EVE General Discussion

Citadels were originally intended to use to entosis mechanic. Players understandably cried. So the damage cap system was used instead. Each tick the citadels only allows a certain amount of damage done to it, all other damage above the cap is reduced to zero. There is therefore no way to speed up the process, meaning 7 hours now is the minimum time it takes for a keepstar to be killed under max tidi.

Tidi is not "an issue", let alone "the issue". Many go to tidi fights regularly.

M-O was horrible because of the length of time it took, due to the cap. An uncapped structure bashed by PL and NC supers would be down quickly even in tidi.

Damage caps are fine sure, when there is no tidi. "It works fine so long as circumstance x is present, and circumstance y is absent" is not a good design though, especially when particular circumstances are well known and common to occur in your game.

That's really not accurate.

The design intent of the damage cap is to allow there to actually be a "reasonable" fight length at a wide spread of scales.

Without it, you're left with either designing them to withstand the DPS of "the blob" - at which point, killing them with less-than-a-max-dudes blob becomes a huge chore, even not in TiDi - or allowing them to be killed in a reasonable time by a modest fleet, at which point a huge super blob could just alpha it off the field.

It's kind of silly to look at one huge "server first" clusterfuck that everyone wanted to pile onto and declare the damage cap a failure. In the average case, it's an improvement over grinding POS.

I don't think a lot of people understand exactly what tidi does. It slows down the game time when there are a large number of players in a system. When there's an absurd number, it slows time down to 10% of normal. This means that any action takes roughly 10 times longer. Reloading your missile launchers goes from 10 seconds to 100 seconds. Warping into the fight goes from 30 seconds to 5 minutes. Destroying a structure that takes 30 minutes now takes 5 hours.

EVE is all about the emergent sandbox gameplay of the players. There are several options to dealing with large fights like these:
1: Allow them to happen at normal speed, potentially causing the node to crash or for some player's modules to not activate like they should, resulting in a fight skewed in favor of those who get lucky with the lag. The fight will still take longer than normal to complete due to unresponsive commands.
2: Somehow slow down the time, giving the network and servers more time to process things so that things more or less happen in the right order and the server remains stable, at the expense of the fight taking longer.
3: Lower the cap on the number of players who can enter one system to somewhere under 1,000.

CCP chose the option that puts the most power in the hands of the players. The game lets you gather several thousand players in one place, if we so choose, but we have to face the consequences of tidi in the process. That's just the price you pay for showing up along with 5,000 other people. Nobody forces you to go to these systems.

What is your solution? Cap the size of the fight? Remove tidi so the fight is at the mercy of server and network lag? Remove the damage cap so that a hundred billion isk structure can be destroyed before the defenders can do anything about it?

This boggles my mind.