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Praetor Novak
Macabre Votum Imperial Republic Of the North
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Posted - 2008.07.29 21:25:00 -
[1]
Edited by: Praetor Novak on 29/07/2008 21:28:49 I picked up my copy (US bookstores are not carrying it) of Jim Rossignol's book "This Gaming Life, Travels in Three Cities" today and was reading page 36 where he refers to Quake Wars« when it dawned on me that EVE is missing something it needs.
The hardcore cadre of EVE players who live and die in 0.0 are feeling their needs unmet in a critical area. We crave the excitement of massive fleet engagements. War on a grand scale. However we've learned to be happy with smaller engagements often referred to as "roaming ops" or just purely "roamsö. We've been forced to be happy with these smaller battles because of game mechanics resulting from a hardware/software infrastructure that cannot handle the large scalability requirements necessary for such massive and epic battles.
These are the stuff of legend. The war defining battles consisting of thousands of ships on both sides. The battles where people say I was there and ôit was crazyö, ôit was insaneö, but more importantly ôit was fun!ö This is one of the most incredible aspects of EVE; that we can put so much on the line for what we believe. That we can risk so much to have those pure moments of being ôin the zoneö swathed in utter gaming fun. EVE needs these wars just as surely as it needs a miner sitting in solitude sucking Veld from the vacuum of deep space.
The epic battles continue because they are now a necessary escalation of the warfare in EVE that must be observed by all sides of the battle, however they are more work than fun. They have become long drawn out monotonies of screen refreshes, a patchwork of lagged out clicks usually resulting in an existential departure of your character from their fleeting life as you are either dead and just don't know it yet or rather worse sucked into the wormhole of a node crash. Rudely sitting at a login screen unable to rejoin the battle consumed by anger knowing that your comrades in arms are dying and you are helpless to gather again and help.
You've (yes you CCP) created this sandbox, armed it to the teeth, told us to pick up the weapons and openly encouraged this escalation in warfare in EVE to the point where we see battles nearly daily and weekly that dwarf the engagements of the past. And yet they have become less a valuation of thrilling fun and more a required necessity of being a part of something bigger. Multiple Titans and Mothers, hundreds of capital ships, thousands of battleships and legion of support ships all fighting the primary enemy, lag. Fleetingly they are given the opportunity to fight each other between the server's graces. They are now as much loathed and begrudgingly attended as they should conversely be desired and sought after. We want to experience these massive fellowships of destruction and redemption to define the destiny of EVE and our own pilots.
Fix this above all else û make massive fleet battles fun again, remove the lag, remove the limitation of the current game mechanics from being the deciding factor in these most epic of battles! Let the victor be determined by the skill, fortitude, sheer luck and decisiveness of those whom wish to engage in this most holy pursuit of the chaos of EVE warfare.
Give us warfare back on a massive scale and make it fun again.
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August Guns
Minmatar Infinite ISK
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Posted - 2008.07.29 21:54:00 -
[2]
^ What he said. August Guns |
Tarminic
24th Imperial Crusade
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Posted - 2008.07.29 22:27:00 -
[3]
Nobody wants these limitations, but I'm not what the point of this post is. I mean, you're basically saying "Hey CCP, fix lag and lag generating mechanics!" Which isn't exactly something they haven't heard before.
Good post though. ---------------- Play EVE: Downtime Madness v0.83 (Updated 7/3) |
Ruze
Amarr No Applicable Corporation
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Posted - 2008.07.29 23:31:00 -
[4]
I keep wondering why we all assume that CCP ain't racking their brains to do just that. They do play this game too, you know.
Genesis Project |
Kithron
Vanguard Frontiers Imperial Republic Of the North
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Posted - 2008.07.30 00:27:00 -
[5]
I lend my support to this initiative.
I know they are working on it, but they need to put more effort into fixing this key problem and less into adding new content that requires more large subsystems to tax the server. New content is great, necessary even, but not at the expense of server performance problems that prevent the grandest of all pursuits in Eve, Fleet Warfare.
