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Battling the Blob...
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HELLBOUNDMAN
Aliastra
Gallente Federation
#41 - 2012-02-17 15:13:28 UTC
Meditril wrote:
Blobs can only be make inefficient if you introduce the "Line of Sight" concept. For example, modules should deactivate if there is any ship in between of the firing ship and the target. This would automatically make it harder for large blobs to focus all of its fire on one target. This would result in large blobs splitting up into smaller chunks which is exactly what we need. (This would also allow to protect ships by putting your own ship into the line of fire, which would be a great enrichment to EVE.)

Unfortunatelly, from the programming perspective I would expect that an implementation of "Line of Sight" concept is very expensive with regards to CPU need... but I would be happy if someone can prove me wrong on this.


Line of site will not happen in Eve until computers are much more powerful than they are now.
Line of site in Eve isn't like first person shooters. Writing the coding for line of site would be a massive task, not to mention it would probably double the sever load if not much worse. Not having a large fleet would have nothing to do with line of site at this point, and more to do with trying not to crash the server
killorbekilled TBE
The Scope
Gallente Federation
#42 - 2012-02-17 19:45:03 UTC  |  Edited by: killorbekilled TBE
ill be honest i read the op and skipped to the last page just wanted to add my constructive 10 pence

one way to reduce blob fleets is to limit the amount of people allowed in one fleet

this would force fleets to either make do with there numbers in there already maxed out fleet or create a second fleet and a third and a fourth until everyone in there corp / alliance or coalition is in a fleet

this could give rise to true wings and / or squadrons of various types of dedicated ship classes

the bottom line is that the whole blob will be chopped down into smaller( 'flubbers' <---- new eve word) more manageable clusters of ships like waves if you like lols

the capacity of fleets could vary on loads of different things bigger ships could take up more room in the fleet than smaller ones perhaps like how the allince tournament is structured some sort of hidden points system

should relay put this into a new post but meh

:)
HELLBOUNDMAN
Aliastra
Gallente Federation
#43 - 2012-02-17 20:47:16 UTC  |  Edited by: HELLBOUNDMAN
killorbekilled TBE wrote:

the capacity of fleets could vary on loads of different things bigger ships could take up more room in the fleet than smaller ones perhaps like how the allince tournament is structured some sort of hidden points system


Actually, I kinda like this portion of it.

Ship size dictates the amount of slots the ship takes up in a squad/wing/fleet.

Currenty, you can have 10 members per squad, 5 squads per wing, and 5 wings per fleet giving us a total of 250 possible people to be in a single fleet...HAHAHA!!!!

Now, lets dictate this by ship size.

frigs use 1 slot, so you can have 250 frigs.
Cruisers take up 2 slots, so 125
Battleships and strategic cruisers take 5 slots, so 50 per fleet
Carriers and dread take 8, so 31
and super carriers and titans take 10, so 25.

This would not only help restrict mass blobs of more powerful ships, but would also cut down on capital blobs.

Sure, they could simply find loop holes to allow more than one fleet to work together, such as one guy warping with one fleet, then jumping ship to another fleet in order for them to warp to him, but hey, if you wanna have that many people in the fight, then you're gonna have to coordinate it a little better than 249 carriers warping in on the scout ship.

So, instead of considering it members per squad, wing, or fleet, it would be considered Command Points, and Each ship size would have a designated Command Point requirement.
If you really wanted to get complicated with it, then you could narrow it down by tech level, faction, pirate, and/or effectiveness in pvp, but that's probably a little too far....
Danika Princip
GoonWaffe
Goonswarm Federation
#44 - 2012-02-17 22:08:38 UTC
Meditril wrote:
Blobs can only be make inefficient if you introduce the "Line of Sight" concept. For example, modules should deactivate if there is any ship in between of the firing ship and the target. This would automatically make it harder for large blobs to focus all of its fire on one target. This would result in large blobs splitting up into smaller chunks which is exactly what we need. (This would also allow to protect ships by putting your own ship into the line of fire, which would be a great enrichment to EVE.)

Unfortunatelly, from the programming perspective I would expect that an implementation of "Line of Sight" concept is very expensive with regards to CPU need... but I would be happy if someone can prove me wrong on this.


