The worst lag was when people were jumping in, wouldn't reopening the Brian in the Box idea really have helped in this instance?

sustained beam projected AOE

Indeed, that's the work that Gridlock has been working towards.

The worst lag was when people were jumping in, wouldn't reopening the Brian in the Box idea really have helped in this instance? I think we're all used to module lag, and lag moving about etc, it's the reappearance of the black screen of death that was majorly concerning.

When you can't load grid, you can't turn on hardeners, and you're alpha'd off the field before it loads. That's not fun game play.

The worst lag was when people were jumping in, wouldn't reopening the Brian in the Box idea really have helped in this instance? I think we're all used to module lag, and lag moving about etc, it's the reappearance of the black screen of death that was majorly concerning.

Interesting information.

I wonder if it makes sense to simply remove sentry drones from the physics simulation, keep them perfectly still, and to stop sending unique per-sentry firing information to every observer above a certain TIDI factor, although clearly you would still want to show them to the person being shot at, and their owner.

That would shake up the meta.

Indeed, that's the work that Gridlock has been working towards.

Why has no brain in a box work has occurred? This surely would have improved the jumpin/out experience of so many that were stuck in warp tunnels for hours.

Brain in the box work is happening

how happening

happening in the sense that "oh that's a good idea we should do it sometime once we're finished with dust" or "actual work has been going on since it was announced"

The other bit is that the decision making code behind drone behavior does a poor job of scaling, often considering all attackable objects on grid when figuring out who to go after.

how happening

happening in the sense that "oh that's a good idea we should do it sometime once we're finished with dust" or "actual work has been going on since it was announced"

The fight that happened in HED-GP has been the object of discussion for the last few days, and specifically the technical aspect of it. Our resident space-wizard, CCP Veritas, wrote a technical retrospective on the events in HED and how they compare to another heavy fight that happened in 6VDT.

Read it here.

Actual work has happened since Brain in a Box was announced. I don't want to go into amazing details 'cause it could be a devblog of its own, or maybe a Fanfest presentation or something, but I spent about 6 months solid on it personally before I got promoted to technical director. Early in the process I discovered that the fundamental design of Dogma was going to get in the way of implementing BiaB, so I started rewriting that foundation. Since then we had one failed attempt to boot it up with a different team. In December we gave it another spin and I'm very happy with the composition of the new team. I believe once they've come up to speed with the system they'll be able to knock out work at a great pace and put me to shame.

A general response here:
I'm fundamentally against any solution that proposes to change game mechanics based on TiDi factor. The purpose of Time Dilation was to maintain game mechanics under high load, not to give a platform to distort them.

how happening

happening in the sense that "oh that's a good idea we should do it sometime once we're finished with dust" or "actual work has been going on since it was announced"

What is "Dogma"? I'm sure you've mentioned it before but I can't remember what that system is.

What is "Dogma"? I'm sure you've mentioned it before but I can't remember what that system is.

edit: also, I hope CCP keeps your team intact: this sort of thing should be ongoing since this sort of stuff is really key for the game and these sort of massive battles being playable is a huge selling point to new people and retention for existing people (and, them being not playable leads to a lot of "**** this **** i'm out")

Guess in the end, it was the 1000 domis that doomed CFCRUS.

It was not covered in the devblog but is there a significant difference between drones when it comes to the load on the server? There is a suggestion that all drones cause lag because they are self-contained units that need to move and shoot, implying that Warrior IIs are just as much a source of lag as Garde IIs. If that is the case, why all the furore about droneboats when most ships in these fights will be sporting their own flights which will be lagging out the system whether they are assisted to a player or not.

A general response here:
I'm fundamentally against any solution that proposes to change game mechanics based on TiDi factor. The purpose of Time Dilation was to maintain game mechanics under high load, not to give a platform to distort them.

Indeed, for the most part a drone is a drone is a drone. There is, however, a difference between a ship who has a standard dronebay and a drone-focused boat that's going to have space for spare flights and such. In the first case you'll have drones, sure, but they can be cleared by AoE and then you don't have drones.

Then if you are against any solution that changes game mechanics

Ah, so when the system approach 10% TiDi, all drones recall automatically due to "system interference" which would even be true.

Would also encourage peeps to stop using those idiotic ships.

+1 for Drone swarms (i.e. groups), because how often do people not apply all their drones to a single target?

Hell, go one step further all put all drones attacking a single target into an aggregate group? If 15 drones from three attackers are on one target, then treat those 15 drones as one single drone swarm. (Yes, abstracting different drones into one attack is non-trivial.)