Darklite Inc. Diplomat |
Butternut Squash
Gallente Macabre Votum Imperial Republic Of the North
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Posted - 2008.07.30 01:58:00 -
[6]
Praetor ... can I have my Thesaurus back now please?
You are right in everything you say, but like others have said, its not like CCP are unaware. What does frustrate the hell out of me though is the fact that they (CCP) are working on things like Ambulation which can only put more stress on the servers and therefore increase lag even more.
If somebody wants to walk around ... then let them do so in WoW (yes I said it) ... I prefer my pixels in space.
CCP have certainly come up with some good lag reducers and have been flamed for it before people came to appreciate the benefits ... we can all live in hope that they have another such ace up their sleeve.
Your signature exceeds the maximum allowed dimensions of 400x120 pixels -Navigator ([email protected])
Butters
I am jealous of my wife ... she already has a titan :D |
RetroVertigo
Macabre Votum Imperial Republic Of the North
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Posted - 2008.07.30 10:19:00 -
[7]
Edited by: RetroVertigo on 30/07/2008 10:19:44 CCP if you would like to continue graciously accepting my money every month i want a playable game, and when you get into a fight which your game allows and from all appearances is designed for, and then you either spend the whole time staring at empty space, or disconnect and spend that time staring at a login screen it really seems like im not exactly getting my moneys worth here.
In my option the situation is clear, instead of giving us an update that clogs up the server with empire fighting hows about you spend all that money and time you spent developing that and implementing something more worthwhile to the thousands and thousands of people that live in 0.0 and fight vastly more meaningful battles. Now i dont expect lag to go away next update, but when you dont even load the field or when FC's dont want to take their fleet against the enemy because the lag would be so bad that it would turn jumpgates in insta-loose machines, there is clearly more of a problem with the game than ships that can go really fast.
CCP please get the game working to the point where we can actually engage in the types of fights that 0.0 calls for, THEN add more to the game. |
Crumplecorn
Gallente Eve Cluster Explorations
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Posted - 2008.07.30 10:49:00 -
[8]
Edited by: Crumplecorn on 30/07/2008 10:50:23 Fleet battles are partaken in by a minority of the playerbase, and lag is basically the most difficult problem there is to fix. Also, fleet battles as they at the moment wouldn't be that much fun even without lag. Flying around in blobs shooting one target at a time?
It would be nice to have no lag for these battles, but its not going to happen most likely.
Both lag and fun issues would be (will be? - see FW) fixed by making the most biggest fleet battles pointless by changing mechanics. -
DesuSigs |
Joakim Wasyl
Caldari State Protectorate
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Posted - 2008.07.30 11:11:00 -
[9]
Reduce lag. I want to see fleet fights like this in EVE
Now thats what I'm talking about
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Lain Maraquine
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Posted - 2008.07.30 11:38:00 -
[10]
No new content until lag is at least improved. Doesn't do any good to have piles of new shiny ships that die before your screen even loads.
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Praetor Novak
Macabre Votum Imperial Republic Of the North
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Posted - 2008.07.30 16:49:00 -
[11]
Thanks for all the kind and critical words. Both are absolutely greeted with sincerity and gratitude because this is an issue that affects all of us and drives deep into the core of EVE's future as the world's preeminent single-shard MMO.
It was brought to my attention in another forum that I left out a suggested solution to the lag issue involved with these ever increasing massive fleet battles. I deliberately didn't include a suggested fix here to avoid having this thread descend into a debate of what is and is not technically feasible within the constraints of CCP's budget.
I believe that CCP's initial shortsightedness in the early years of EVE lead to the current lag fest that occurs on a daily basis, although I admit their efforts to correct the situation have resulted in some improvements and are truly Herculean however they are band-aids. To scale EVE to the size it needs to be and what it will become in the future will require totally new thinking about MMO software architecture and hardware deployment.
