Assembly Hall

The battle in HED-GP proved one simple, undeniable fact.

CCP is unable to provide a credible solution to the problems created by drone fleets in nullsec warfare.


CCP's advertising includes "CHOOSE YOUR SHIP : Pick the ships you want to fly from hundreds of widely varying models.
CUSTOMIZE AND TUNE : Each ship is highly customizable using modular equipment, rigs and subsystems."

What they should say is only Archons, Nyx and interceptors are worth having in nullsec now days. Everything else, forget it. And forget nullsec industry too, it's gone thanks to Odyessey making grav sites instantly pop up without scanning, and Rubicon making interceptors warping to a grav site faster than a barge can get to warp.

700 dreads killed 7 archons. That says it all. Rediculously unbalanced, defeated by TiDi and server instability. So no-one should bother with dreads any more, as a class they are invalid (being the conceptual counter to carriers - but they can't do that). And Nyx are better for sov grinding because you don't have siege cycles to get caught in by interceptors.

And speaking of ship rebalancing and CCP's current love of drone ships - given the utter inability of CCP to have stable subservers, even on a reinforced node, unless you have drones that fight at server speed or are allocated to someone who actually does have the ability to play, forget it.

Yes, the pinnacle of nullsec pvp is currently assign drones, go have a coffee. Done. It is skillless, mindless, and boring for everyone concerned. And there is ZERO place for new players in it - if you can't fly a slowcat archon, go back to highsec. Where 99% of the game is, and apparently where 100% of the design effort is. That is simply not acceptable if this game is to survive as anything more than a WOW IN SPACE.

CCP needs to stop pretending that nullsec systems do not have a hard cap for players, and write a better protocol for how admission to the battle is handled. HED-GP proved it does, where the server loaded in 700 dreadnaughts one after the other - without their pilots having a chance to do anything - because it would not load a new one until the previous pilot was dead. They couldn't put their hardners on, couldn't target, and couldn't well .. anything. Other than die. 50 minutes in a jump tunnel to load in dead is an insult to players and a gift to the 10 MMOs out there under development who are looking to take customers off EVE.

So yes, hat should have been an epic battle has become a litmus test of EVE Online. People have been complaining that Star Citizen's design is bad because it has capped rooms for pvp to ensure quality of game play. But that is now beginning to look like a much better option than what EVE offers, where 'unlimited' also means 'unplayable' past 600 players. They are being honest, and CCP is not.

There has been a lot of rubbish added in recent expansions that does nothing but make nullsec LESS stable than it was. Instant action interceptors do not help when the server can't even handle working out how to not crash.

So YAY the server did not crash - but the 'fix' of leaving pilots stuck in warp until they were dead is no fix at all. It is simply a bad joke on the community who actually play what passes for pvp these days.



For real, make dreads do double damage against archons, and make drone assist limited by double the bandwidth of the ship assigned to. Not to mention stop lying about epic warfare, hundreds of ships to choose from, and new players being able to participate. If you don't buy a character who can fly an archon, you can't. Simple as that.

And yes, I can't wait for Star Citizen. I love EVE Online, and have played since 2005. But guess what, CCP is spending all the developer time making fluffy junk for highsec carebears, and has ground nullsec industry into the mud with cloaky campers (because gee we needed more covert ships for campers to use to stop all play in null!) and left archon blob fleets win by crashing servers and attacking fleets. Not good enough, not NEARLY good enough. So yes, I'd rather spend my money on something new.

Was that drones, or was that jamming four thousand or so people into one system, and jumping in hundreds of dread on grid with everything else?


Speaking as someone who was actually in the dread fleet, as opposed to some random forum alt, that's not how it happened. While I didn't jump in myself, I was in comms with people who did, and it wasn't one dread at a time. The server was struggling, and dropping in batches all at once. Weird bullshit happened with them, there were blackscreens, module lag was horrendous and doomsdays were (Again) the only thing that worked.

Drones were never even mentioned. Trying to cyno several hundred of anything in all at once all on grid will generally end up like this.


If it had been the other way around, with the CFC/Russian dreads getting in well before the N3/PL carriers, the EXACT SAME problems would have happened.

Brain in a Box will not solve their main problem of the core engine not being multi-threaded. It will remove some strain from the existing infrastructure making it perform better, it will work exactly like TiDi. It delays the inevitable.

If you have played Eve long enough, you realize that the original base for it was not much more than the old MUD code from the 1990's, with a graphic overlay. Characters, Ships, Systems - they are nothing more than database records with a bunch of flags and timers attached, along with some pointers to other databases. As such it has an upper limit on how much data they can process and update in real time.

I know TiDi was supposed to address this issue - by giving the servers more time for back-end processing and lessening the amount of data they had to transmit to you per second. Obviously they have some other issues as well.

I'd be amazed if the back-end database engines are not multi-threaded and working as fast as they can to try to keep up with all the updates to the tables, but I think the sheer amount of data in the system is the real problem. It is a problem of game design, but the problem is that they are not limiting the game design to the amount of data it can reasonably handle in real time. This is why you see other MMORPGs limit the number of players in a PvP situation in the same place at the same time.

I really think the only way they solve this is to limit the number of ships in a system at the same time .

[quote=Grace Ishukone] Rabble rabble [quote]

Afk cloaking, this thread, etc...you whine a lot

Rabble rabble rabble the Chris Roberts shill is strong in this one rabble rabble

So I'm curious grace, are you ever happy about anything? I mean this is the fifth petty whine thread you've made in less than two months, all about things which if you took the time to engage your brain instead of your mouth you would realise are nowhere near as serious as you believe.

This post pretty much answers the question you raised by the way.