How much does a drone "lost" in space cost in performance? What if you have thousands of them? We are not supposed to drop large quantity of jet cans in space because it can cause lag and I would assume drones are counted as objects too.

How about entirely removing the auto attack behavior of drones and have the controler have to actaully control them with direct command/trigger on ship attack/assistant attack? Wouldn't that remove some of the ridiculous load generated by the thousand entities in space trying to analyse wich one of the 4k ships in space should be the next default target?

It's also eliminate some AFK play...

As soon as we find a way to make different drones with different stats behave the same way...

+1 for Drone swarms (i.e. groups), because how often do people not apply all their drones to a single target?

Hell, go one step further all put all drones attacking a single target into an aggregate group? If 15 drones from three attackers are on one target, then treat those 15 drones as one single drone swarm. (Yes, abstracting different drones into one attack is non-trivial.)

Or bring sentry drones in line with other battleship weapon systems in terms of tracking, optimal, rate of fire and dps. If both sides in a fight are bringing the same thing- and literally everyone else from the alliance tournament on down to every current fleet concept in 0.0 are using the sentry drone then clearly the thing needs to raise some eyebrows.

In hed we couldn't set drone assist when turkey shooting.
It was all done manually. Got another point?

As soon as we find a way to make different drones with different stats behave the same way...

If drone assist was not working, it means every single drone had to find a target by itself or wait for a direct command. All those drones then go through the whole list of ship on grid and check if they are a good target. This will add to the load. If dones were just unable to direct themself, it would mean those thousands of things in space start morking more closely to ship because the server don't "think" for them.

The worst lag was when people were jumping in, wouldn't reopening the Brian in the Box idea really have helped in this instance? I think we're all used to module lag, and lag moving about etc, it's the reappearance of the black screen of death that was majorly concerning.

When you can't load grid, you can't turn on hardeners, and you're alpha'd off the field before it loads. That's not fun game play.

Herpa ...derp... derp..... derp.....Guess you guys shouldn't of jumped your capital fleet on the same god damn grid with your domi fleet + 5,000k drones in addition to N3/PL fleet.......

Given a group of drones, calculate the average DPS and damage type(s) into one attack. This calculation is done once when the group is created, i.e. it creates a single unique drone attack instead of 5 individual drone attacks.

Abstracting maneuverability is a bit trickier, but leveling out drone performance (e.g. all lights travel the same speed) is one method. Giving drones a micro MJD in place of an MWD is another way.

Unless they make drone totally immobile unless jumping, then the load will be the same or more if the drone calculate himself if he should jump or "slowboat". Each gun attack also need to be calculated individually to be on equal term as guns even if groupped.

Whatever that is what you all want is to nerf all the TIME i have put into new skills.
Reimburse SP then because it's pretty stupid to go chasing goats everytime CCP can't find a solution and people cry.
That's what pisses me off. FIX it not nerf or remove FFS.
How many times does it have to happen till you all realize a patch is not a fix and that's exactly what always happens.

Would stripping sentry drones from all movement capabilties (ie. turning them into deployed turrets) help solve some of the lag related to them? After all, it takes all movement calculations out of the equations while nobody is going to miss that 1m/s..

No, and no.

Would stripping sentry drones from all movement capabilties (ie. turning them into deployed turrets) help solve some of the lag related to them? After all, it takes all movement calculations out of the equations while nobody is going to miss that 1m/s..

Guess in the end, it was the 1000 domis that doomed CFCRUS.

+1 for Drone swarms (i.e. groups), because how often do people not apply all their drones to a single target?

Hell, go one step further all put all drones attacking a single target into an aggregate group? If 15 drones from three attackers are on one target, then treat those 15 drones as one single drone swarm. (Yes, abstracting different drones into one attack is non-trivial.)

Actual work has happened since Brain in a Box was announced. I don't want to go into amazing details 'cause it could be a devblog of its own, or maybe a Fanfest presentation or something, but I spent about 6 months solid on it personally before I got promoted to technical director. Early in the process I discovered that the fundamental design of Dogma was going to get in the way of implementing BiaB, so I started rewriting that foundation. Since then we had one failed attempt to boot it up with a different team. In December we gave it another spin and I'm very happy with the composition of the new team. I believe once they've come up to speed with the system they'll be able to knock out work at a great pace and put me to shame.