I wrote a plea of emotion to engage us in our passion for what we love û EVE Online. Sometimes you need to appeal to people on an emotional level to feed the process of change. Motivate a man's soul and he will move accordingly.
The hardware industry, specifically the OEMs who build the servers EVE (and the rest of the world for that matter) uses based on Intel and/or AMD processors have let us down also. Many providers robust industry applications the world over are lulled into believing that the ônextö thing will fix their performance woes. We believe in the almighty predictive powers of Moore's Law to save us from our prior sins of inadequate programming based on flawed assumptions and poor planning for future expansion.
Moore's Law doesn't specifically say ôprocessing powerö doubles. What Gordon Moore said was that; ôthat the number of transistors that can be inexpensively placed on an integrated circuit is increasing exponentially, doubling approximately every two years.ö It is a common mistake to misinterpret Moore's Law and assume it gives us a free ticket to doubled processing power every two years or so. As wonderful as that would be however, this just isn't the case. Processing power is also a function of the software doing the processing on the hardware transistors.
Originally by: a friend The EVE server software was created and optimized for single-core systems, and doesn't thread very well at all. And CCP was now stuck with new CPUs that were actually /slower/ than what they already had - the first dual-cores delivered less power per core than a slightly older single-core.
This is where I completely agree with how the current status quo came to be. CCP definitely planned to be able to forklift upgrade their hardware when new CPUs became available and just load the existing EVE stackless python implementation on the new servers. EVE was conceived as a serially threaded application on a scalar processor architecture. When at it's very conception as a massive single-shard should have been built as as an HPC application with dynamically linked threadlet (microthreads) within a highly parallel stream processor architecture. In CCP's defense though there are many new concepts and capabilities today that didn't exist when they conceived EVE. CCP has had to bootstrap their way to success with EVE and unfortunately in this business arrangement you cannot build out the best from the very beginning, so this current dilemma is completely expected in some ways.
Planning to do forklift upgrades is an understandable misstep, because nobody really wants to re-write their software all the time, it's expensive and time consuming. However CCP didn't plan perfectly for EVE's massive growth and the subsequent node scalability necessary for players converging on a single system (node).
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Praetor Novak
Macabre Votum Imperial Republic Of the North
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Posted - 2008.07.30 16:56:00 -
[12]
At the same time they have subtlety pushed us to higher and higher concentrations of players participating in fleet battles through additional features and functions. Case in point, view the flash graphic at the top of the Empyrean Age Feature page; http://www.eveonline.com/empyreanage/index.html This is how fleet battles should be, not lagged out waiting for the grid to load. Now they are trying deferent tactics to get players to not concentrate, need for speed, covert ops, blob busting initiatives, factional warfare, etc. Give us what we want, give us fleet battles that flow.
The drive to expand and market EVE has not kept pace with it's underlying architecture and has outstripped it's ability to handle the load.
I completely understand most all aspects of multi-core processing, threaded programing, highly parallel processing, threads and threadlets, HPC, supercomputers and various HPC interconnects. I just wasn't interested in a long, deeply technical discussion about the possibilities out there, however I was told that just commenting on the problem contributes to our growing apathy and frustration of the the lag issue as a whole. So I hope this provides some technical meat to the discussion at hand.
Hopefully CCP's initiative to completely upgrade to an HPC solution will not overlook their crippling dependence on windows and classical programing methods. Too bad there isn't a native micro threading highly parallel programming language for an RTOS that can run on stream processors (think GPGPU or Cell processor) in a highly parallel system distributed over many HPC servers all over the world like an industry grade deployment of OpenVMS. It's a mash up I know, but how cool would that be?
BTW Devs û Using HP's MPI to communicate between nodes seems like a huge risk by outsourcing such a critical piece of the cluster.
For those looking for more information about CCP's planned upgrades check here.
Thank you for your time and consideration of this issue.
