out. The majority of member corps of these blocs did not go and stake their own claim. They didn't reform into a new power bloc. They just simply joined one of the existing larger blocs, because straight up fights are what most people find fun, not backroom deals or dealing with logistics which are huge investments of effort that having your own bloc requires. This results in the three gigantic sov blocs we have now.

The problem with having these gigantic blocs is that suddenly instead of the 500 to 1000 man fleet fights which were huge back in the day and can easily be handled by TiDi, now every single fight over an objective is a 2000 man slugfest.

The secondary problem with this is that this gigantic fight can kick off pretty much anywhere where you can expect any one fleet to pass through. If your fleet takes gates, CCP would have to reinforce all systems en route to make sure one fleet of 250 can pass through without getting jumped and the fight escalating. All midpoints have to be reinforced. All staging systems have to be perma-reinforced. Any small objective turns into a big one, and suddenly every single timer system has to be reinforced, which can be a problem if a large number of timers are generated.

There's no way you would be able to reinforce all of these systems so that they can handle a gigantic fight. The players can't always deliver intel to you on time for downtime, and you shouldn't throw your hands up in the air and blame us for a broken system which promotes a metagame that causes heavy amounts of lag.

This has been a slowly escalating issue since 2011. TiDi was a good bandaid solution for CCP to buy time and allow them to improve upon nullsec and the sov system to make it less bloc-centric before we got here.

But again we see ourselves at the breaking point, where players are feeling the side effects of CCP failing to make any effective systematic change to a real issue, and even with the attempted fixes that have occurred there is no end in sight. Even the arguably greatest addition you have made, the introduction of TiDi, has become ineffective due to a system that is not working properly.

All of the effort put into quality-of-life changes is much appreciated, but at the end of the day these changes don't matter if you're stuck in slow motion for 3 hours longer than you wanted to play for.


When you where bloobing others this was not the issue - but now when you are getting slaughtered you finally notice it?

I agree TIDI is issue - the biggest is that fights escalate to multi-hour nightmare.
I know that CCP Capped the TIDI at 10% - but that was only the timer.
Guns on rokh cycling for 7minutes - yes this is TIDI 10%...

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Dangirdas Bachir
Federal Navy Academy
Gallente Federation
#42 - 2013-11-25 09:39:13 UTC
sry im nob, but what does TIDI mean?

EVE EVE STARGALACTIC CITY B I T C H
Pak Narhoo
Splinter Foundation
#43 - 2013-11-25 10:04:40 UTC  |  Edited by: Pak Narhoo
Anthar Thebess
#44 - 2013-11-25 10:05:14 UTC
In theory - during a heavy battle time slows down to 10%.
10h in TIDI = 1h outside it ( in theory )
CCP did this to manage incoming server load , and some people are stating - to allow more people to get fun.
The more is going on in system - the bigger TIDI.

Now the real facts.
There is a counter showing current TIDI , and CCP capped it (not the TIDI itself) on 10% - it wont show less.
The more players/drones on field - the bigger TIDI.
You can get to fight quickly by titan bridge from the area outside TIDI.
You can easily crash node by dropping carriers/supers and launching drones/fighters ( PL loves to do it in order to save their ass...ets).

What is happening in TIDI:
- Commands you give to your ship subsystems become unresponsive.
For example:
* you click fire/warp - and the ship responds/or not few! minutes later.
* you can fire/target something that is long dead
* eve is white screening often
* the longest railgun cycle i observed was about 7minutes.

- if your ship dies sometimes ( i got this twice ) it is not removing modules from your pod :) - yes this is quite funny - i was shooting from my pod using 425mm railguns - and doing damage!

- if your pod dies it is good chance you will not loose your implants ( more than once i managed to keep mine)

- you see that people are targeting you - brodcast - and then you hear from logies - but you are long dead. ( what? im 100% shields)

Funny things about TIDI:
- you can take your dog into the walk - and nobody notice it - nothing will change on the battlefield
- you can logout ( with aggro ) in the middle of the fight , in the baubles - and login in the morning - and join the fight again - TIDI is so big that 40minutes in battle have passed. ( yep did this - and was surprised when i logged back, in the baubles , alive)

Main fact.
You cannot run once in TIDI - you can sit there till end of this nightmare , or die.
On most important timers TIDI fight continues until a node crash - as anybody can join the fight, at any time.







