Blazde
4S Corporation
Morsus Mihi
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Posted - 2008.09.27 12:42:00 -
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I'll hold off full enthusiasm until the long term effect on fleet battes is clearer but it's most definetely fantastic to see core technology being ovehauled like this, and cool devblogs to boot 
Couple of observations so far:
Of the two big battles I've experienced since the change (WH-JCA on 16th 22:00 - 01:00, local peaked at 440,
and M-OEE8 21st 21:00 - 22:00, local around 250) both had very different lag conditions to what I'd usually expect. My ship was generally more responsive and client seemed to stay updated more often. No staring at an empty grid for 5 minutes before loading, no 5 minute activation lag.
However there was plenty of new weirdness, in the first:
- Several people jumping in to system and ending up inside the station, ship intact
- Several people blackscreening for an hour during login/undock and their ship only appearing ingame when they logged of
- One report of a ship remaining in space for 45 minutes (after which GMs intervened)after log-off in a nearby quiet system after leaving the battle. This bug isn't totally new but I've never seen it so extreme as this.
- A few reports of 'ghost' ships.
A good example:
 Quote:
the systems around there are still quite messed up. We've been probing and destroying ships that logged off hours ago. When they blow up, a wreck appears, but the ship remains there and becomes unlockable. There's a bob hurricane that has been sitting on a gate in WH for several hours now, and a few jumps down towards TVN, a phantom tri gang on a gate. You jump in and there's about 5 or 6 ships sitting around the gate, all unlockable, and none of them are in local. If you bump them, they slowboat back to where they were.
In the second battle and a very similar one about an hour before there was:
- Huge numbers of unlockable 'ghost' ships, mostly where ships had died.
- Two occurences of what felt like an almost-but-not-quite node death, requiring everyone to relog during which many dead (and damaged) ships returned to full health, in many cases after insurance had already been paid for the lost ships.
- Around 50-75% of killmails never being generated.
I hate to say it but it was categorically worse than before StacklessIO was introduced. I'm assuming it's minor teething problems and will be (or has been) quickly diagnosed and fixed, I'm just saying don't be too fast to relax and sign it off as a job well done 
More generally I'm little concerned about your attention to Jita. Lag conditions in jita are presumably pretty repeatable, or predictable rather, so it serves as a good base line metric to measure changes with. But I really wish you'd analyse fleet battles (lowsec FW and 0.0) more closely than it always appears you do. The weird unexpected bugs and lag conditions are more likely to crop up in fleet warfare because players tend to create less common place, 'extreme' node stress conditions (as a simple example it will never happen that hundreds of ships simultaneously activate mwd in close proximity in Jita).
There are still big issues with excess lag created by carriers. There are very common desyncs that occur when capital sized ships collide that put people's supercaps in danger on a daily basis. That ships often remain in space after log off longer than they should in lag is also very serious. We as players can't submit simple repro steps and get these things fixed. It requires careful logging and analyse of real fleet situations server side.
I strongly suspect that more attention to these situations will uncover performance bugs the improve all of EVE. Even if they don't, fleet battles are simply a more critical aspect of EVE than the performance of Jita. At the end of the day I can schedule my trade activities for off-peak times and a little lag in Jita is no big deal compared to it's affect on territorial warfare.
But like I said thumbs up, good to see substantial changes.
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