Player Features and Ideas Discussion

This is a pretty standard feature in most online games. I'm not sure why Eve Online hasn't implemented it.

Benefits :
Less Server load.
Less Tidi
Less load on the network pipe.
Accurate Count of people playing the game.

Con:
Afk people have to reconnect to the game.

Well #1: Alpha Toons, aren't paying to be afk. 1000 afk people in local means that every line of chat needs to be replicated 1000 times more than is needed. This creates server load, server load creates lag. Less lag = better fleet engagements. If eve servers could "handle" the load, TIDI wouldn't be a thing.

Now please tell me, why do people have to remain online afk? Why would they need to be on a game they aren't playing?

Ummm, what? I didn't mention cloaking. I did mention the 1k+ afk's in Jita.

My only motive sir, is to have lag free 500 person fleet fights. I believe booting afk players is a good step towards that goal. I can't see how people not playing the game are adding any benefit to it. Can you?

While yes, Jita is on it's own 'node', your assessment is inorrect I shall explain why. Each system gets 1 or more CPU cores attached to it. When you request a node to be 'reinforced' for example, all they do is shift more cpu cores onto that node. That's not even taking into account things like socket connections, memory, logging. All of these activities take resources from the cluster as a whole to process. Systems that have 0 players in them, get 0 cpus, that's why you get that longer load time when you're the first person to jump into a system in a while. The cluster has to assign a cpu to that system so you can be in it playing.

So lets say out of the 25,000 connected players, 18000 of them are actually playing the game. Disconnecting those 7,000 people will free up a lot of memory and cpu that can be assigned to other active nodes.

So again I ask the question, what exactly is the value of assigning server resources to characters that are not actively playing the game? I shouldn't be getting TIDI in 400 player fights.

Relevant thread from 2013:

https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=4269005#post4269005
https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=4287956#post4287956

tldr:

- someone wants to have "spammers" / "afk players" kicked out of Jita to open server resources for "active players."

- DEV responds by saying that "afk players" do not consume server resources the same way "active players" do and are pretty much a non-issue because the server will automatically allocate resources accordingly.

- even on dedicated nodes (which are separate from each other), major fleet flights are laggy and suffer TiDi because that is the nature of the beast.
Kicking people out in some nodes will not make other nodes run smoother as they are utilizing resources on different hardware.

Exactly. It's not like the server has to calculate where they are in relation to every other player out in space.

Not only is that not how the game works, that's very nearly the opposite of how the game works.

A fair analogy would be comparing the server cluster to a city. Over in one corner of the city is where all the afk'ers sitting in station are. Over on the other side of the city is the downtown district where people are active and doing stuff. The people sitting in station have zero effect on the traffic downtown. Even the people sitting in a parking lot downtown (i.e. afk but in space on a loaded node) don't affect actual traffic in any meaningful way because they are not interacting with it. Every effort to fix traffic/lag has been about spreading load to parts with less traffic or better "roads." Likewise, TiDi was the equivalent of installing traffic lights where previously the default state was gridlock. Bulldozing your afk tree fort in the suburbs will not improve traffic downtown.

And that's why people think you have ulterior motives. Because either you understand the system and are full of crap, or you have the opposite of an understanding of the system and yet are still trying to give advice on how to "fix" it.

edit: because your description is so painful to read I feel like I have to correct it. You have it backwards. Multiple systems can be on 1 CPU, but each system can't use more than 1 CPU. No multi threading in this case. Node and CPU often get used interchangeably, so assume they are the same thing. You may be confusing "blade" with "node" but the existence of blades doesn't really matter in this context. The biggest reinforced nodes are Jita and the fleet fight one. They are reinforced because they get better hardware and a full CPU to themselves without sharing. Things like chat and trade and stuff that's not Dogma (the in-space simulation) get put on separate CPUs so they don't cause lag. What systems share which CPUs are decided at downtime and cannot be changed without turning off all the systems that share that CPU, so live migration is not done at all (even though your understanding of it would be the opposite of how it would be done if it were done at all). That's why it's important to notify CCP the day before a big fight so they can map the system to a reinforced node, because doing it live doesn't work. Setting aside Jita afk'ers (which have precisely zero effect on fleet fight lag) even in-space afkers don't add load to a fight. Usually someone afk in space will be off grid from everything interesting since that's the entire point of being afk in space. The only load they'd add is in updating local (almost no load and on a different CPU anyway) and position for d-scan (which only happens if they aren't cloaked and adds almost nothing to the big picture compared to the load of everyone on grid in the overview.) They aren't moving, they aren't running d-scan, they aren't adding anything to any dogma calculations. No additional lag. If kicking afk'ers would help lag, it would have been done years ago. Whatever your ulterior motives for kicking AFKers, you aren't going to convince anybody by pretending it'll help against lag. Try again. Maybe with more honesty.

If your posting about Jita, you do know that those that sit in stations are basically bots right, keystrokes can be simulated, this may be against the EULA in cases but it is up to CCP to boot them.

Don't get me wrong I get what your saying, just understand that there are many GOOD reasons not to do this action, the playstyles that folks do would be effected and gimp many, including boosting ships which can sit for a long time not moving.