If they are not immobile, they still have to keep moving so that calculation is not saved at all. Why would they be given a single attack when grouped guns do not?

I feel a new drone nerf module on the horizon Rubicon 1.2 perhaps?

Herpa ...derp... derp..... derp.....Guess you guys shouldn't of jumped your capital fleet on the same god damn grid with your domi fleet + 5,000k drones in addition to N3/PL fleet.......

I feel a new drone nerf module on the horizon Rubicon 1.2 perhaps?

Yep, that was extremely dumb. And the people involved should be shot. Luckily, that's not my call.

What is my concern is that we have another situation where 'on grid first' wins.

This seems like a very contradictory statement to me.

You admit that jumping 1000 domnixes (which did absolutely nothing in terms of doing damage in the fight) was a stupid decision that caused a large amount of lag that severely hampered your dreadnought fleet. If those 700 dreads were actually functioning, even at reduced level, it would have been absolutely terrifying.

This effect is compounded by how it was so laggy that the drone assist on slowcats was not working at all, and that the modlue lag was long enough that it would be very difficult if not impossible for the carriers/supers to get any reps down before the targets died to overwhelming alpha.

Even if you lose the majority of the dread fleet, there were a heck of a lot of soft targets (ragnorak/hels/wyverns) to kill off first to at least get the isk efficiency number in the green.

Actual work has happened since Brain in a Box was announced. I don't want to go into amazing details 'cause it could be a devblog of its own, or maybe a Fanfest presentation or something

I'm struggling to find a doctrine for large scale fights that isn't drone based.

besides caps being able to field 3x's the amount drones that of any other ship which seems strange in itself ( maybe nerf down to 10 and remove drones from caps altogether fighters only since their capital weapons and all) ... perhaps another way of reducing the amount of caps on field is too make fighters require actual pilots too fly fighters/bombers...

EVE Valkyrie comes too mind here..

Only having one objective to kill/protect in these sov related battles is terrible. But you can't just add more objectives in the same system because that is still the same load on on system. So the solution is to make the gates leading to the system being contested equally important. Now instead of one system trying to support thousands upon thousands of players, the weight is spread across a few systems. Each system on its own reinforced node.

Still one giant battle, but far more playable and hamster friendly.

Won't people send all they have to system 1 and if they win go to system 2 then 3 then whatever because they are facing smaller fleet distributed over numerous systems which can be moved to all the time thanks to power projection?

To be clear, the majority of drones quoted in the post were sentry drones, not fighters or fighter bombers.

Also, carriers can only field 10 drones, and for most people only 9 since they havent put in the time for carrier 5.

Not if winning means you need to win all the objectives at the same time.

Not if winning means you need to win all the objectives at the same time.

Should I refer to Advanced Drone Interfacing?

Or is that still capped to 10, even with Drone Control Units?

To be clear, the majority of drones quoted in the post were sentry drones, not fighters or fighter bombers.

Also, carriers can only field 10 drones, and for most people only 9 since they havent put in the time for carrier 5.

Not if winning means you need to win all the objectives at the same time.

You admit that jumping 1000 domnixes (which did absolutely nothing in terms of doing damage in the fight) was a stupid decision that caused a large amount of lag that severely hampered your dreadnought fleet. If those 700 dreads were actually functioning, even at reduced level, it would have been absolutely terrifying.

This effect is compounded by how it was so laggy that the drone assist on slowcats was not working at all, and that the modlue lag was long enough that it would be very difficult if not impossible for the carriers/supers to get any reps down before the targets died to overwhelming alpha.

Even if you lose the majority of the dread fleet, there were a heck of a lot of soft targets (ragnorak/hels/wyverns) to kill off first to at least get the isk efficiency number in the green.

Should I refer to Advanced Drone Interfacing?

Or is that still capped to 10, even with Drone Control Units?

Only having one objective to kill/protect in these sov related battles is terrible. But you can't just add more objectives in the same system because that is still the same load on on system. So the solution is to make the gates leading to the system being contested equally important. Now instead of one system trying to support thousands upon thousands of players, the weight is spread across a few systems. Each system on its own reinforced node.

Still one giant battle, but far more playable and hamster friendly.

As good as this would be, I've never once seen an actual system proposal where the correct answer isn't still to blob up and hit each group of defenders/attackers one at a time if they split up.

Fix drones!

Nobody fits drone control units in fleet PVP.

The only way to stop blobs, is to remove the big timers.

Turn Sov fights into /lots/ of little fights, which have to happen over time.

