Assembly Hall

No, i defend game from idiotic ideas which bring more lag, and more bad game mechanics.
Easy to see why is so bad your idea.

No, I was mostly ignoring whether or not it was true or false, and going off on a completely different tangent which would then double back to prove a point.

Anyhow, I've had a think, and I can only really think of two games where losses actually matter, darkfall and mortal online. I haven't tried either of them, but I believe at least one of them is without a "show people near you" style, i.e. I've seen tons of people get robbed by people who just followed them out of eyesight. The problem with comparing this game to EVE, however, is a matter of scale and how things work. In the other two games, RPGs, the act of sneaking up on someone is something which takes a fairly long while, giving the victim ample time to unscrew his head and spot the perp. In EVE, however, if the hunter isn't bad, he'll be able to cut the response time from when he's visible on a 14AU directional scan, till he's got you locked and warpscrammed, down to 6 seconds or so. While this may sound like ample time, and it would be if there were something other than the mindnumbing activities of mining or ratting for hours on end to contend with, the mere fact that the hunted is sitting around and not doing overly much stimulating means that the chances of the dscan warnings coming in time to allow the guy to take evasive maneuvers are pretty slim. Your idea of cutting down the distance the broader width you scan down to 1AU cuts the response time down to however long it takes for someone to slow down from warp sufficiently to start locking you.

I mean, it's not like the 30 seconds or whatever is the current best time from appearing in local, till you can land on someone if you do everything right is preventing that many from dying like muppets, so I'm not sure why the urgency to change this (well, in Caliph's case, the reason is fairly clear cut, he just wants ganking to be easier so he'll suck less).


The lag isn't even the thing you should be overly worried about (even though it would put an added strain on a server during 1000+ fights). The main problem with the idea of switching over to a dscan style intel gathering, is that it drastically cuts down the possible response time of the hunted, and puts literally all the initiative in the hand of the hunter. However fun it might be for a while (and believe me, if this change did come to pass, I'd dust off my T3 and go to town all over the place), it just strikes me as a bad game balance change.

"CCP Atlas: "There is a new 2 second delay in using the directional scanner. This has been done for server performance reasons."

But do you know better than any CCP Dev.
Oh man.
Delayed local generating more lags. Why ?
Because all players need to use always the dscan continously. CCP dont want to create from a stupid idea a massive laggenerator.
And wasting server resources for this stupid delayed local it's a fail. Easy to understand.

OK learn to read a post before you criticize it. Also some comprehension of network traffic would help too.

OK let me dumb this down for you.

Let's say you had one shared document between 10 users. Each user needs to see the changes that each other user is making to the document (Remember Google Wave anyone?)

So the dumb way of doing it that you think we are talking about, is to keep everyone up to date by constantly downloading the entire document every 2 seconds.

The clever way is for everyone to download the document once when they first see it. Then when one user makes a change, the server pipes that change to everyone else looking at it. If no changes are made for half an hour then nobody gets a change from the server. If one person makes one small change then everyone else only gets broadcasted the one change and not the whole document.

Now replace the word "document" with "stuff in system with you" and "changes to the document" with "different stuff comming in and out of local"

so you have 10 guys ratting in a system for half an hour. Local hasn't changed, nobody has docked or undocked, jumped in our out, So they don't get an update on what's in local from the server.

Now an 11th person comes into local. The other 10 clients are piped the info on the new ship (not a full D-scan query) and their clients start doing the new intel tool gameplay timer thing locally so it doesn't bog down the server.

The 11th person comming into local doesn't have an up to date copy of what's in local. So their client does a full query (pretty much the same amount of data in a regular D-scan) then like everyone else their client starts doing the new intel tool gameplay timer thing locally so it doesn't bog down the server.

And as long as these 11 people are floating around in space without anyone leaving or comming in the server won't pipe any more data to any more people until something changes.

Automatic intel tool, time based detection, low network traffic.

And I'd be willing to bet this "only update on new information" trick is how most shared chat channel programs work too. If that's the case then this new intel tool wouldn't add any more network traffic than being in one additional chat channel. And someone coming into local wouldn't cause any more lag than them saying hello in a chat channel.

If you just look at local as something which you glance at to "get intel", then yes, it's "no effort". The effort aspect comes in when you factor in the need to keep constant watch, hour after hour. There's a reason people keep getting caught.


The main problem I have with this is that I think the risk/reward of nullsec for the individual pilot is, right now, "mostly okay". If it's made more risky, the thing that'll happen is that people'll just go back to L4s in hisec instead, because the risk/effort/reward makes more sense than it would do in nullsec with this change.

Where I'd prefer to see more danger, however, is more on the alliance level, to encourage more skirmishes over systems, which I believe is a bit more of the right place to do tweaks.

1.) It's currently very difficult to catch an alert ratter/miner... and even unalert miners/ratters that actually practice safe habits are very hard to catch.

2.) We all know you like the notion of sneaking around, and you like the notion of ganking the gatherers of EvE. Both of these start off with good intentions of adding more risk to the game and enhancing the "cloaky" playstyle. On the surface, I fully believe that nullsec needs more risks, and that allowing people to "hide" is a good thing. However, a balance between the hunters and hunted is extremely important to maintain for a healthy lowsec/nullsec. CCP tends to lean game mechanics in favor of the hunted, and for good reason. Overhunting results in the extinction of your herd!! Xorv, in general your proposal overwhelmingly supports the hunters (especially cloaked hunters), the consequences of which I think you're oblivious or willfully ignorant of.