LOS would make structure shoots in subcaps near impossible.



killorbekilled TBE wrote:
ill be honest i read the op and skipped to the last page just wanted to add my constructive 10 pence

one way to reduce blob fleets is to limit the amount of people allowed in one fleet

this would force fleets to either make do with there numbers in there already maxed out fleet or create a second fleet and a third and a fourth until everyone in there corp / alliance or coalition is in a fleet

this could give rise to true wings and / or squadrons of various types of dedicated ship classes

the bottom line is that the whole blob will be chopped down into smaller( 'flubbers' <---- new eve word) more manageable clusters of ships like waves if you like lols

the capacity of fleets could vary on loads of different things bigger ships could take up more room in the fleet than smaller ones perhaps like how the allince tournament is structured some sort of hidden points system

should relay put this into a new post but meh


You know the big coalitions already bring more than one fleet at a time, right? This would solve absolutely nothing, except making it slightly more of a pain to do strategic things. Shared voicecomms, people in fleets 2-5 to rebroadcast the targets the FC calls. I suppose you'd have to be careful about where your logistics ended up, but that would be about the biggest challenge.

It's been said before, dozens of times. the best way to 'break up the blob' is NOT to make the game less fun. The best way to do it is to remove the need to blob. Ever shot a station in battleships? It takes FOREVER. less massive EHP blobs means less BS blobs are needed. (Of course, there will still be blob fights, and they can be quite good fun. I doubt you'll ever stop the 800 on 800 fleet fights.)
Simi Kusoni
HelloKittyFanclub
#45 - 2012-02-17 22:18:59 UTC
Danika Princip wrote:
It's been said before, dozens of times. the best way to 'break up the blob' is NOT to make the game less fun. The best way to do it is to remove the need to blob. Ever shot a station in battleships? It takes FOREVER. less massive EHP blobs means less BS blobs are needed. (Of course, there will still be blob fights, and they can be quite good fun. I doubt you'll ever stop the 800 on 800 fleet fights.)

This <3

As it stands small fleets won't even go out, got less than 200 battleships? Screw that, we'll leave it till next time. Having said that, lowering the EHP too much means you could ninja reinforce stuff with a couple of supers. Jump in, launch bombers while aligning to safe, kill structure recall drones and warp to safe to cloak up.

[center]"I don't troll, I just give overly blunt responses that annoy people who are wrong but don't want to admit it. It's not my fault that people have sensitive feelings"  -MXZF[/center]
Ares Renton
Deep Core Mining Inc.
Caldari State
#46 - 2012-02-17 22:51:59 UTC  |  Edited by: Ares Renton
Possible Anti-Blob mechanics:

Occlusion: Any collidable object (including friendly ships) that are between a ship and its target will be hit by weapon fire instead of the target. This way, pilots are required to form formations to be able to apply damage in large fleets. Until they get into formation, only the edge of the blob can attack, which gives the blob's opponents time to react (call in reinforcements or escape). This has the side effect of making it so that more mobile fleets require a greater deal of coordination to destroy as they attempt to maneuver into the blob's blind spots.

Diminished Targeting AKA "Noise": Any ship that is targeted takes longer to be targeted by different entities. (Say a stacking multiplier of 1.1). This means that if the fleet commander suddenly declares a primary, the blob will lock on at different times, causing the damage to trickle in, allowing the primary time to react.

Diminished Tracking AKA "Smoke": Any ship that is being actively fired upon is harder to hit by other entities. This means that the fleet will need to be divided into various divisions with different targets.

Overall, it's pretty much a given that more numbers = more victories; but I think that these changes would make the blob require more tactical thought, and thus make the game more interesting. No?
Simi Kusoni
HelloKittyFanclub
#47 - 2012-02-17 22:54:27 UTC
Ares Renton wrote:
Possible Anti-Blob mechanics:

Occlusion: Any collidable object (including friendly ships) that are between a ship and its target will be hit by weapon fire instead of the target. This way, pilots are required to form formations to be able to apply damage in large fleets. Until they get into formation, only the edge of the blob can attack, which gives the blob's opponents time to react (call in reinforcements or escape). This has the side effect of making it so that more mobile fleets require a greater deal of coordination to destroy as they attempt to maneuver into the blob's blind spots.