Which is grinding. And this impacts on fun levels. (Though the current blob system isn't so much fun either. Or so it appears. I'm not involved)

That's not what I said. I'm against any solution that alters game mechanics based on what the TiDi factor is. Changes to game mechanics that do not rely on the TiDi factor are not covered by this statement.

You still need an objective to shoot and it will have a timer to prevent people from using the other side's weak TZ to plow through countless systems...

You still need an objective to shoot and it will have a timer to prevent people from using the other side's weak TZ to plow through countless systems...

And so cameth the great drone nerf of 2014...

All at same time means defenders only go to one. The obvious adjustment is "majority of encounters" and as you said they run simultaneously. It certainly looks like a possible method for consideration. Unfortunately HED has only two gates and one is in High Sec. I still like splitting the encounter between systems. Another idea is to reduce effectiveness of large fleets, thus limiting their deployment.

besides caps being able to field 3x's the amount drones that of any other ship which seems strange in itself ( maybe nerf down to 10 and remove drones from caps altogether fighters only since their capital weapons and all) ... perhaps another way of reducing the amount of caps on field is too make fighters require actual pilots too fly fighters/bombers...

This is one of the bounding scaling factors in large fleet fights, the unavoidable O(n2) situation where n people do things that n people need to see...

There is no need or reason to be able to see (or be notified of) drone fire, laser fire, nos effects, etc. when there is TiDi on a server. Simplify and compromise algorithms so you do not have O(n^2) under TiDi.

Would stripping sentry drones from all movement capabilties (ie. turning them into deployed turrets) help solve some of the lag related to them? After all, it takes all movement calculations out of the equations while nobody is going to miss that 1m/s..

Actual work has happened since Brain in a Box was announced. I don't want to go into amazing details 'cause it could be a devblog of its own, or maybe a Fanfest presentation or something

How much does a drone "lost" in space cost in performance?

How about entirely removing the auto attack behavior of drones

Would stripping sentry drones from all movement capabilties (ie. turning them into deployed turrets) help solve some of the lag related to them? After all, it takes all movement calculations out of the equations while nobody is going to miss that 1m/s..

There's been some speculation that loading inventories is server-intensive and that capitals, due to multiple inventory bays, may cause higher lag - is that correct?

Also, what sort of lag does refitting in space put on the node? Does refitting trigger the same sort of intense calculations brain in the box is intended to fix, because you've suddenly got to apply all sorts of new bonuses to new mods?

Prior to the fight CCP had to take down G-0 (our staging) and HED. This was because they were both located on the same node. This has occurred many times and has been escalated before. Why have more nodes not been put in the reinforcement pool?

How far would TiDi have to have gone to keep Dogma Lateness at zero? 5%? 1%? 0.01%?

I haven't tested it specifically, but if there is an increased load due to their inventory I doubt it'd be directly because of multiple bays. Under the hood it's just one inventory with stuff identifying which bay it's in.


No, it doesn't. The modifiers from skills and such are already set up they just get picked up by the new module. I don't expect refitting would cause much load but I haven't tested it.

Yeah, a separate drone setting for that makes sense to me. I know I'd use it as a player for sure.

Getting back to drone swarms (aka drone grouping to reduce lag,) homogeneous drone grouping (launching the same type of drones) could be encouraged by providing a "synergy" bonus for such groups. If you launch 5 Warrior IIs as a group, you get a 10% buff to their stats.

Optionally, (or not so optionally nowadays,) if you launch mixed drone types or launch them individually, then you get a 20% de-buff to their stats.

You still need an objective to shoot and it will have a timer to prevent people from using the other side's weak TZ to plow through countless systems...

Is this not what the Aggressive/Passive option does?

Allright, post-nap replyathon!

Yes. Removing their desire to approach and orbit would reduce the amount of messages they generate.

when is drone assist being removed

Why not assign fighter drone mechanic to all drones ?
So you can control as many drones as you can use at current ship capabilities.

The only reason why people are using drones - is current drone assist mechanic.

If servers are overloaded by sentry doctrines why not to change this assist mechanic for sentry drones.
This will again make gun doctrines primary ones and as we all know they are manageable by servers.



Current status from logical perspective is strange.
AI drones - that require control and bandwidth - you can assign as many of them to a ceptor as you want. Thousands - no problem.

Fighters - in game piloted by pilots - you can assign only 5 to a subcap.

As far as I know, Brain in a Box was never closed; the hold-up is in unraveling the legacy spaghetti-code, whose voodoo underpins the existing systems.

