Live Events Discussion

Oh, I thought it would be a good smaller scale live event just for a short period? I didn't mean it to be a new game feature.Just a few smaller live events than one Big one that was vulnerable to difficulties.
But fair enough, I can see your point that it is probably best to hold thoughts for new improvements to live events until after the Official response.

Regarding other point, Yes changing the Original title is not such a good idea. didn't notice it had changed.

I had suggested in an earlier comment, that you allow (a certain trusted few) of us players, access to some of the tools. I do not wish to make assumptions as to what the capabilities are with the tools, but, with responsible limitations as to how we can use the tools, I know we can help, if not enhance the live events that you plan for the future.

Quite simply, what I had suggested earlier, was that I understand that the theme of Eve is to focus more on the sandbox nature. The suggestion was/is to give the (responsible) players some of the tools to do so. I can guarantee that many volunteers will come to the plate to enhance our game (without getting paid). I hope this is taken into consideration. Thank you, CCP Goliath, for taking the time with going through all of this.

NPC behaviour and AI has to all be handled server-side, and most selection algorithms I've seen scale poorly as the number of available targets goes up. Realistically you'd want them to do a standings-lookup to check who's friendly with who, but even tracking something like biggest-healer or most-dps or the like tends to be an O(n^2) operation, or at least O(n logn). In other words, every additional player on-grid with the NPC creates an exponential or near-exponential load increase. Given that the AI behaviour is only runningon one thread while the server's handling everything else, and given the results we saw from tidi and the like... spawning NPCs for combats that can involve thousands simply isn't viable.

Just a guess, of course. Maybe it's all running on a static grid instead with near-constant lookup! I doubt that, but I think this is what's going on.

You're assuming the NPCs on grid are doing a linear or dichotomic search on all present comparing DPS and healing, but that's not necessary - threat tables are an old concept in games and provide with a O(n) or even O(1) access depending on the implementation, while giving a O(n) increase in time spent when generating threat - granted it increases the memory footprint, but it allows for threat management as well (that NPC favors healer-threat over DPS threat, that other one the other way around; this "ability" generates more threat, the other doesn't at all...). O(n*2) is still a lot better than O(n^2) :P



Is this confirmed information are you assuming?



I can understand that spawning new NPC can be costly - as you need to create instances, update action lists, occupy space thus ensure it's unoccupied (I've found this to be a challenge in my dev, tho there are strategies), send updates to all clients... If I'm allowed a wild guess, I'd say it's the act of spawning them that tends to be the problem more than the act of "acting" them - if you think about it, with 20-25 missioners in a system you're already probably approaching a 1000 NPCs or more; but they don't all spawn at the same time.
But of course, your guess is as valid as mine.

I doubt AI operates on algos so inefficient that simply finding a target per each rat scales THAT poorly with number of targets. Incursion rats and Sleepers come to mind. Although, to be frank, the AI is reportedly really old so it wouldn't surprise me to see a n^2 or worse target seek. It'd kind of be like inviting people to come and cause server trouble by stacking 300 people into an anomaly to see what happens.

(Hm, if we were to assume they did program them to run say, sorts basing on damage dealt and then picking highest with sort working best for small n then I'd see the case. That said, I don't think they'd go that far given incursion AI is also coded to work wtih null and low incursions - and those might by design require more manpower than hisec ones. Those things said, given the recent preference of rats to go after "similarily" sized targets it may be some sort of sort-by-signature with range select per rat, weighted to include things like reps or ewar rather than simple threat system of most-dps-on-field.)

Navigation sounds like a potential issue though - even though collisions are simplified (boundary spheres) in EVE, AI would probably need to generate at least a simple navmesh to avoid bouncing off objects. Given plexes/missions are always pre-scripted and always contain collidables in the same space, nav data may actually not be generated when rats spawn but simply loaded from an earlier dump.

In case of spawning mass amount of rats on the battlefield with an unmapped structure? It could get funky. Ah well, I guess CCP should release a Devblog on the "why" of spawning things this way! You've awakened our inner nerdbeast Goliath, now feed it or else you shall suffer endless wrath. Or, if you're nowhere to be found to suffer endless wrath we'll go punch some kittens! I'm an evil null cartel pilot that eats babies and washes them down with tears so you know I mean business.

Alright so if we're going for the definition, the term 'carebear' in EVE was applied as derogatory to people that believed they could detach themselves from non-consensual PvP. Mind you, this isn't about the lack of pvp or blow-stuff-up in general - it described the type of player that believes he's going to go pvp "when he's ready" (all skills at 5 + superawesome ship, preferably a goddamned titan or something equally ludicrously expensive of course) and until then he should be left alone.

Of course, even if he'd ever get to that level he'd wind up tackled by a month old cute newbie and brutalized in his shiney toy, becoming a really shiney killmail.

Given their preference to mindless grinds (missions, tons of them, mining, tons of it) the term was broadened to the point it became a joke: "I'm out of money, time to break out my Raven and carebear it up big time" and was often applied to anyone who engaged in carebear-like activities. It happened despite the fact that those people didn't share the attitude of carebears, preferring to say "Oh wow I'm a dumbass just minimized EVE to watch porn and didn't notice a local spike. That's one raven down the drain." rather than threaten their attacker with imaginary pals before making a massive whine thread on the forums, detailing how Ravens should be made bearmobiles impervious to ganks.

Hell, at some point the term started getting applied to people who are anything but carebears - mainly your average 0.0 joe who by undocking agrees to the danger of finding his sorry derriere ending up in an unreported gatecamp one jump away. Mostly because "nullbears" dare to avoid certain death by running for the POS instead of staying in their anomaly and honourably losing their Vindicator to a lone Jaguar or something equally horrid. (That is not to say there aren't carebars in null, there damn well are. Every now and then you can read hilariously bad suggestions in F&I about making the place much, much safer for ISK grinding. Even though it tends to be rather safe if you keep eyes on local, intel and your watch. Remember: don't rat when it's hotdrop o'clock)

Were players who followed CCP carebears? Not all of them, but some of them. Yes, many acknowledged the risk of dying but the carebear award goes to those who cried about it on forums. Instead of adopting HTFU they chose to scream and cry (...much to the amusment of the folk that aided in the slaughter, me included), shifting the blame in 100% to CCP and going as far as calling for unsubs to "Show CCP it's WE who wear pants in this 'verse!".

The nodes systems were on were reinforced, but reinforcement doesn't equal "no tidi at all".

Damn! "No TIDI at all" you say? I got a lot of 10% TIDI (mostly the entire route from rally ,Meves i think, system to target one). Guess CCP needs to spend some money on hardware upgrade then.

Dev Blog posted here: http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/operation-spectre-event-breakdown-and-faq/

And the verdict is?

Wow! I got my picture in it!!! - Review and thoughts on it to follow -

They admitted their errors and wish to continue doing events having learnt some lessons on what went wrong on this one, I am happy with that reply, I hope others are too.