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Khamelean
Bricks in the Sky
#45 - 2013-11-25 13:06:14 UTC
Adding line of sight mechanics or even aoe would increase the load on the server exponentially.

TiDi was never meant to be a fix, all it was ever meant to do is provide graceful degradation of a node. Because of TiDi, nodes have higher capacities than they used to. Because nodes have higher capacities, more players join the fight. If CCP increase the capacity of nodes then battles will just get bigger and the resulting experience will be the same degraded performance.

The fact is that it's very difficult to manage thousands of clients interacting with each other in real time. If anyone can name any system/service out there that can handle that kind of load gracefully, then I would love to hear about it.

Of course that's not to say that CCP shouldn't be constantly trying to improve server performance, or that the players shouldn't continue to demand better server performance. But that doesn't change the fact that it's a hard problem to solve.
Justin C4se
Iron Whales
Goonswarm Federation
#46 - 2013-11-25 14:05:02 UTC
TiDI has to be fixed asap... Nodes have crashed 2 or 3 times in this N3 vs RUS war alone!

Plz CCP!!!!!!

Fly safe,
Reiisha
#47 - 2013-11-25 14:06:36 UTC
The problem here is blob warfare, not tidi.

Sov and fleet/battle mechanics need to be changed, tidi itself is fine.

If you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all...
tiberiusric
Comply Or Die
Pandemic Horde
#48 - 2013-11-25 14:14:00 UTC  |  Edited by: tiberiusric
I have said this time and time again. Tidi is just as bad as it was before. Sure things may hit now, 'eventually' but that could be like 20 mins from the time your first pressed F1, how is that any better? How the hell do you know what you may have hit or may not have 20-30 mins later. You could of died within that 20 mins.

Tidi is a good idea in theory terrible in practice, and as you said its just a bandaid to the problem. In fact its not a bandaid as it doesn't help. I mean you cant even have 200 ships in a system without 20% Tidi

You still get node crashes, and the game in completely unplayable, so how this is better than before, as some people try to make excuses for, i have no idea.

CCP should seriously spend the next expansion on rewriting the code behind all this. But there again you will insist on having everything on one server, wont you players? In fact things may never get better, maybe only worse.

Do you not wonder why every other MMO have lots of shards, simply because there comes a point when lag and server degradation kicks in and no amount of hardware, software tweaking will help.

All my views are my own - never be afraid to post with your main, unless you're going to post some dumb shit
Anthar Thebess
#49 - 2013-11-25 14:15:24 UTC  |  Edited by: Anthar Thebess
I suggested long time ago that you have to wait the difference between TIDI/Normal Time - to join the fight.
This is 1 timer and it is easily for ccp to manage it without any big load.

For example TIDI is jumping 1-20% and difference between TIDI system rest of eve is 20 minutes.
You arrive at the gate to this system/ use JB / Titan etc and you get nice prompt.

"You will have to wait 20min to join this fight."
When you click Yes - you get perma cloack and have to wait 20min , or you click no - and go back.

When at some point of battle tidi is gone - timer gets a reset, and all waiting people jump in in perma cloack until they move.

Edit:
One of other topic how to limit TIDI.
People from bloob fights know how things go messy, when sentry drones begin to shoot.

https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=3921265#post3921265

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Gibbah
Caldari Provisions
Caldari State
#50 - 2013-11-25 16:07:24 UTC  |  Edited by: Gibbah
Even if Ccp would fix it so you could fight a 5000 man fight without lag people would just bring 6000 and still whine about lag. Remove the incentives for blobbing instead. You would get more intressting gameplay for everyone AND no more issues with lag. A win win solution.
Jythier Smith
BGG Wolves
#51 - 2013-11-25 16:11:27 UTC
So how do we change the mechanics to go against blob warfare?
Kagura Nikon
Native Freshfood
Minmatar Republic
#52 - 2013-11-25 16:16:50 UTC
Jythier Smith wrote:
So how do we change the mechanics to go against blob warfare?



Create several targets that can be hit and disabled by smaller gangs and that are economically or tactically relevant.

Example: Make jump bridges have 200 k EHP. Put Moon mining structures outside pos shield and have 200 k EHP (before the disablign is reached). Remove POS scramblers and warp disruptors (makign easier to a small gang to hit and run).

That type of thing. Woudl add another field to cripple the enemy, withing timed and fast attacs that woudl demans several smaller gagns patrolling,k not a single huge blob to coutner it.