Perhaps get the people from Team Super Friends to give a hand...they aren't doing anything constructive atm.

Ah, so when the system approach 10% TiDi, all drones recall automatically due to "system interference" which would even be true.

Would also encourage peeps to stop using those idiotic ships.

You mean so they are treated as guns? They still need to be targetable but at least what you say makes sense :)

Prior to the fight CCP had to take down G-0 (our staging) and HED. This was because they were both located on the same node. This has occurred many times and has been escalated before. Why have more nodes not been put in the reinforcement pool?

Unavoidable O(n^2) things don't exist. Certainly not in a game. You can always optimize and compromise to avoid them.

So what can you do to avoid these n^2 problems? How about turning off collision detection (except with POS force field, for example) when TiDi is above some limit? I'm assuming you do not do collision detection with warp bubbles already unless warp attempt is actually initiated.

Everything else in EVE is not O(n^2) complex since there are limits - lock limits, watch list limits, etc. Because those limits exist, interaction complexity should not be O(n^2). Network traffic may still scale at O(n^2), but that can be managed and optimized at other nodes, not grid node (for example, I don't care if ship at 100km updates its position as frequently as a ship at 15km)

The only event that a client needs to be told is when the ship dies. Player X does not care that a drone is orbiting player B, especially when drones are not visible to player B! Sort and compromise so things scale. Send aggregate updates to clients that actually need to know about sum of events, not specific event. Player X does not care that Drone 123 hit for 5 dmg and Drone 154 hit for 20. It only cares that Player X sustained 25 damage in a given tick *iff* Player X is either locked by player B or is in Player B's watchlist. If Player B does not lock player X (and not in watch list), then Player B does not care that player X sustains damage.


There is no need or reason to be able to see (or be notified of) drone fire, laser fire, nos effects, etc. when there is TiDi on a server. Simplify and compromise algorithms so you do not have O(n^2) under TiDi.

No, we did not live remap HED-GP. We only live remapped G-0Q86 because it was on the same node as HED-GP.

(We also live remapped Rens and Hysera at a similar time, but for completely different reasons.)

Unavoidable O(n^2) things don't exist.

That is even worse. One side was completely screwed by this.

wait, your staging system got taken OFF the same node as the fight and you claim you got screwed by this ?

Exactly. Think it through.

In a thread about server performance, you want to introduce AOE.

Not sure if trolling or daft...

Implementing AOE drone tracking / optimal nerfs is an O(N) operation where N is the total number of disruption beams active and would be a significant step in balancing the slowcat / sentry meta.

In a small fleet fight nobody is going to go to the effort to deploy large cap logistics chains and dedicated drone disruption battleships, but as the size of the enemy sentry carrier / domi fleet increases, it would become more practical to dedicate fleet members to fielding them.

Hence there would be a natural counter to sentry blobs growing too big. Depending in how such a module was balanced, 5 to 10 AOE disruption beams in addition to 50+ subcap energy chain logistics ships to support them could potentially nerf a few hundred sentry carriers.

Why another crap nerf instead of fixing lag?
Just curious.

We did. One of the reasons your plan to crash the node got screwed. CCP - Gewnz 1:0

wait, your staging system got taken OFF the same node as the fight and you claim you got screwed by this ?

Really pleased that CCP is trying to fix the large fleet battle issues.

At the moment, winning large battles like this is more about knowing how to exploit server limitations than actual skill in-game, which spoils it.

BTW, there's been on ongoing trend for some time for some parties to spam local chat. mostly with text graphics, in the belief that they'll induce more system lag by doing so.

Is this still an issue? And if so, would CCP consider rate-limiting the local chat to mitigate it?

They should have never been on the same node in the first place. Then the live remap disconnected everyone in G-0.

Jeez man don't they teach you how to multiquote?

Because if you "fixed lag" all they'd do is bring in more carriers and launch another 2000 drones until it did crash again?

On a side note, we have gun drones, so why can't we have missile drones?

/ducks

So nerf blobs

instead of game mechanics.

Here's a thought... stop using drones as a balance mechanic for every god damn ship in game. Drones should be super rare to see on almost any ship except a drone class ship. You guys have added them wrongfully to so many ships they do not belong on simply because you have no clue how to balance your game. So you resort to the option that... oh drone bay can give the ship more umph... when it makes absolutely no sense on the ships you give it too.


FIX THE GOD DAMN TRACKING FORMULA