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The Only Way to Fix Blobbing (But will never happen)

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VoiceInTheDesert Zebra Corp Circle-Of-Two	Posted - 2009.05.27 19:45:00 - [1] Inspired by the Titan thread discussion, I got to thinking about how they are used as the only effective anti-blob weapon. The problem is that they are not truly an anti-blob, they just encourage the blob to get bigger and bigger until it can take on titans...and that doesn't help the situation at all. So I started to think of "what would fix the blobbing." Right now, the strategy in any fight is "bring more guys than your enemy." It seems logical enough, yet it doesn't work out well in actual combat situations in world history. Why? Because the larger you get, the more coordination you need and the easier it is to hit your own guys. Real combat allows armies to take up bottleneck situations or formations that take advantage of small size. It allows for the use of terrain shielding both in terms of hiding behind battlefield objects as well as other ships (preferably the enemies ships so that they are forced to fire in the direction of their allies). This is the only solution to blobbing. It's the only way to inject skill and precision into this game and take it out of the hands of the mindless swarms (no pun intended in regard to goons). There is no other fix. No amount of ship balance, sov changes or new mechanics will fix the blob, only the incorporation of friendly fire. It is the only disadvantage to large numbers and since EVE does not currently take it into account, the Blob reigns supreme. So what would have to be done? I've wracked my brain over how to do this easily, but it simply can't be done. The game has to start rendering weapon rounds and missiles as projectiles that travel through space and hit targets rather than just numbers in a calculator. It's the only way to get rid of the blob. I know it's a lot of work...but it's been done quite successfully in an entire genre called FPS's, so we know it's doable (unless there is some sort of special code on TQ that prevents such things that I am unaware of) Please CCP, please work on this. I know it could take a long time, but I (and I'm guessing 90% of the EVE population) would much rather have this than a rather pointless "walk around in the station" feature that serves no game-relevant purpose. Also, can I please get a dev reply to indicate if this is even thought about? I know it's been suggested before and I just want to know if I should completely give up hope or if anyone in the higher ups has realized the value of this idea and proposed any progress towards it. Flame/discuss/troll at will
Lindsay Logan	Posted - 2009.05.27 20:04:00 - [2] I belive teh RTS Supreme Commander did simulate all projectile courses as well. But in Sapce, there is a big nothing. One ust needs a lot of numbers to win :).
Xorth Adimus Caldari The Perfect Storm Controlled Chaos	Posted - 2009.05.27 20:59:00 - [3] Not going to very workable mostly due to the extra workload creating those paths and that if it was achieved you would get allot of friendly fire. Only way around it is to make squads /wings have enforced formation flying to prevent friendly fire (with the penalty of lower agility). Larger more destructive area of effect weapons and area of effect ranged EW ships/more effective bombs (perhaps on a large combat ship rather then just specialised bombers) would also be very useful in breaking up RR/gank blobs One idea I put up a while ago vs blobbing was to do with sensor echos being caused by too many locks: The more ships that lock a target the longer it takes for the last ships to lock. This effectively delays 20 ships vs 1 immediate ganking and makes the various electronics skills and remote sensor boosting/damping/painting much more worthwhile. It would also nerf large scale remote repping (you would have to have seperate penalties for friendlies and unfriendlies in a way that could not be exploited). It would make the game much more interesting (not just plate gank RAWWR! ) and tactical I believe in the larger fights and encourage smaller scale skirmishes within these battles. In smaller fleets it shouldn't be too noticable and caps should be so big that they can be locked without much if any penalty by multiple ships.
voogru Gallente Massive Damage United Corporations Against Macros	Posted - 2009.05.27 21:15:00 - [4] Originally by: VoiceInTheDesert The game has to start rendering weapon rounds and missiles as projectiles that travel through space and hit targets rather than just numbers in a calculator. Originally by: VoiceInTheDesert but it's been done quite successfully in an entire genre called FPS's, so we know it's doable All FPS games which use bullets, bullets are actually what they call trace lines. Think of a laser pointer, there are no real bullets. Why? Efficiency. Anything that's slower than a bullet (grenades, rockets/missiles) actually require real emulation, and missiles in EVE already do that. Hate Farmers? Click Here
Ausser Cybertech Industrials Agency	Posted - 2009.05.27 23:32:00 - [5] Implementation of line of sight would not remove blobs. Think about fighters/drones. They go where they have to kill something and do it close range. Even with guns it would still be sexy to blob up. You just have to spread arround after warp in to reduce friendly fire. A better aproach to dicourage blobs is to encourage fast small scale hit+run tactics on splitted objectives. E.g. think about bo-bridges + bombers + delayed local. The blob would simply be too clumsy to parry such attacks fast enough - while small and agile stealth squads would have a chance of intervention before everything is broken (most likely the cyno jammer).
