Meiyang Lee
Gallente
Azteca Transportation Unlimited
Gunboat Diplomacy
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Posted - 2010.11.16 20:51:00 -
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Edited by: Meiyang Lee on 16/11/2010 20:52:46
 Originally by: Bartholomeus Crane
Encouraging graph (well, the first one). It's clear that the pooling of resources into a specific task-force to attack lag is slowly bearing fruit. Although I understand that from a managerial point of view, employee mobility and adaptability has it's advantages, for specific and hard problems like this, that organisational model is just not as effective as a dedicated and specialist team. I hope the progress made thus far, partially reflected in the graph, supports this case.
As for the 'Drake graph', I'd be careful to attach too much importance to it. It's easy to end up in a race-condition that way. Nerf the Drake and the Hurricane will take it's place as the blobbing ship in 0.0. Nerf the Hurricane and in turn another ship will take it's place. Etc.
The underlying problem is not necessarily the ship used and it's CPU utilisation. That's just a symptom of the fact that the Drake, and several other ships like it, are well suited for the blobbing warfare becoming more and more prevalent within EVE. I'm quite sure that you'll find a correlation between the latter trend and the use of several of these ships. Nerfing these ships may hide or move the symptoms, but what's called for is not nerfing a ship against another, or even a technological solution, but a design decision.
Although polishing code based on profiling is always a good idea, at least an equivalent effort should be made to bringing emergent pressure to bear in the design of the game to spread out player utilisation across the cluster and to diminish topical utilisation hotspots (i.e. blobbing).
The trouble isn't really the drake as such, it's the fact that every single missile fired in a fight is an entity, TQ needs to track every single one to it's target before resolving damage.
This basically makes every missile fired count in a similar faction to an additional ship in the fight. Imagine a 500v500 fight with drakes, each side is spawning 3500 additional "ship entities" every firing cycle, not even counting drones (another potential 2500 entities).
That is what messes up TQ if I understood the dev explanation correctly (not sure where I read it though).
What they hope to do (and have done to Fighter-Bomber missiles as a temp fix) is turn them into virtual missiles. That basically takes the entity spawning step out of the loop for all missiles. Freeing up quite a bit of CPU on a node since there are far fewer entities to track in a given fight.
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