Some will eventually escalate, but now there is real action with strategic relevance that is not made under TIDI.


Billion EHP targets as the only relevant warfare objectives lead to the need of large fleets and long time operations, creatign the oportunity to be counter blobed, what escalates in the need of every operation to be a Huge blob of as large as possible scale.



Give us hit and run, and that will create less field battles. Players will gravitate to the most efficient way of winning the war. Just make possible for other tactics than massive blob to work, and players will use them.

"If brute force does not solve your problem....  then you are  surely not using enough!"
tiberiusric
Comply Or Die
Pandemic Horde
#53 - 2013-11-25 16:47:16 UTC  |  Edited by: tiberiusric
Gibbah wrote:
Even if Ccp would fix it so you could fight a 5000 man fight without lag people would just bring 6000 and still whine about lag. Remove the incentives for blobbing instead. You would get more intressting gameplay for everyone AND no more issues with lag. A win win solution.


The problem is, tidi still happens when there is only a few hundred in system. I don't think nerfing the big battles is the idea, as that pretty much goes against one of eves main attractions (albeit a let down when you actually get in them). However there are now game tactics (and CFC used them and others) to crash the node or make it so unplayable that it no one wanted to even try fighting or even entering a system as tidi was so bad, by just plowing lots of people into the system. That's pretty poor sportsmanship isn't it. Whoever gets into the system first wins type mechanic.

I think CCP need to make nodes based PER REGION rather than here there and everywhere. at the moment you can have a node thats hosting a system in one region ad one in another region far away. So I think that would help.
Start looking at some serious code and database optimization as a main release perhaps, then ramp up the hardware.

To be honest, you have to put up your hands to the devs, I mean to be able to develop a game that can handle the mechanics and physics of a 3000+ man battle and all the scenarios that come with it, its pretty impressive nevermind speeding it up. However as i say that, they have done the hard work, the actually physics etc work fine. So how do you speed that up?
and that's usually because of hardware or code/database bottlenecks. Perhaps its time as i said to really focus on this issue as a main release.

All my views are my own - never be afraid to post with your main, unless you're going to post some dumb shit
Alice Ituin
Doomheim
#54 - 2013-11-25 17:03:55 UTC
Mara Rinn wrote:
I think LOS should be a thing because it adds so much to the tactical possibilities. I'm sure nVidia or someone in the graphics hardware domain has a piece of ray-tracing hardware which would make LOS calculations trivially easy to do in parallel on the same motherboard as the processor managing the combat simulation.


Srsly? CCP haven't even managed to unf** their code to allow multithreading and you expect them to do LOS calculations on a GPU?^^
BeBopAReBop RhubarbPie
University of Caille
Gallente Federation
#55 - 2013-11-25 17:43:57 UTC  |  Edited by: BeBopAReBop RhubarbPie
Beekeeper Bob wrote:
CCP decided that Tidi was "good enough" and started working on the graphics. The problem with that is, shiny pictures require more time to generate.


This is blatantly not true. Shiny pictures require more time for the client to generate. They cause no additional processing time for the server because the server does not render images (if it did you'd have a hard time getting 4 people in a system with 60 fps, let alone 2000). I'd like to see a source for the reasoning behind the jita changes as I was not playing at the time. (started before then, and took a break)

CCP realizes that TiDi is a band-aid solution, and that is why they have a team dedicated to improving performance. It will require significant work to significantly improve the current maximum number of people in a system. If people have suggestions about how to encourage alliances to split fleets between multiple objectives simultaneously, I'd love to hear them, but performance issues are some of the most complex and difficult to solve problems when programming, and complaining about something that they are already working on will do little more than ensure that ccp continues working on these issues (is that a run-on? I'm having trouble writing today for some reason). Keep in mind that these fights that we're talking about have more simultaneous players in combat than most mmo's even have running on one server concurrently.

Kagura Nikon wrote:
Jythier Smith wrote:
So how do we change the mechanics to go against blob warfare?



Create several targets that can be hit and disabled by smaller gangs and that are economically or tactically relevant.

Example: Make jump bridges have 200 k EHP. Put Moon mining structures outside pos shield and have 200 k EHP (before the disablign is reached). Remove POS scramblers and warp disruptors (makign easier to a small gang to hit and run).

