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Check out some math and numbers that make me feel dumb, and make the server feel great with CCP Prism X's new Dev Blog.

I hear this guy listens to really weird music (NSFW) which is probably indicative of his cognitive capacity. Probably not worth reading this!

I have a concern. As you point out, this system means that ajacent systems tend to share the same physical hardware.

Doesn't that massively increase the chances of spillover tidi in nullsec battles: i.e. our staging system is overloaded so every system next to it is overloaded, massively increasing the pain in the ass to leave? Or the system the fight is in is massively overloaded, causing all systems around it to be massively overloaded as well making it a giant pain in the ass to get there?

Let's take it one step further - let's say I'm an alliance with huge numbers that doesn't want to commit to fighting in some situation. I can simply go *nearby* under this model, causing massive tidi and suffering for my opponents, without ever actually engaging in a figth. Or I can bridge huge piles of reinforcements somewhere nearby, slowing down the constellation enough to buy me much more time to form, reducing or eliminating the target's ability to extract and giving me more leeway to be slow at forming.

And all this, impacting thousands of players in EVE's biggest wars, to avoid inconveniencing a few ratters on the other side of EVE every now and then. Seriously?

Ok, but that also means that by staging near my enemies and having more numbers than them, I can basically permanently annoy my enemies purely by undocking, or just having lots of people around. Or I can lag out their staging, keeping them from logging in reinforcements, purely by having dudes of my own jumping out. There's all kinds of **** I can do, while on the other side of the universe, where there's no war, whole nodes will be dedicated to supporting a dozen systems populated by 20 dudes ratting. It'll be better for those 20 dudes, and worse for the 2000 dudes who're generating the large-scale content you use to sell your game.

But I want horrible, mindless mission runners slaving away in some corner of highsec to suffer as I do through massive fleet fight lag: sharing the experience of nullsec warfare one extra slow tick at a time.

The bolded part concerns me. It makes a certain amount of sense to avoid inconveniencing the three people in some system in Solidude for reasons they don't understand, sure. However it also makes a great deal of sense when you have a cluster of systems expected to be used heavily to offload the issues caused in those systems to unused systems in buttfuck nowhere as a sort of heat sink - it seems to me that it is better to be inconveniencing three ratters in Solitude because of 1000 people in nullsec than doubly inconveniencing those 1000 people in nullsec.

I don't mean to criticize the work you've done here - this all looks extremely impressive. I'm just concerned that it's assumptions on nullsec battles are not correct and may wind up creating more inconvenience overall in certain situations.

The many systems with massive lag in one area problem is semi-solveable by simply buying more regular not-crazy-expensive servers, and thus reducing the total # of systems per server. While I hate crawling through tidi to get to a fight, well on the one hand it is fairer if everyone traveling to a fight is getting there at the same speed. Minimizing the chances of one fleet traveling without tidi while their opponents are crushed by it. And on the other hand... taking gates is for poor people anyways. Get more titans. :P

Unrelated question for Prism X:
Why is it that the Empire nodes have so much more peak traffic than the nullsec systems? Is this to compensate for the occasional extreme swings in nullsec load (huge unexpected fights) that have no highsec equivalent, or something else?

I'm gonna guess higher average population, higher traffic, higher market activity - more of everything, on average, than most nullsec systems.

afaik from the dev blog it wont work exactly as you would say. if your staging close to a hostiles staging then upon downtime when the server runs a new premapping it may identify the staging systems as load hotspots and could well at the last splitting to discrete servers decide to split your staging and the hostiles staging to different servers.

if u plan on changing alliance / coalition staging once every day after downtime then i guess you could still grief in your original way.

Prism... the pre-loader to split the cluster load runs every downtime right?