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Herschel Yamamoto
Bloodmoney Incorporated
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Posted - 2008.07.30 17:41:00 -
[13]
I like your vision, and I imagine that CCP shares it. I'm just rather fatalistic about the whole thing. ------------------ Fix the forums! |
Praetor Novak
Macabre Votum Imperial Republic Of the North
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Posted - 2008.07.31 19:13:00 -
[14]
Originally by: Herschel Yamamoto I like your vision, and I imagine that CCP shares it. I'm just rather fatalistic about the whole thing.
Being fatalistic about lag comes from years of sitting on one side of gate or the other dying or being liberated of your ship while you wait for the grid to load. CCP has seriously conditioned us into accepting this lag as the status quo and we believe there is nothing that can be done about it; hence the apathy displayed by the EVE community as a whole to provide pressure on CCP toward improving lag caused by massive fleet engagements.
We recently had a Titan pilot DD friendlies and allow the enemy to escape partly due to a laggy node. This is how influential the issue with the robustness of the EVE servers is. The strength of the node becomes one of the major deciding factors in the outcome of major fleet battles in EVE. The skill, determination and decisions of our pilots and fleet commanders become secondary and diluted by a faltering node.
We see this happening all the time and just throw up our hands, shake our heads and utter ôthat's just the way it is.ö - APATHY
CCP can fix this and they are tentatively showing slow signs that they will in the future, at some point apply some effort to improvements to fix server lag. However, who knows when? We just need to pressure them into knowing this is the real and urgent priority to us, the pilots of EVE, not all this other crap they are doing to "improve EVE". When did core playability in MMO games become secondary to cosmetic improvement?
Laggy massive fleet engagements is a major playability issue to 0.0 Alliance. We just don't know it because like Pavlov's dog we've been conditioned over many years to ignore it and just live with it.
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Herschel Yamamoto
Bloodmoney Incorporated
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Posted - 2008.07.31 19:56:00 -
[15]
Let me just ask you this then - do you really think that they're unaware of the lag problems? Remember, the devs play this game, and they're disproportionately PvPers. The old-timers among them were suffering lag before the game got out of beta, and they've been suffering it for the 5+ years since. I'm sure that they would, to a man, love to have silky-smooth responsiveness in thousand-man fleet ops. But they can't neglect game development to do it, since that's how they get new subscribers. And before you say "Less lag = more subscribers", no, it doesn't. Noobs don't experience lag, since they don't play in L4 hubs or fleet blobs, and even if they have discovered Jita, it's an occasional thing.
I'd love to see CCP rewrite the game's code, install a brand-new supercomputer, and run a fibre optic line from Rekjavik to my modem. But it's not realistic. Hence fatalism - they want it changed, I want it changed, and it'll change eventually, on its own schedule. The ten thousandth whine thread on the topic won't change that. ------------------ Fix the forums! |
Pwett
Minmatar QUANT Corp. QUANT Hegemony
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Posted - 2008.07.31 20:23:00 -
[16]
I whole heartedly agree; but as you hinted on before, this is way more than just a server side problem. This end-result of their programming methods can be seen in our single-thread clients.
Why should your game freeze when you open up the corp history tab on a corp hopper?
Why should your game freeze when you accidentally open up your corp's sanctionable actions?
Why should your game freeze when you open up a hangar with a lot of items?
One of the biggest killers is the fact that even when they modified the client to use directx9 graphics, they still maintained a single-threaded experience. _______________ Pwett CEO, Founder, & Executor <Q> QUANT Hegemony
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Nekopyat
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Posted - 2008.07.31 20:33:00 -
[17]
While I'm not against them putting energy into these fleet issues in theory... I kinda feel that way too much energy goes into supporting the massive fleet stuff already.
It does have marquee value, and they can show it off, and a few alliances really love them.. but the bulk of the EvE population will never see one of these fights outside the news section and have very little interest in them.
Yet developer resources pour into null sec war mechanics (more ships, bigger ships, alliance toys, etc etc) to a detriment to other play styles.