Diminished Targeting "Noise": Any ship that is targeted takes longer to be targeted by different entities. (Say a stacking multiplier of 1.1). This means that if the fleet commander suddenly declares a primary, the blob will lock on at different times, causing the damage to trickle in, allowing the primary time to react.

Diminished Tracking "Smoke": Any ship that is being actively fired upon is harder to hit by other entities. This means that the fleet will need to be divided into various divisions with different targets.

Overall, it's pretty much a given that more numbers = more victories; but I think that these changes would make the blob require more tactical thought, and thus make the game more interesting. No?

These have all been suggested before, all have some pretty damning flaws and you should read through thread or use search function to read about them.

[center]"I don't troll, I just give overly blunt responses that annoy people who are wrong but don't want to admit it. It's not my fault that people have sensitive feelings"  -MXZF[/center]
Ares Renton
Deep Core Mining Inc.
Caldari State
#48 - 2012-02-17 23:00:08 UTC
Simi Kusoni wrote:



These have all been suggested before, all have some pretty damning flaws and you should read through thread or use search function to read about them.


Well you'll have to tell me what keywords to look for.

I really can't think of these "damning flaws" that can't be fixed with the same brush.
HELLBOUNDMAN
Aliastra
Gallente Federation
#49 - 2012-02-17 23:15:00 UTC
Ares Renton wrote:
Possible Anti-Blob mechanics:

Occlusion: Any collidable object (including friendly ships) that are between a ship and its target will be hit by weapon fire instead of the target. This way, pilots are required to form formations to be able to apply damage in large fleets. Until they get into formation, only the edge of the blob can attack, which gives the blob's opponents time to react (call in reinforcements or escape). This has the side effect of making it so that more mobile fleets require a greater deal of coordination to destroy as they attempt to maneuver into the blob's blind spots.


myself wrote:
Line of site will not happen in Eve until computers are much more powerful than they are now.
Line of site in Eve isn't like first person shooters. Writing the coding for line of site would be a massive task, not to mention it would probably double the sever load if not much worse. Not having a large fleet would have nothing to do with line of site at this point, and more to do with trying not to crash the server
Simi Kusoni
HelloKittyFanclub
#50 - 2012-02-17 23:16:58 UTC
Ares Renton wrote:
Well you'll have to tell me what keywords to look for.

I really can't think of these "damning flaws" that can't be fixed with the same brush.

You could start by scrolling up and reading the posts above yours, but since you asked:

Ares Renton wrote:
Occlusion: Any collidable object (including friendly ships) that are between a ship and its target will be hit by weapon fire instead of the target. This way, pilots are required to form formations to be able to apply damage in large fleets. Until they get into formation, only the edge of the blob can attack, which gives the blob's opponents time to react (call in reinforcements or escape). This has the side effect of making it so that more mobile fleets require a greater deal of coordination to destroy as they attempt to maneuver into the blob's blind spots.

Diminished Targeting AKA "Noise": Any ship that is targeted takes longer to be targeted by different entities. (Say a stacking multiplier of 1.1). This means that if the fleet commander suddenly declares a primary, the blob will lock on at different times, causing the damage to trickle in, allowing the primary time to react.

Diminished Tracking AKA "Smoke": Any ship that is being actively fired upon is harder to hit by other entities. This means that the fleet will need to be divided into various divisions with different targets.

1) Makes shooting structures near impossible for sub-cap fleets. Also effects other areas of gameplay, running a complex with a large number of NPCs would be hell with LOS enabled. Or gatecamping, or anything else really. It's just messy and annoying.

2) Get your fleet to tactically target all your logi and FC, now the blob has invincible logistics/FC.

3) Doesn't effect alpha fleets, all this does is make alpha fleets the new FoTM. Plus, it's just going to make calculating missile damage even messier.

There are loads more example, try using the key words "anti-blob" etc. Or actually read through this thread.

