EVE General Discussion

A prob with time dilation I can think of, is that if it's applied to one or two systems, with outside systems remaining unaffected, is that does it affect reshipping?

Eg some1 gets killed jumps out, runs 10 jumps to reship, and comes back within a couple of module timers? So to the ppl in the time dilated system it seems that some1 dies and almost magically reappears in a new ship. Combined with the slowdown of time, will it create endless battles?

I don't see anything bad in this. "Endless" means until you run out of ships, how many times would you return? And more exploding spaceships is definitely a good thing.

"Fixing lag" indiscriminantly is impossible. Fixing lag for 1000 players in one system may be possible.

The reason this is a serious and depending on some factors impossible to solve problem lies in the information theoritcal domain. The problem, extremely simplified is this: If you have 100 ships in one space and one ship of those houndred performs an action, you have to communicate this action to 100 clients (99 others and to the one initiating the action so the client knows it's done ok). Imagine that's sending 100 messages or 100 letters to everyone for that single action. Now if not 1 ship does something but everyone does something, that's already 100 times 100 messages to send. This communication problem is an n^2 (n - squared) problem.

For people with knowledge in performance optimization in software everything is clear at this point, for all others: n^2 means that the more people you have there, the faster the amount of communication grows, and it grows quadratically. The main problem is you can only add more hardware or better hardware linearly. If instead of one big server, you put in two or four big servers to handle the problem, you only help a bit, since the problem increase outgrows the processing power you add. Because the problem grows quadratically, while your solution can only grow linearly (at best). Worse, the more you add the less increase you get.

This is a core information theoretical problem that is impossible to solve. The trick is to be handle practical limits fine and mitigate the odd outliers. Which is precisely what CCP is doing at the moment. Note that improvements until lag appears can be done, because that depends on a lot of factors that are controllable, including the efficency of the software handling the issue, however there is simply a limit on how much you can do and at some numbers you can't do anything at all, since you reached the limit where the quadratic growth of the problem just takes off and goes through the roof.

True :) Maybe this is a no-win situation without game changing sov mechanics, *surrenders*

I won't lie, this is pretty awesome.

Would the time dilation be effective only in the grid where the big fight takes place or is it system wide? And if not the latter, how would this look to an distant observer, perhaps monitoring the situation with probes and by scanning?

The whole system will be dilated, including warping or scanning itself.

Now we just need space worth fighting for

The station environment will be not dilated and there will be also a few parts of the in-space environment which will not be dilated like reinforcement timers. Planetary interaction for example will also not be dilated.

People will actually die a lot faster with gun cycling slower but cycling, than with guns cycling every 10 minutes.

Why do yo all assume the server will be at 1% speed when it's more likely it will be at 80% speed? (and going faster with each ship dying)

Time Dilation = slow down processes because current hardware is having issues dealing with the amount of ships on grid (call to processors)

if this is true then the opposite must be possible.

increase the amount of hardware on the cluster, dedicate more nodes to less ships.

this is all about Load Balancing.

spend more cash CCP