In other words, the stuff you are asking for is already the favored child of the development process, not some ignored little aspect. Unfortunately it is also a really hard problem to solve which is why it always looks like so little progress is being made.
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Deldrac
Bat Country Aegis Militia
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Posted - 2008.07.31 23:39:00 -
[18]
The amount of time wasted on vanity projects such as the 'walking' expansion suggests more should have been about this by now.
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Mahke
Carrion Crows
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Posted - 2008.08.01 02:39:00 -
[19]
I haven't even participated in the potentially (but thanks to lag not at all) epic fleet battles, but even more moderate sized engagements get lagged up. Sometimes the node slows to a crawl even outside battles and mission hubs. I've lost more isk to getting lagged out and dropped from the server (and just lagged out long and badly enough I might as well have been) (and then boom) than I have in all my pve activities in EVE. Finally, the marquee fleets are aspirational, watching them on youtube, reading about, knowing they're going on in the background.
Even those of us who do not participate in the giant fleets or live in motsu and jita are effected by this. The two most important things for keeping the game fun are balance (which CCP has shown an incredible devotion to working on, whether or not one agrees with their decisions) and lag control; new content is very nice, but keeping the core of the game viable is key.
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Othe Noc
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Posted - 2008.08.01 03:37:00 -
[20]
Is the primary point, though, to "Fix lag?" Or to "Make Large-scale Engagemenets Fun Again?" Whether you have lag or not, massive fleet engagements under the current rules don't look like any of the awesome space battles we dream of. What it looks like is, well . . . have any of you ever played Starcraft? And had a couple fleets of twenty-odd Battlecruisers shoot at each other? That's hardly epic, either. In fact . . . remember that mission where you have to go capture a bunch of Battlecruisers, and then another big fleet of them comes in to fight you? That fight, right there, is one of the greatest disappointments of my childhood.
CCP's talked about trying to fix this all the time. You'll notice in the Factional Warfare thing, which would presumably be one of the "fluff" bits they're adding instead of fixing the lag, changing system occupation involves hitting and holding multiple capture points for a period of time. Now, FW's still in a sort of fetal stage, and nobody cares about capturing systems, and PvP pilots sure as hell don't want to sit on a box repulsing rats for fifteen minutes.
But . . . picture an engagement on a MASSIVE scale, with ships fighting over multiple points across several adjacent systems. Capital ships blazing away at capturable targets while their support fleets scramble to fend off incoming targets. Territory gained and lost, reserves brought in and sent to the front lines while the commanders try and keep ships on as many points as possible without spreading themselves too thin. Doomsday Weapons employed tactically instead of strategically, falling upon a point which is about to be overrun and levelling the playing field for both sides.
Fleets are still big, battles are still epic, and large fleet combat is actually more interesting then a bunch of battleships/capitals sitting on one grid and focus-firing each other to death one at a time. Oh, and lag's better, too, since you aren't just packing as many ships as possible onto one grid anymore. This is what CCP's trying to do; it's what they've been talking about whenever I read a Dev Blog on the subject, and what they're trying to prototype with the Factional Warfare thing. Is it in a workable shape yet? Nope. Is the current setup in the FW arena going to bare any similarity to what finally gets shipped out to 0.0 as new territory mechanics? Probably not. But CCP IS working on it. Because they want things to be awesome, too. Arguably, they've got an even bigger stake in it than we do.
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Andreya
Direct Intent
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Posted - 2008.08.05 22:45:00 -
[21]
nice post Prae anyways i agree and disagree.. theres loads of us who prefer small scale pvp, even if there werent lag. i for one am one of those people. but making large scale more appealing wouldnt hurt :D _________________________________________________________ Only once you've lost everything, are you free to do anything. Your signature exceeds the maximum allowed filesize of 24000 bytes -Navigator ([email protected]) |
Mara Noan
Blue Labs Pandemic Legion
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Posted - 2008.08.06 00:09:00 -
[22]
Edited by: Mara Noan on 06/08/2008 00:10:30 Edited for content
Tell you the truth I have never had such a rush in a non combat situation as a small scale roaming engagement with like minded and usualy bigger opponents, lag is less and you get to realy fell the fight.
