Player Features and Ideas Discussion

This really just happened...

Maybe if you bring short range dreads to the fight you wouldn't have to do that?

Maybe you lock target? before cause damage.

Let's agree that root of the problem is huge TiDi. Nobody should like when node has TiDi and if somebody is intentionally making TiDi or server lag then they're using "exploit". We cannot speculate here if somebody is using drones to intentionally cause a server lag, so let's look at the root of the problem.

I have no deep knowledge of EVE infrastructure, but I can speculate from mine experience.
Could that be node network problem?
Each drone at least represented as separate object in grid. Let's assume that each drone is represented quite optimally from network POV by:

• Position, which, optimally will be in local grid coordinates, only 2 bytes per dimension, so 6 bytes.
• Id, which also can be just 2 bytes, or 4 top
• Owner, as we need to know at least it's owner ticker, 4 bytes, as there's definitely more than 2^16 people registered and could be possibly more than 2^24 (16.7kk), so we'll need 4 bytes for that. It can be optimized down to 2 bytes if server has special mapping of virtual IDs to their full IDs, as usually there's less than 2^16 (65k) concurrent users.

I've ignored some of information, like health etc, as it can be sent just on purpose/request.
So this information should be sent about each drone to each person in grid, once a second. In case of grid having 3k drones and 1k pilots it will lead us to 274 MBit/s traffic for node. Which is more than OK, it's easy to rent 1 Gbit/s port in data centers for anything. Also in case if EVE server has "prediction" for objects, then it will not send positions, reducing traffic significantly, and only sending this info when needed.
Yes node should still send info about any actions, these drones are doing, but abandoned drones then will not lead to any new traffic, ideally. But it is, so networking is not main problem with drones.

Could that be computing problem?
In the same case of 1k pilots and 3k drones one can think of several situations where it's needed to process 3kk iterations or be in any way computation heavy:

• Going through all the objects in grid to send or check the need of sending info to clients about this object. I assume that CCP haven't made this error and are creating big batch of visible objects that are shared between all clients, so in this case they should only need to go through 3k drones once, not 1k times.
• Checking available actions. These could be client or server based. In terms of drones it could be availability of scooping it, or looting, in terms of Titans - using portal or fitting services, etc. It's wise to leave it mostly client-side, so it will not generate the need of doing 3kk checks, or, if based on server, to organize each grid in such way it would take less iterations to go through all available options.
• Making collision checks. These as well should be turned off for drones, and could be easily optimized with proper space partitioning. However this could lead to big lags, when huge number of ships are present in very compact location, where multiple collisions can occur often. But in this case any blob of subcaps with numbers around 1k should cause comparable TiDi, which is not the case from my observations.
• It also can be problem with basic cache-misses, as with that much objects in grid one need to prefetch data ahead of time to effectively iterate through. And this depends heavily on how data is organized, as for purpose of making drones or any other objects cache-friendly CCP need to pack relevant data together.
• It could be the problem with amount of actions performed by drones. 3k active drones will perform huge number of actions which should be sent to players in grid.

Most of above assumptions should not be the case, if CCP have proper server architecture.

However to find the source of the problem with massive TiDi in presence of huge amount of drones testing or profiling is needed. Profiling can only be done by CCP, but testing can be done by players on test server:

• To test networking, 100+ players should deploy and abandon several thousands of drones in one grid and take a look at their traffic. It could be speculated, that if without drones traffic is X, and with 3k drones traffic is Y for one person, than server need to output (Y-X)/3000 per drone per person, so it could be scaled up to any number of players on grid with any number of drones on grid. If traffic with and without abandoned drones are pretty much the same - it could not be the problem.
• To test computational problems same players should make node to have TiDi down to 10-20%, then test how TiDi scales with number of players present in grid with drones. There could be strong correlation - then it has something to do with amount of iterations needed for node to do something with those drones, either checking if player should receive any info about this exact object, or checking collisions/actions/anything, only CCP can profile it further to pinpoint the problem. Or there could be no or weak correlation, then TiDi is only caused by these objects present in space.
• To test computational problems,caused by actions, same players should gather a huge blob of drone boats and shoot something way out of range (so object will not receive any damage) and something in range (so there will be damage involved).

All test scenarios can be easily produced on test servers if anybody is up to it, or it could be done internally by CCP, as they, I assume, have proper instruments of achieving the same thing in an easy way.

This is a very short list of possible problems, which can be written in 5k chars. Some are really simple to fix, some are not, but without further knowledge of server code and architecture it's hard to find out what really causing problems described in original post.

hahaha. PL and NC. dont cry, it's only fix broken game mechanics. We believe you will find a new way to abuse the game.

PL has never had any issues with outblobing the enemy. Recall 2012 Delve war? Where PL had to call CFC yet having HBC on their side to deal with such ****** allianes like AAA and Nulli
So don't try to play the grrr blob card.

Do you moron even read what I'm posting?
We ALREADY used caps to counter carrier blob. And the main thing that prevented your total annihilation was not your amazing pvp skills, but TIME, which was greatly delayed (15min rewarps, 5 min dread gun cycles) because of tons and tons of drones and in the end resulted in node crash
That simply means that it's impossible to kill 200 carriers from eu evening prime time till the next DT.
By reducing the lag caused by drones the chance of dealing with carrier blob is increaced significantly.

Or give turrets and launchers assist mechanics for balance. And fix drone lag. We are slowly killing the carrier, than it comes with reinforcements on the other side of the galaxy, if you remove an assist drones, it will take away the appeal of this format and solve the problem without the need to rewrite the code of the game.

good question, compare the DPS of a dominix with sentries and a rail megathron at long range

then compare the tracking

then compare how fast each one goes through ammo

This thread is so going places...

A fight in nullsec with less than 500 dudes?! Pics or it never happened