[center]"I don't troll, I just give overly blunt responses that annoy people who are wrong but don't want to admit it. It's not my fault that people have sensitive feelings"  -MXZF[/center]
Ares Renton
Deep Core Mining Inc.
Caldari State
#51 - 2012-02-17 23:31:49 UTC  |  Edited by: Ares Renton
HELLBOUNDMAN wrote:
Ares Renton wrote:
Possible Anti-Blob mechanics:

Occlusion: Any collidable object (including friendly ships) that are between a ship and its target will be hit by weapon fire instead of the target. This way, pilots are required to form formations to be able to apply damage in large fleets. Until they get into formation, only the edge of the blob can attack, which gives the blob's opponents time to react (call in reinforcements or escape). This has the side effect of making it so that more mobile fleets require a greater deal of coordination to destroy as they attempt to maneuver into the blob's blind spots.


myself wrote:
Line of site will not happen in Eve until computers are much more powerful than they are now.
Line of site in Eve isn't like first person shooters. Writing the coding for line of site would be a massive task, not to mention it would probably double the sever load if not much worse. Not having a large fleet would have nothing to do with line of site at this point, and more to do with trying not to crash the server


I'm a programmer and this is complete bullocks.

All the code needs to check is whether or not there are collidable objects along the hypotenuse between my xyz coordinates and my enemy's xyz coordinates and if so, which one is closest. (Just give each object a roughly spherical hit box that fits inside the ship graphic, doesn't need to be too precise). The game already does dozens of calculations more complex than this, per player, per second spent in combat.

....

1) Why does this make shooting structures impossible? Surround it in a sphere and click fire button. As for whether it's fun or not, that's not what's in question here.

2) Unless you have the same diminishing returns on repair ships.

3) Alpha fleets have counters.
HELLBOUNDMAN
Aliastra
Gallente Federation
#52 - 2012-02-17 23:40:04 UTC
Ares Renton wrote:

I'm a programmer and this is complete bullocks.

All the code needs to check is whether or not there are collidable objects along the hypotenuse between my xyz coordinates and my enemy's xyz coordinates and if so, which one is closest. The game already does dozens of calculations more complex than this, per player, per second spent in combat.


Well, then apparently CCP is doing something wrong because missiles alone cause server lag, and i'd think they're easier to work with in reguards to computing power than determining where every ship is at, at all times in relation to your position and your target's position.

Not to mention that occlution would cause missile boats to be even less used in pvp because you would want to use something that would hit instantly, or else someone might accidentally cross the path of your already fired missile.

Also, don't forget that occlusion would basically kill off other ships such as interceptors which typically require fast, close range orbit of their target ship. So you'd be getting in the way all the time.

Speed would be more your enemy than your friend, so attempting to build a speed tank ship while in a fleet would be redundant because every time you move, you'd be hurting your fleet. So it would be all about sitting still and making sure you don't block a friendly from their target, or block logistics from friendlies.

It would be a massive nightmare on programming, server load, fleet composition, fleet positioning, and fleet tactics.
Ares Renton
Deep Core Mining Inc.
Caldari State
#53 - 2012-02-17 23:54:24 UTC  |  Edited by: Ares Renton
HELLBOUNDMAN wrote:
Ares Renton wrote:

I'm a programmer and this is complete bullocks.

All the code needs to check is whether or not there are collidable objects along the hypotenuse between my xyz coordinates and my enemy's xyz coordinates and if so, which one is closest. The game already does dozens of calculations more complex than this, per player, per second spent in combat.


Well, then apparently CCP is doing something wrong because missiles alone cause server lag, and i'd think they're easier to work with in reguards to computing power than determining where every ship is at, at all times in relation to your position and your target's position.

Not to mention that occlution would cause missile boats to be even less used in pvp because you would want to use something that would hit instantly, or else someone might accidentally cross the path of your already fired missile.

Also, don't forget that occlusion would basically kill off other ships such as interceptors which typically require fast, close range orbit of their target ship. So you'd be getting in the way all the time.

Speed would be more your enemy than your friend, so attempting to build a speed tank ship while in a fleet would be redundant because every time you move, you'd be hurting your fleet. So it would be all about sitting still and making sure you don't block a friendly from their target, or block logistics from friendlies.

It would be a massive nightmare on programming, server load, fleet composition, fleet positioning, and fleet tactics.


Of course it would make huge blobs unwieldy. That's the whole purpose. Huge armies are unwieldy in real life. Maybe people won't use blobs as much and we won't get into these 400 vs 400 battles that crash servers.

But anyways, it was just an idea, I'm sure I can go on defending it, but it's never going to happen anyways.