Sonya Rayner Unicorn Enterprise Blind Octopus	Posted - 2009.05.28 00:31:00 - [6] Originally by: Lindsay Logan I belive teh RTS Supreme Commander did simulate all projectile courses as well. I've seen one player accidentally destroying his own base just because a fighter _happened_ to be flying over strategic launcher at the time of launch and actually hit the missile (or missile hit the fighter, w/e)... Originally by: Lindsay Logan but in Sapce, there is a big nothing. One ust needs a lot of numbers to win :). Well, there are rocks, moons and planets here and there... Implementing line of sight and line of fire mechanics in eve would put a HUGE stress on servers, to calculate all that data we would need calculating power bigger by like a factor of 10, if not more... You want to be back to a stone age where local with 30 ppl in it would result in a dead node? Well, i don't... However, we DO need an effective anti-blob solution... ____________________
Myra2007 Shafrak Industries	Posted - 2009.05.28 00:37:00 - [7] Not sure how this would solve blobbing. Tbh besides eve i am not a gamer at all but i used to play counterstrike a lot (probably some 10 years ago - not sure if that game still exists). That was basically a fps game that had friendly fire (depending on server setup). However "blobbing" was "solved" by automatic team member switching if one team had a numerical advantage. Not sure if todays fps are any different though. Can you elaborate a bit? Anyhow personally i've never seen a big problem with blobbing. I've never been in a corp with more than 10-15 active members so i am kinda used to "getting blobbed" and of course with "blobbing" all the corps that have even less members. I think for the most part (and i am not talking about you because i know nothing about you) people complaining about blobbing are hypocrites: If the enemy brings more he blobs, if their own guys blob the ** out of some loner noob its because that is how many guys x'ed up in corp chat. Plain and simple hypocrisy. As such i've never (or at least i try not to) judge others because they "needed 20 gazillion friends to kill me". Its more like they had 20 gazillion friends in the next system and i wasn't eager/careful enough to check on that. For me pvp in eve is not only the 3minutes of heart-pumping action but also the (potential) hours of "foreplay" in which opposite gangs gather intel and try to prepare for the fight. My experience says that a lot of battles are already won before they are being fought. Be it a better gang composition, player with higher individual skills and equipment or simply knowing when to fight and when to bail are half of the pvp. That includes the ability to evade the dreaded blob before you get steamrolled or to blob someone who wasn't inclined to do just that. I've learned that this can be done effectively by a group of dedicated players no matter how small they are. Admittedly it can be frustrating and even pathetic (who can't tell a story of being hotdropped while flying a solo bc etc.) but i think one thing is important: In a world where blobbing proves to be no longer effective people relying on it everytime will just cease to fight at all. Of course this could be considered a good thing by many. The way i see it if there was a working anti-blob tool people would just fight even less. Personally i am not poor at all but i still have to grind in one way or another for my ships. Do i regularly risk ships in unfavourable encounters for the fun and lulz? Yes. Can i afford to do so twice a day or whenever some random gang comes into local and wants a "fair fight"? Nope, sorry. Thats just not what eve is imho and this is what risk is all about. Imagine your solution works and we're 10 man in a mixed gang. Along comes a 5 man gang. Now bringing 10 ships would be silly because of the detrimental effects - so are we going to tell 5 pilots to dock up and browse internet ? Maybe we can change into smaller ships (if the circumstances allow) but chances are we can't either because we are far away from home or because game mechanics prohibit the use of smaller ships. (i.e. sentries) I realize this is a slight derail (a rather longwinded one even ) and i apologize for that. But i think whenever such a discussion pops up that there really is no concise and commonly accepted viewpoint on what constitutes blobbing, what should be done about it or even what it does to the game. The only two things most people will agree on: Most of eve are blobbers. But WE are different. I will now leave your thread alone and wish you good luck on your pursuit of answers. -- Originally by:** Jasper Dark I agree! Lets go back into caves and lick rocks!
