Player Features and Ideas Discussion

it also slows down the server for you to see how long your instructions take to get to the server when its lagging

They added a UI feature showing how much the server has slowed down. The server slowing down makes sure that all actions take place when they're supposed to. We don't get situations like your guns sending cycle after cycle at the guy you killed ten minutes ago while you try to lock up someone new, or where you basically flip a coin as to weather or not you warp when you try to, or blackscreen as you jump through a gate. Reps will cycle, guns will cycle, everything else will cycle, all commands sent to the server will be completed in order, it just has to slow things down in order to actually do it.

Would you rather have TiDi, or the old 'soul crushing lag' things?

Which is totally awesome.

..at least I think so. I'm smiling, happy, and feeling like everything is right in the world. I'm also glad that Nullsec battles will actually be worked out properly now, and something besides lag and node crashes will determine the winner.

Warping 40AU with 10% TiDI is ******* awesome. Now i can go afk in a fleet without worrying to much about dying, just because dat long warp.

Then you don't really get it. There will never be a point where the servers can handle the load they will be under all the time, since that hardware will likely never exist or it's cost prohibitive to use. Meaning the problem will never just magically go away the hardware route. It also doen't just cause lag, it causes everything from minor to game breaking issues randomly to every player playing under those conditions, no matter how good their connection was. That makes the fights unenjoyable and the winner is often decided by a server made dice roll instead of actual fighting ability. Once you face that reality it becomes obvious you need an actual system to manage those situations, so that the problems aren't so severe or random and the game remains playable.

That's the beauty of the feature. It turns a random, game breaking situation, that isn't very enjoyable to anyone, to a predictable, working and much more enjoyable system for everyone. It's not just lag made a feature. It's accepting the reality of things and taking that bad situation and trying to make the best of it with what you have. It's not a perfect solution by any means, but it's still an infinitely better situation than you would have without it.

yeah but still dont change the fact that it now takes far to long to have a large fleet fight n most peeps cant afford to spend 12hrs a day playin jus for 1 fight....

Also, realistically, no battles are taking 12 hours to happen. It might take 12 hours to muster the supers, wrangle the caps and shepherd the subcaps into the right place at the right time including setting up cyno chains, moving fuel, waiting on timers etc, but the the actual fighting even at 10% TiDi is seriously unlikely to run quite that long.

Simply because of the size of the fleets involved, the things tend to splat somewhat immediately. It might start at 1000 people, but once the shooting starts (ie when TiDi really kicks in) the number of ships starts dropping pretty fast. And as the ships die, the TiDi gets less severe.

Fights can certainly take a few hours to complete, but its certainly not 12.

As an example... A big fight in 92D-OI between raiden and pals agains goons and pals... As best as I can tell there were about 2000 in system, about 550 ship kills. From first kill to penultimate kill (there was a pod killed an hour after) took from 17:29 to 20:44. This is just going from killboards, so numbers aren't perfect, but should be good enough.

Now that's a LONG fight, and certainly a big fight. But it still only took 3 and a bit hours. I'm certain that fights have been bigger and more extreme, but still... If you can have that many people in system, that many deaths and still only take 3 hours then TiDi is working exactly as intended. No disconnects, no node crashes, all the fleets involved were able to actually able to use their modules, warp, jump in and out and generally do what they would have done otherwise.

A 1 hour fight taking 3 hours isn't that bad though, and when the alternative is a fight that should last 1 hour crashing the node or black screening 50% of the participants, I'll take slow over comedy unstable.

As for the weird stuff you've been experiencing... Are you sure you aren't just misunderstanding how TiDi works ?

Do you in fact mean 'Things were moving so slowly it was like being frozen ?' because if so, that is TiDi working as intended and you don't understand how it works.

If the stuff on your screen was happening at even close to normal speed, but you couldn't do anything, thats not TiDi. That's good old fashioned lag, and that's more likely to be coming from your connection than from the server these days.