Player Features and Ideas Discussion

TIME DILATION INQUIRY

What are the plans for time dilation? Is it being developed? When will it go to the test server? What other plans are there for combating lag warfare?

It is buzz jargon introduced by CCP where time is altered slightly to allow the servers to keep up with combat. In essence, everything slows down a little; I think they mentioned between 10-15% slower. Cycle times are longer, ships move slower, missiles take longer to hit their targets, etc. It only applies to a grid if so many ships or drones enter the grid that things get laggy. Time everywhere else remains unaffected. I fully support this as a means to enable technology to handle Eve mechanics well on whatever scale the players choose to engage each other. It removes common complaints about the advantages of blobs, alpha strike, max EHP, passive shields, drones, manual module cycling, and loading grid first to name a few. What progress is CCP making on this? I think they initially announced this earlier this year so I hope to test it on the Test server about now to get it ready for Tranquility soonish.

Of course, combat in the presence of a black hole would also be quite interesting as other effects enter the equation like gravity waves distorting ship sensors (decreased range and increased lag for ships farther from the black hole than your ship) and ripping ship hulls apart (constant rate of hull damage based on distance to black hole).

But an entirely new and different concept than the one which CCP has already announced and to which I now refer. Feel free to make your own separate post on the latter concept of time dilation.

devblog on TiDi

It'll affect a whole node, rather than a grid. So it may touch other systems than the one that the massive fleet battle is in. Unless it's a reinforced node(like Jita)

It doesn't stop lag. But it allows for a more graceful slowdown, rather than some people just not updating. Fairer, really.

Should stop people having to go to killmails to find out how they died, because their screen went black ;)

I think a WOOP WOOP is in order. Although like everyone else (and probably CCP) it would be better if they didn't have to do it at all but because the players just keep loading more and more people into system its a neat solution for sure. Hopefully it will work as intended from the get go. Though it might mean that instead of doing a 3 hour op where the lag is unplayable you are told to log off and try again later, you have to sit there for 5/6 hours instead fighting in slow motion, might need to move the kettle upstairs and have a large supply of water, tea bags and milk sat on my desk...

Actually it should decrease the time it takes to finish fighting. Lags usually make it impossible to shoot targets, lock targets, move, log in or log off and so on. Slowed down time makes it all work like a clock, it just takes a little longer depending on the load. Ships will start popping all the time because you are able to lock and shoot without lagging for 20 minutes, unable to do anything. And as the fight goes on - less ships will remain and the game will speed up back to real time. So it really should speed things up considerably and maybe even return the times when it is beneficial for each wing to shoot it's own target and not the whole fleet of 600 people shooting 1 battleship :)

\o/

It looks like today's test does not involve TiDi. I guess its still not stable enough for testing. That's the problem with software bugs, you never know how long it will take to kill them.

Yep, we will. The build that is on Singularity right now is focused on client-side Carbon IO, but Time Dilation will return there hopefully later this month.