DigitalCommunist November Corporation	Posted - 2009.05.28 03:11:00 - [8] Blob is a moving goalpost. 40 ships used to be called the mother of all blobs. Now its just a universal term for "big force" and whats big is relative to the size of the game population. You can remove any and all gameplay incentive to gather forces in one area, and people will still do it. The reason I know this is because people were doing it long before there were defensible and attackable positions. Then the question remains, why would you want to stop it? There are only two possible reasons: - server can't handle it - its not fun To the first I say "tough ****", not my problem but CCP's. Add parallelism to their dated node architecture and whatever else is necessary. To the second one, the only reason its not fun (taking lag out of the equation) is because 90% of fittings, ships and tactics become utterly useless. The bigger that two sides become, the less it is about gameplay and more about strategic decision-making. The latter will always be there, but the reason players have a dull time is because combat does not scale. And it doesn't scale because ships have too much overlap in capability. If you could only reliably kill frigates with frigate weapons, for instance, a support heavy fleet might actually be a threat. If you could only reliably kill cruisers with cruiser and frigate weapons, a cruiser heavy fleet won't get utterly torn to shreds by a battleship heavy fleet. In the end, the combat not being scalable is entirely a design decision. If it was, small scale pvp wouldn't be as fun, and would in fact resemble rock-paper-scissors for anything larger than a frig.
darius mclever	Posted - 2009.05.28 03:46:00 - [9] just one thought ... "high-sec wars"? accidental friendly fire? concord? dead mercenary alliances/corps?
Anri O.W.N. Corp OWN Alliance	Posted - 2009.05.28 04:02:00 - [10] Edited by: Anri on 28/05/2009 04:04:00 My 2 isk. Blobs are not a problem. If you have superior numbers bring them. It is the same as saying it is unfair for fleets to field tech 2 ships if the enemy fleet only can field tech 1. Using the advantages you have in resources is not a bad thing and really should not be looked down upon. Outnumbering the enemy isn't everything. I have been involved in battles where the side with greater numbers lost. This was due to the other side employing better ships, tactics and/or the larger force making mistakes. The larger a fleet is, the harder it is to control it properly. It tends to move slower and can become a logistical nightmare. Smaller fleets are more nimble and easier to command. Large fleets tend to get noticed quicker and are less likely to get engaged and thus miss out on more fights and kills. The larger the fleet the more the loot must be divided meaning less profit per pilot. Thus why low sec pirate gate camps are generally not that large. As far as terrain advantage the problem is that space is fairly open. The only possible choke points might be gates and to do so CCP would need to implement a limit as to how many ships can jump though a gate in a certain period of time. Each gate might have different thresholds on how many ships, or mass that can jump though in a given time. Note that there are "traffic advisories" but that is due to a node getting too busy, thus a technical issue and not a tactical or strategic feature. This would be the only possible feature CCP could implement, but it would not lessen blobbing. It would just create a way that a smaller force could hold off a larger invading force. It would also make invading a space much more difficult possibly causing stagnation in the wars over sovereignty. Friendly fire is not an option when the whole philosophy of the game engine is "need for speed". Doing collision calculations for every gun fired would overwhelm the servers and we'd end up with a very unplayable game. As has already been stated. Edit: typos.
Merin Ryskin Blood Money Inc. Blood Money Cartel	Posted - 2009.05.28 04:54:00 - [11] Edited by: Merin Ryskin on 28/05/2009 04:56:14 It's been proposed many times, and the official answer is hardware limits. And it's a problem with the math, not CCP refusing to upgrade their servers. Like it or not, the calculations you're talking about increase exponentially with increasing fleet size. Consider a 10-man fight. To be conservative, we'll assume that there are no non-ship objects, all ships use a single weapon group fired at a single target, the calculations are based on ship center to ship center and not the actual model and turret position on the model, a ship always has line of sight to the target it is firing on as long as no other object blocks it, and there are no additional bandwidth costs. For the 10-man fleet, each ship requires 8 line of sight checks (it doesn't check itself or the target), multiplied by 10 ships = 80 checks per round of shots. Now let's double the size to 20. 18 checks x 20 ships = 320 checks, or a *4x increase. Now add in other objects (drones, asteroids, etc, since obviously CCP is going to want to add interesting stuff to use their new feature), increase the gang sizes a bit, and things suddenly get absurd. For a 100 vs. 100 fleet battle with 100 non-ship objects on the grid, you need 11.8 million* line of sight calculations for each round of fire. But obviously this isn't going to be enough, you might get away with center-to-center LOS checks for sniper fleets at 200km, but nobody is going to be impressed by shots passing through an asteroid just because they missed the center. So guess what that means: now you have to do it using the actual shape of the objects, so your calculations just got even more demanding. Could it be done? Maybe. Is this the best use of all that processing power? I don't think so. -----------