P.S. Though I just wanted to point one thing out: The game already tracks your position; and the position of every player in the game. And your position to them in real time (transversal). If the CCP computers are such bricks they can't handle a 3d environment, they shouldn't have made a 3d game.
Simi Kusoni
HelloKittyFanclub
#54 - 2012-02-17 23:56:49 UTC
Ares Renton wrote:
3) Alpha fleets have counters.

Wait, so you're complaining about blobs, and now saying a blob has a counter? Yee gads.

[center]"I don't troll, I just give overly blunt responses that annoy people who are wrong but don't want to admit it. It's not my fault that people have sensitive feelings"  -MXZF[/center]
Simi Kusoni
HelloKittyFanclub
#55 - 2012-02-17 23:58:44 UTC  |  Edited by: Simi Kusoni
Ares Renton wrote:
P.S. Though I just wanted to point one thing out: The game already tracks your position; and the position of every player in the game. And your position to them in real time (transversal). If the CCP computers are such bricks they can't handle a 3d environment, they shouldn't have made a 3d game.

Transversal is calculated client side, LOS would have to be done server side.

Scratch that, just realized they need it to calculate tracking. Bleh Lol

[center]"I don't troll, I just give overly blunt responses that annoy people who are wrong but don't want to admit it. It's not my fault that people have sensitive feelings"  -MXZF[/center]
Ares Renton
Deep Core Mining Inc.
Caldari State
#56 - 2012-02-18 00:01:03 UTC  |  Edited by: Ares Renton
Simi Kusoni wrote:
Ares Renton wrote:
3) Alpha fleets have counters.

Wait, so you're complaining about blobs, and now saying a blob has a counter? Yee gads.


I never complained about anything. I was giving suggestions.

3) Alpha blobs besides will be just as nerfed as everything else, as they'll have the same stacking penalties. First 10 guys fire, everyone after that misses. If the target's not dead, he's just flat out not going to die. A high-DPS blob at least has the chance to wear him down.

P.S. But as I said, I don't care about these ideas either way. Just brainstorming aloud.
Amaroq Dricaldari
Ministry of War
Amarr Empire
#57 - 2012-02-20 03:24:22 UTC
This game has been missing a Line-of-Sight system for a long time.

Now I don't want to make anyone upset, but alot of good ideas on these forums are put down because the server would never be able to handle it, and anything involving Line-of-Sight could very easily end up on that list.

This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Simi Kusoni
HelloKittyFanclub
#58 - 2012-02-20 03:51:12 UTC
Amaroq Dricaldari wrote:
This game has been missing a Line-of-Sight system for a long time.

Now I don't want to make anyone upset, but alot of good ideas on these forums are put down because the server would never be able to handle it, and anything involving Line-of-Sight could very easily end up on that list.

To be fair, with line of site it isn't just about server load. It's also just a very annoying mechanic for a game like Eve.

LoS has the potential to make PvE very, very tedious for example.

[center]"I don't troll, I just give overly blunt responses that annoy people who are wrong but don't want to admit it. It's not my fault that people have sensitive feelings"  -MXZF[/center]
hmskrecik
TransMine Group
Gluten Free Cartel
#59 - 2012-02-20 07:13:14 UTC
Ares Renton wrote:
All the code needs to check is whether or not there are collidable objects along the hypotenuse between my xyz coordinates and my enemy's xyz coordinates and if so, which one is closest. (Just give each object a roughly spherical hit box that fits inside the ship graphic, doesn't need to be too precise). The game already does dozens of calculations more complex than this, per player, per second spent in combat.

It would nicely fit into existing game mechanics if this spherical hit box had size of ship's sig radius.

The whole idea is almost good. Almost.

At simplest logic level, if EVE servers already have trouble handling load of big fights, how do you expect to improve the situation by increasing complexity of calculations? "If the blob grows too big the node will crash" Well, that's what I would call natural selection but is it what you actually want to have?

And this complexity added is not small. We're talking about O(n*m) for starters. (n - number of shooters, m - number of all shootable objects on the grid).
hmskrecik
TransMine Group
Gluten Free Cartel
#60 - 2012-02-20 07:17:13 UTC
Simi Kusoni wrote:
LoS has the potential to make PvE very, very tedious for example.


Unless we had proper manual ship flying which, let's be honest, would make quite different game. Though it's not that I wouldn't like it.