In-Game Events and Gatherings

My own thoughts on the Event.

5,000 players in Nisuwa showed up to explode a rare Revenant Super-Carrier under increasingly difficult conditions. Were you there? What was your experience like? I'm starting this thread because Erlendur made me do eet.

Was this a CCP server test? Or was this a great time had by all?

Feedback, opinions, experiences, let 'em fly.

For background then first reading https://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/what-a-hed-ache/ where CCP Veritas provided a comparison on the fight in HED-GP in Jan this year with the fight in 6VDT-H in Jul 2013 is very helpful. It establishes the terminology we use internally at CCP and a basis for a comparison to Nisuwa. The technical part at the end of https://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/the-battle-of-asakai-and-poinen-must-burn-by-the-numbers/ by CCP Masterplan is also relevant because like Asakai then Nisuwa happened in empire and not in 0.0.

All done reading? Excellent, let's continue.

Let's start with that whether a solarsystem is reinforced or not doesn't change the general progression of load and ultimately lag (when the load becomes too much), it only changes the scale at which it happens. The same applies to whether an event is in 0.0 or empire, it just changes the scale. The best-case scenario is reinforced in 0.0, worst-case is not reinforced in empire.

This event was in a reinforced node, the solarsystem was hosted next to Jita, so it was the best hardware experience; but it was in empire so Crime Watch was a part of load, monitoring the fight and calculating security status (but not dispatching CONCORD). For details on Crime Watch, please see the Asakai devblog. (We also saw load in other parts of the cluster, i.e., on other nodes than where Nisuwa was hosted, e.g., the Bounty Service spiked to 100% CPU load for a while during the fight.)

In terms of load there are 3 stages: Controlled CPU, 100% CPU but controlled Time Dilation, 100% CPU and 10% Time Dilation and Dogma Lateness setting in (see the HED-GP devblog for details on these terms).

Looking at the numbers this morning then the Dogma Lateness of Nisuwa (at 4920 pilots) was somewhat similar to HED-GP (at 4000 pilots)*. When we add the fact what Crime Watch was running in Nisuwa (empire) but not HED-GP (0.0) then performance per pilot was much better in Nisuwa than HED-GP. The end result was probably similar since there were approx. 25% more pilots in Nisuwa.

* These population numbers are from population recording at 20 minute intervals, we've yet to establish what the second-by-second peak was for Nisuwa.

Excellent, and I have read those reports believe it or not. So this begs the question, what are our options? Given the technical limitations on server load and the increasing amount of reporting needing to be done, crime-watch, drones, etc., what are legitimate options for massive fleet battles or events?

Is it time to consider a hard limit on per system player numbers? What else can be done?

PS: I'm no fan of limits and I would never recommend them. Perhaps this is just one of those things that has no real answer. At least, not yet. 5,000 ships, each with their own modules, guns, drones, effects, sec status, etc, etc. There is only so much computing power available.

Hard population cap is not the answer; that will become a tactic where the cap will be used to lock people out and avoid a fight.

In terms of answers:

1. More servers :) Just this week we were preparing RFPs for new hardware, to replace TQ.
2. Team Gridlock is continuing on rewriting Dogma and on the Brain-in-a-Box project. There are also other things on the table such as drone-swarms where all drones act in a swarm like one drone, this would be similar to the grouped gun system. Given the O(n^2) nature of drones this would significantly reduce load in certain scenarios.
3. The last part is more tricky and the one we would appreciate feedback: How can we spread large fights over multiple systems in such a manner that it's fun for everyone involved? Some sort of a simultaneous mega-objective across multiple systems but only when there are many involved so you could still have single-system fights depending on man-power (we don't want to require people to always have 3000+ pilot fleets). This happened in B-R since there were fights in the staging systems and Titans and fleets were intercepted en route to B-R.

I'm sure it's all very impressive technically, but as a playing experience it's fairly horrible. Not trying to moan about this, that's just my genuine opinion. When you have 5 minutes before the game responds to a warp command, and modules start doing random buggy things, that's way beyond any sort of reasonable limit.

CCP Explorer's suggestion above of spreading fleet/alliance/coalitition objectives across multiple systems simultaneously seems to be the inevitable answer for sov warfare setups, if there's a basic limit of how much MHz of processing power can be applied per system.

Kill mail, token "achievement item" (example Revenant scrap metal delivered to everyone who was in system at time of kill)

OR Skill points award for everyone in system, for wasting 5 hours of our lifes we aren't getting back...

Combined wasted time, for this event, 1041 Days. or 2.8 Years...


gg



;)

Don't act like teenagers about this, ye knew exactly what ye were infor.

Personally I had an awesome/awful(in equal measure) experience.

Cool event , glad I got to take a shot at the ship.
I Hate tidi and despise that modules cease working, in all honesty I could put up with it if I knew my modules would work, that said , good job to ccp for shoveling hamsters into the machine like they did and kept the node running, seriously o7.

I'm not going to demand the killmail, but I would certainly like to hear something about it from ccp.

1) thought the same thing

2)to restrictive, carriers would lose way to much functionality

Bringing up good points here & the criticism is founded. However, the Tidi was to be expedted, just not this bad I'd think. Carrier kill events have been part of eve's entertainment for a while now (check the ingame event forum, usually has one lying around)

The high number of attendees was a big surprise however, albeit the fact it would be a revenant kill event & it being backed by CCP probably did contribute to people flocking like it like bees to honey.

Published a report on it: Revenant supercarrier destroyed as promotional stunt by Eve-Bet

I did add your blogpost on the Tidi as one of the informative links Rixx Javix, hope you don't mind.

No on both, because if we did that then Time Dilation stops being a method to mitigate/spread load and instead becomes a game mechanic.