Player Features and Ideas Discussion

As far a I know the server tick has always been the standard mechanism in Eve to synchronize commands that drive the actions of our pilots, but isn't it about time that the game change and adjust to be more fluid? Sure the game has expanded and the graphics have improved but in 15 years since deployment CPU power and networking speeds have vastly improved. Shouldn't this mean that the server tick could be decreased as well and changed from a full second to 1/2 second or even 1/4 second in order to allow more instantaneous reaction for our pilots?

Is this doable or Would the server load really be that awful?
Or would this cause balance issues due to being extra responsive to those who live close to the server, with latency issues still being an issue for those who live far from the server?

I think it would be a real improvement if the server calculation ticks could be decreased, but it would be a real shame if such advancement was merely be held back due to non-technical reasons.

What do you all think?

Or ... would it even out the server load.
Is the server having to calculate all incoming processes within each tiny moment a tick rolls over each second?

Yes overall load would be higher because the server would have to be listening for processes to come through more often but would this actually allow it to level off the calculation load within that second into multiple chunks, thus easing the calculation pressure?

It is however quite possible, and perhaps even likely that measures have been taken to pre-calculate processes before responding to them on the server tick, which would make my above theory wrong, but if not then it may be possible that a decrease in the server tick could actually improve performance, so don't completely discount the possibility.

If it came to that you could always add the shift in server ticks back to 1 second as the first level of tidi. Not everyone lives in a large fleet though and I think improving responsiveness for the players in the vast majority of their game play could really improve the game experience.

The real question though is: If it is or becomes technically possible and practical to reduce the server ticks would you want it and do you think it would improve the game?

Fixed that for you.

But in all seriousness, CCP literally can't do this even if they wanted to because of L E G A C Y C O D E

Half second ticks are a terrible idea. To hell with the hardware and the costs CCP may need to incur to make it happen all I care about are those of us that live in out lying areas where we are just barely into the DSL (good day maybe 256kbps raw connect speed) era and fiber optics is a dream that will never come true. Not to mention that our ping times are routinely 4 times that of players that live just a few miles closer to town and ping delays of more than 10 times what they get are not uncommon. All of this means that it is not unusual for us to be playing with the functional equivalent of a 2 second tick, with your proposed change we would be playing against the functional equivalent of a 4 second tick in today's game. We have figured out ways to deal with the 2 second delay in most cases, if that were doubled again we would have trouble even running the high end PvE content and all forms of PvP would be a one way suicide missions.

Yes I am being EXTREMELY selfish, we have played this game a very long time, we continue to play this game because it is one of the few we can still play on a reasonably competitive level against the rest of the world and now you want CCP to change that.
Well pardon me but take your crappy idea and stuff it somewhere.

Last o saw a dev chime in on this they said the 1 second server tick is integrated in so many pieces of code all over the game you'd be talking about rewriting the whole game pretty much.

If it was possible to do so with zero impact on any part of the game, then sure.

The technology for that simply does not exist yet, however.

(Also, tidi kicking in at 250 in system is not 'big fleet'. That's 'tuesday afternoon in the staging system'.)

It really would not be of any benefit to a game like EVE, something like a twitch reaction game maybe, but for EVE it would not positively improve the visual or game fluidity in any way, (that would come from improving your system) and it would in fact have significant performance implications, and undo most of the hardware upgrade work that has been done recently. We are still a LONG way away from removing the delays and load points. And they would need to be dealt with and another few generations of hardware implemented before we reach that point, and It still would provide no benefits the game would need to be written with a totally different architecture to benefit from a reduced "tick". When the world has universal 1gb internet, then its maybe worth having a development meeting, with quantum computers and advanced AI taking the minutes.

That is not strictly true, It WOULD make it easier to gank travel fit interceptors, but thats hardly worth degrading the rest of EVE for.

One second server ticks are the death of pvp pilots all across New Eden. Particularly frigate pilots. Although I'm sure it allows people to escape being tackled at times as well.

It's terrible how sluggish and unresponsive the game is in general, but I hear there's nothing to be done about it... and it's still an epic game.