When the people you hunt cannot truly defend themselves nor have a realistic opportunity to detect you and get safe before they are within your gun's sites, you break the predator prey balance! Last I read, your proposal really lacks any viable options for the hunted to counter your cloaky-sneaky ganks.

Think about it: I can make 15m an hour (easily and very safely) in highsec running missions and the like. In most of nullsec, the rewards are NOT that much greater. Pretend I can make 30m an hour (which is not nearly as common as you'd hope). Pretend I'm thrifty, which means I make this ratting in an 60m isk drake. To keep pace with my highsec counterpart, I would need to rat ~4 hours before losing a drake. Do you really think that's possible with your scheme? There's only 3000 nullsec systems, and only 20% of those are actually regularly used. With an average of 25,000 players online, how many of those ratting systems can be successfully ratted for 4 hours before a cloaky gang destroys them???

Read again and learn.

Ok learn game mechanics before you talking idiocracy. Such as "if you can warp 3AU with a ship and you move to 30 AU distance your travel time will be 10 sec :P
And now starting your eve client and try it.

And dont talk dumb thing as you download a document. Man. the Dscan download objects not one or not just two documents, you will downloading all objects in solar system. POS ships, etc datas in small packets with different angles.
Everytime when you push scan button you will get all objects from database which is not allowed to save on your client. (prevent cheats)
If the players not see local, the all players need to scanning continously, because they dont want to die and they need intel from scanner. That's would be horrible for server performance when 50k players spamming the dscan button within 2 seconds again and again. Time to time.
No matter if manual or automatic scanner will you use, you need gathering and download the datas from server side.

PS
"Locator agent ship type" Man that was python inject code, a cheat which is saved the all object positions in system to client.
The game client in normal state (cheat free) not save these positions. Thats why they dont enable to save the object positions/bookmarks etc to your client. And you know python code inject is a cheat and you get instantly ban when CCP found you ?

As someone who's flown in nullsec for a good amount of time, I agree that local is simply too much and too easy of an intel gatherer. The idea of stealth does not work when everyone is alerted of an intruder's presence.

What I propose is a 30 second delay for local update for both parties.

What I propose for cloaking is that the inorder to receive intel update, the pilot must remain uncloaked for 30 seconds to receive intel up. If he cloaks before the 30 second timer complete, it restarts. But at the same time his presence will not be revealed as long he remains cloaked and does nothing. If he remains uncloaked for 30 seconds his presence will be revealed.

If the cloaked pilot warps however, he will be revealed in 30 seconds even while under cloak.

Stealth will have more meaning in the game and more deaths to ratting bots.

No this wouldn't really change much at all, since I'm sure organized alliances and bot programs would figure out some way to communicate the presence of friendlies in a system, and then by process of elimination easily know if a new ship entering a system was a neutral/hostile.

If you combined your ideas above with a new Chat that was Regional wide not just System wide, then it would be a real improvement. I swear I recall even Zim suggesting someplace that Local become a Regional chat. It's not my preferred option but it would be a marked improvement over what we currently have.

There's a difference between giving people a tool for something that they need occasionally and enforcing a tool that they will need to run continuously (whether they choose to or not). Unlike other MMOs, Eve runs in a single shard environment, which means, every single bit of globally frequent server queries will have be reduced to their minimum.

Simplified, the way it works now, for the dscan+local perspective, for every player in each system the client queried people available in that system, that's it, only when they pressed dscan, the client pulls out a request for space objects within that dscan scope on demand, even offgrid objects, which is not something that's queried automatically on every session changes. During a certain timespan, only a handful of clients would put such a request. Even with this kind of mechanics, CCP decided to put a 2s delay on every dscan requests.

With an automated dscan and delayed local, people will be forced to use this just to gather information which should be there in the first place, even with 5 or 10 seconds delay, imagine the increase of strain to the server would be, and remember, since (in a sense) local info is not there, people would be more likely to turn this 'feature' on.

This is also not a matter of "CCP should code it better", no. This is how client-server communication works on MMOs, it's not the issue of how big the packet size is for each instance, it's a matter of how frequent those requests are. Let's say, 40k people are online at one time, say 1/8 of them are in space, so that's 5000, imagine a quarter of them plays in nullsec and ratting, or doing missions of something, so thats 1250, imagine almost half of them are using the automated dscan, so that 620 people. For a 2s delay, you're talking about adding 310 number of pings active, each second, continously, and that's even the best scenario possible, and judging by your idea of a (sort-of) removal of local, it should be at least twice or three times that number. So yes, the server-strain argument is indeed, valid.



A good analogue, but it doesn't apply to this case. MMO packets are different than shared online documents, the biggest difference would be an extensive timeslicing on the server side caused by how frequent the packet requests are. On your analogue, it addresses the point where huge size file downloads are not necessary because of the incremental update. In MMOs, a relatively small packets are sent and received continously throughout time on the servers. The main issue is the amount of packets received, not to mention the database queries needed before the server responded. This brings out another thing that differentiate Eve and documents, it may be true, while clients can cache ship informations (hulls, character avatars, etc), we can't cache their positions and state, hence it's not as simple as sending "an update of one change".


Regardless, i'm not fully against the idea. The purpose of it, is nice, the solution offered however, imo might need another alternative. While it seemed balanced, people might view it as a complete nerf of local while not providing any incentive towards those who don't like it. This drastic of a change without any incentives rarely works. If you think the public emorage coming from the incarna expansion is bad? try removing local and see what happens.