EVE General Discussion

Roaming gangs and 50+dudes fleets are so more interesting, fun rewarding and instructive, plus 99.9% of those you can actually play in "normal" conditions.

Some people here are not making the difference in between "TiDi made it possible" which is an absolute truth, and how fun such fight is under these conditions.
Not being able to do anything or stay stuck in some warp tunnel for 20min instead of black screen is awesome for the editor to keep players log in, which is a nice addition, for me as player I have no interest on sitting at the desk and watch a never ending warp tunnel for 20min to listen dudes blahblahing tons of crap jokes about jews germans and whatnot stupidity while waiting grid to load.
Playing 20min of any other game will bring me more fun doing things than looking at a screen where nothing happens or everything happens with such delay, it's a waste of my time.

You hit on one of my pet peeves. I hate that too. I've been in huge fleet flights pre and post TiDi and I've enjoyed them for the most part. My 1st Day in Raiden i found myself in a low sec battle and got my name on 70+ killmails (2 solo kills, top damage or final blow on 6 or 7 others).

I know people who play other games , they come to work and ask me why I play EVE Online "when it's so unfun". So I explain (the bloody obvious) that what's fun for me and what's fun for them are different things. Then I get IN EVE and have gotten the same things from actual EVE players (ie "why are you doing so much ratting, aren't you rich by now?", or "don't you get tired of exploring, come kill real people with me" lol).

Frankly, it's a bit annoying that some people can't grasp the idea that fun subjective.

How dare you tell people fun is not coming out of a cookie cutter in pre-defined shape/form.

Cookies are fun.

No fun for you!

Probably the best we can legitimately say is a 4000+ player battle would be more fun in normal time than it is in major TiDi. Clearly it'd be no mean feat to implement, of course, but perhaps someday...

Yes, that's what we said about 1500 man battles in the past.

Soon, it will be wow, we had 6000 people in soul-crushing TiDi, can't we do better?

At some point, you can't really crank the clock speed higher and the IPC progress is getting limited. Most hardware manufacturer are not pushing all that hard into single thread performance because they know most really intensive task are gettign the multi-thread treatement now.

Maybe a hand made rig OC'd to ridiculous level could serve as a super node. Would have high risk of crash tho and thats assuming it's even possible top pull off.

I have wondered whether a fleet operation ASIC would be possible, though again the cost-benefit ratio might be too high. But, I'm a math guy, not a hardware engineer.

The problem isn't in the hardware, it's in the software design. In theory you could do it with pretty low latency because the rules aren't all that hard to understand. Your simple "physics" could be done on a single GPU with DirectCompute pretty easily. Your client can easily handle 10,000 entities moving around in space (look at particle sims, they can do way many more than that). You don't need low latency for things like local text chat, skill checks and all that kind of stuff. I'm not sure where the bottleneck is. I expect its in thread locks and stuff like that. Also, Python... good idea at the time but probably not the right tool for the job.

It's doable. It's just a question of opportunity cost, moving the code base from here to there. It would be better to throw the whole lot out and start again in my view. Being a software developer I know what software developers are like. I guarantee you someone at CCP has thought about the problem and knows how he'd do it.

In the meantime, you're going to need to spend a larger amount of heat for smaller and smaller gains, as scale isn't going to be linear with CPUs.