King Rothgar Death of Virtue MeatSausage EXPRESS	Posted - 2009.05.28 05:11:00 - [12] I agree that introducing LoS would basically kill blobbing in it's current form. Unfortunately, it probably isn't doable as that requires client side processing and eve is server side. It's much like the request for joystick control rather than all this clicking crap. Eve would be infinitely better with ****pits, joysticks, crews and so on. But that just can't be done server side, it has to be client side. You can do it in client side games up to a few hundred players but that's the limit to my knowledge. -----------------------------------------------------
something somethingdark	Posted - 2009.05.28 06:46:00 - [13] Currently if you pit fleet vs fleet aka blobing there are a few win condidtions Personal : be on voice comms and folow orders emediatly and to the letter Fleet : Unified setup/tactic An FC who can dirrect his fleet to warp in and out and fire at designated targets with as little commands as possible i.e. everybody knows what they are doing and the fc is there to reafirm them a handfull of support ships like covops and bubblers now if personal and fleet requirements are met its down to who has the "high ground" and who has more battleships high ground being of course who is NOT bubbled for the individual battleship pilot the current form of entertainment is wait, wait, warp in, align, lock target, shoot target, lock target, shoot target, warp out, align, warp in, align , lock target, shoot target ...... now this can be spiced up by 3 diffrent events a) my shields have dissapeared : warp out b) ** they got a bubbler on us : hit mwd, pray that your not primary, warp out c) o titan, warp out c1) oh** bubbler+titan, puff c2) oh**** titan+lag, puff, warp out in a pod c3) etc once you have a little experience with your alliance fleets personal skill for 99% of the fleet members boils down to can you sit infront of the screen for 4 hours and do you have ears all suggestions for a fix are very nice but thers always huge problems in between biggest one being line of sight line of sight would bring so much to this game ranging from basic things like ... where is my ship pointing towards so most guns are actualy exposed to the enemy all the way to formation flying side note: caldari ships would be kings at fights arround structures possibly throwing the whole game balance completly out of whack things like that ... but thats only the player side on the server side if its even possible to calculate all that stuff in paralel in a 500v500 fleet fight the eve cluster would probably cover all of iceland lol that and you are most likely looking at an engine rewrite (aka suecide)
Sabine Perrine Copperhead Inc.	Posted - 2009.05.28 07:15:00 - [14] the friendly fire idea ins interesting and you can take that even further (why can scanners see stuff that is behind a planet relative to you, also why can you see stuff on your overview that is behind a station or asteroid relative to your ship?) but these are all such radical changes that to add them you would need to be implemented very slowly or it would make eve not eve. I think what you really need is some way of forcing a fleet to travel together or make it harder to travel around a system. There by giving increased need for scouts, and meaning that small numbers of ships could gank larger blobs by separating them more easily. However, i think as every nano * will tell you, there is a skill way of avoiding gank squads and carrying the day against a larger foe (anyone who hasn't seen a small group of nano HACs a large gang hasn't live in 0.0) Also: i find that this argument will always be strange as the definitions of 'blob' in empire and 0.0 are so different. 0.0: huh they really did only have 5 people in gang empire: THEY HAD 5 PEOPLE IN GANG GAAAAAANK GAAAAAANK **ING BLOBERS! etc.
eliminator2 Gallente Annihilate. Shock Alliance	Posted - 2009.05.28 07:26:00 - [15] so basicly if this was to ever happen people with war decs would sit outside station wt undocks you shoot him he goes behind a nuetral kaboom concorded
Ulstan	Posted - 2009.05.28 16:41:00 - [16] There are two reasons 'blobbing' isn't used in real life/other video games a) AOE damage b) Congestion Neither of these is really present in EVE. The only real aoe damage is very specialized, smartbombs, bomb launchers, and titans DD. These are all incredibly hard to use effectively in normal situations. I think if there was more aoe damage people might not get as clustered up. (We could substitute AOE ewar instead of we felt like it) The congestion issue is another one: a fleet of 500 ships can (barring lag) jump around from stargate to stargate as fast as a fleet of 5 ships. I don't even want to think of the can of worms opened by trying to implement some kind of bandwith limit on stargate activation, but until that happens, it's not really true that a small gang is faster and more nimble than a bigger gang.

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