I usualy come out of those short of breath and swating profusely, which is better than the fill my pants feeling I get when someone is trying to kill me.
Of course it's just a game and I do get paid to go get shot at.
__________________________________________________________________________________________
"If you don't stand behind the troops, feel free to stand in front of them."
"Common sense, it's not that common."
Opinions are a dime a dozen, still this one is mine.
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Chainsaw Plankton
IDLE GUNS IDLE EMPIRE
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Posted - 2008.08.06 02:18:00 -
[23]
Edited by: Chainsaw Plankton on 06/08/2008 02:18:35
Originally by: Butternut Squash Praetor ... can I have my Thesaurus back now please?
You are right in everything you say, but like others have said, its not like CCP are unaware. What does frustrate the hell out of me though is the fact that they (CCP) are working on things like Ambulation which can only put more stress on the servers and therefore increase lag even more.
If somebody wants to walk around ... then let them do so in WoW (yes I said it) ... I prefer my pixels in space.
CCP have certainly come up with some good lag reducers and have been flamed for it before people came to appreciate the benefits ... we can all live in hope that they have another such ace up their sleeve.
right, because graphical artists are going to do a wonderful job fixing lag and optimizing code
some people even want it. hell it surprised me when I found out you were always stuck in your ship when I first started eve.
and I would love to have no lag and massive battles but sadly I don't see it happening anytime soon
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TheEndofTheWorld
Republic Military School
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Posted - 2008.08.06 08:39:00 -
[24]
1. CCP fixes lag, so that 400-600 players in local can have a fight with 10s module delay. Everybody says AWESOME. 2. Players start having 800-1000+ fights in local. New threads like this start, players praise the OP and obviously blame CCP.
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Red Thunder
Most Wanted INC G00DFELLAS
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Posted - 2008.08.06 10:56:00 -
[25]
didnt read it all, but heres my opinion:
we want huge fleet fights, but not the kind eve offers. Eves are just lagfests, no fun at all
Eagles may soar, but weasels dont get sucked into jet engines |
Deldrac
Bat Country Aegis Militia
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Posted - 2008.08.06 11:00:00 -
[26]
Originally by: TheEndofTheWorld 1. CCP fixes lag, so that 400-600 players in local can have a fight with 10s module delay. Everybody says AWESOME.
10 second module delay would not be 'awesome' it would be unacceptably slow.
I'd think of 2-3 second module delay as reasonable under extreme circumstances. But I'd understand if others felt that was too much lag.
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Red Thunder
Most Wanted INC G00DFELLAS
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Posted - 2008.08.06 13:31:00 -
[27]
well currently we can get up to 30 minute module lag in large fights, so 10 seconds is pretty good in comparison
Eagles may soar, but weasels dont get sucked into jet engines |
Deldrac
Bat Country Aegis Militia
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Posted - 2008.08.06 14:12:00 -
[28]
10 seconds might be better by comparison, but that doesn't mean it counts as 'pretty good'.
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Deaver Trantor
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Posted - 2008.08.11 14:52:00 -
[29]
Has CCP EVER released a schematic detailing the components, interconnects and topology of their server farm? Perhaps if they could provide more details some of the smart people that play EVE and have IT experience could offer "advice"?
Would that be asking too much? Let the people who suffer from the lag help find the solution, something other than "keep out of that system".
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Fenrals
RillaCorp Executive Outcomes
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Posted - 2008.09.02 16:37:00 -
[30]
walking in stations will A) hopefully be on dedicated servers and remove the stresses to the In space servers.
B) Keep the AKFer's in major trade hubs in seperated servers while they are in station.
C) prolly not set up at this time to be on seperate servers at this time and will only increase lag with virtual lap dances by manginas for isk
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