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Alright, hereÆs the scoop:

ò A carrier can launch up to three times more drones than a normal ship at one time and MSes up to 5 times
ò Drones increase server instability at an exponential rate
ò Drones will auto-aggro and keep killing stuff, even if everyone else is lagged, making them ôimmuneö to lag
ò Lag really sucks
ò Solutions like upgrading servers to alleviate the lag are expensive and fleeting at best, since as the capacity for fighters increases, more people will come in and reach the max capacity again (see: Jita overpopulation)

Carriers and MSes create an inordinate amount of lag because they can launch more drones than any other ship. While twenty normal ships may collectively launch 100 drones, twenty carriers will launch 300. At this point, trying to do anything in system becomes futile, where the server is so flooded that it can take more than 5, 10, or even 15 minutes to respond to player commands.

Since the number of interactions with the server is a value of n^3, lag increases exponentially with each new drone launched.

ò 5 drones require 125 times more server calculations than just one. (5^3 / 1)
ò 15 drones require 27 times more server calculations than five. (15^3 / 5^3)
ò 25 drones require 125 times more server calculations than five, and 15,625 times more calculations than a single drone.

Reducing fighter counts could create profound improvements in server performance, and considering the same was done for normal ships in RMR, itÆs not an outrageous request.

What we, the undersigned, want is just for CCP to acknowledge fighter spam lag as a priority issue and make fixing and adjusting it a goal in an upcoming patch, whenever that may be. Combat cannot occur as the game was designed without distinct and effective action from CCP.

The quote below is just an example of what could work, though whatever happens is not as important as making sure something happens. This idea can be scrapped if a better idea works just as well.

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1. you can only have 1 fighter delegated to your ship at once instead of 5. That means any ship with a fighter assigned only get to use that 1 fighter and no other drones.

2. Reduce maximum deployable fighters from a carrier at any time to 5.

3. Make the Drone Interfacing skill apply to fighters so that at level V fighters get +100% damage and +100% HP.

4. give motherships an added +20% to drone damage and HP per level on top of what they already have. The Nyx gets +25% per level to keep it as it is.

5. Drone Control Units; Since the DPS of the whole thing is determined first by multiplication and then adding stuff, giving DCUs a percentage-based increase to anything drone related won't scale properly for a mothership and in the end would make something either gimped or absolutely insane. As a cheap cop-out, make it so DCUs add +20 damage to each of the 5 fighters, which gives a +100 total damage with one DCU (same damage increase as is now) and +500 total damage with 5 DCUs. Only place where that breaks down is that it would a sort of a stealth nerf to the Nyx and Thanatos, since before they would get more damage out of the additional fighters they could use. The technical limitations behind this may make it impossible to get this to work properly without reworking Drone Control Units in general.

6. reduce the drone capacity on carriers and MSes appropriately, since they seem to be designed to carry only a limited number of fighters.

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Other, more complicated changes are also an option, but the bottom line is that something has to change.

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