EVE General Discussion

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.

I find it amusing when people describe fights before TiDi and it sounds exactly like my experience now.

Assign drones--->watch Netflix. One of the many reasons that drone assist is so good and great is that it only takes the attention of a single person to concentrate an entire fleets drone power. Only one person has to pull the trigger so only he has to deal with tidi. The rest of the populace can alt tab, watch their shows, or deal with waifu agro.

TiDi is a great idea....if applied with back-end code fixes...

One day CCP will learn...the hard way...that they should've fixed the actual problem instead of applying a bandaid and hope things hold until the next one is applied...

Next bandaid....brain-in-the-box!!!

Pre-Tidi a big fight was 1200 people in local. Pre-tidi that crashed the node.

Current situation is 1500-4000 in local with extreme tidi plus possible node-crash.

It's always been thus. When CCP increase the capacity of a system, the player base crash the capacity with more people.

If in four years time CCP triples or quadruples the capacity, players will pile in five or six times as many.

Don't get me wrong.

I accept that there are engineering challenges getting thousands of players together playing the same game and interacting with eachother. I also accept that there should also be large battles that happen on occasion when something very important is on the line.

But when they become a regular occurrence someone needs to step back and figure out why it keeps happening and do something to make strategies that don't involve generating an insane amount of processing power more effective.

Been in 0.0 lately?
Try undocking 100 people at the same time, massive tidi, something that didn't used to be a problem. Run 100 man gang thru some gates to a fight and watch the tidi build with each jump.
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. Jita used to handle 2700, they lowered it to 2k, same reason.

Tidi is also not the great balancer that CCP would have you believe either.
I had two alts in that Black legion Super welp, the one in a Dread could not cycle the siege module for the entire fight. My other character in a subcap ran slow, but all the modules actually cycled, at the expected time based on the tidi.

Tidi is a temporary fix, the problem is, at the pace CCP works, that could be years before they come up with something better.

In order to be involved with Sov warfare now, you must have no life, because any fight could turn into a 10 hour yawn fest

Problem isn't tidi, Its the drone clouds.

Beehive domi were nerfed for this very reason all those years ago.

Make it so you can only asign drones to a squad member. That should help

Perhaps but 4000 drones cant help one would think.