That type of thing. Woudl add another field to cripple the enemy, withing timed and fast attacs that woudl demans several smaller gagns patrolling,k not a single huge blob to coutner it.

Some will eventually escalate, but now there is real action with strategic relevance that is not made under TIDI.


Billion EHP targets as the only relevant warfare objectives lead to the need of large fleets and long time operations, creatign the oportunity to be counter blobed, what escalates in the need of every operation to be a Huge blob of as large as possible scale.



Give us hit and run, and that will create less field battles. Players will gravitate to the most efficient way of winning the war. Just make possible for other tactics than massive blob to work, and players will use them.

These are all excellent suggestions. Of course the large fleet fights are one of hte main advertisements for eve so ccp may not actually want to give more incentives to hit and run tactics.

OP: This is one of the most thought out complaints that I have seen on this subject. Thank you for posting this instead of just saying TiDi sucks like most other threads on the subject do.

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Frostys Virpio
State War Academy
Caldari State
#56 - 2013-11-25 17:51:39 UTC
SmilingVagrant wrote:
This isn't going to be not garbage until they figure out how to utilize multiple cores for node processing.


They most likely know how but re-writing everything so it can take advantage of multiple core is not a short task.
Adrian Dixon
Arbitrary Spaceship Destruction
-affliction-
#57 - 2013-11-25 18:00:59 UTC
Multi threading must be the real option. In 10 years time do you expect EVE to be a single threading program or a multithreaded .

Personally I think EVE should be a multithreaded program. Someone needs to bite the bullet here.
Xindi Kraid
Itsukame-Zainou Hyperspatial Inquiries Ltd.
Arataka Research Consortium
#58 - 2013-11-25 18:22:47 UTC
I don't know what can be done as far as TiDi goes, but I do think, at the very least, it would be beneficial for CCP to come up with a way to allow server assets to be dynamically reassigned with TQ is activae, so that nodes can be reinforced as needed when needed while stuff is happening rather than the devs having to do it manually during downtime.

That said, this is still somewhat of the players' fault. People pile into fleet fights and complain that stuff is slow and the nodes are crashing, so CCP finds a way to increase the limit. More players then pile into fleet fights and, again, end up with lag and node crashes, and somehow this is CCP's fault.

If it's that horrible, then stop taking part in blobreign warfare.
Baaldor
School of Applied Knowledge
Caldari State
#59 - 2013-11-25 18:35:24 UTC  |  Edited by: Baaldor
EI Digin wrote:
If you ask any hardened veteran who was around a long time ago, they will tell you that big fights were generally Not Fun because of all the disconnects, black-screening, etc. Time Dilation did a lot to fix this and made big fights a lot more bearable.


Bearable...this basically. It is now bearable for the rest of us that has experienced the lag monster during Cold War, Red Moon etc etc.

The newer lemmings, this may not be acceptable as they have no refrence except the ramblings from a bunch of burnt out nerds.

Yet they have have not experienced crushing your foe only to have :CCP: roll back the fight and everyone's shiny **** is given back to them, KM's and LM's wiped out....

And being all excited your ship made it....later getting your **** pushed in in the first 30 seconds of the "do over".

Or the entire eve dies for everyone because some one accidentally the whole thing in OOYZ-, Although you are 38 jumps away your **** dies too.

The list goes on...

But wait! there are now benefits to Tidi, less FC burn out, we now have less "FC!! LAG!! I GOT LAG FC!!..." followed by a chorus "lag..lag..lag... fuc!!" from the rest of the special snowflakes you are herding around the universe.

Now we have something very simple "FC..12% Tidi FC, copy Tidi FC?" Much more civilized. And all your special children can now look up to the left had corner...and behold..a meter showing you the fun level...
Sentamon
Imperial Academy
Amarr Empire
#60 - 2013-11-25 18:42:31 UTC  |  Edited by: Sentamon
Khamelean wrote:
Adding line of sight mechanics or even aoe would increase the load on the server exponentially.


You're assuming that fights would ever escalate to the 100+ level with it, which they won't. They could have also made it more difficult to move ships, in particular large ships from system to system but they chose the instant gratification route, so now you have what you have.

The fact that you can have 300 people in a fight is a downright miracle in a multiplayer game, yet people expect thousands. Go figure.

Personally, I'm really happy with TiDi, it lets me know to move to another area and beats the old node crashes when the lemmings tried to fight it out in their boring blob fights.

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