CCP | The Wandering Druid of Tranquility

Let’s talk about lag baby…

7 Comments »

…it would seem that I am seeing the same issues many other EVE bloggers are seeing these past few days, too much going on in real life to allow for game play and decent blog entry construction.

Not to worry, things are in the works, problem is that I have about 10 draft posts on various things that I am working on to talk about.

Here’s one for ya as that I have been toying with for almost 2 years now.  It’s a question that came into my head back when I made a decision to stay in lowsec rather than live in nullsec space and oddly enough, the reverse as well about a year later.

Allow me to indulge in some discussion and if you feel so incline, comment or write a blog post to expand your thoughts, but please don’t let this become a rant-fest about lag.

As there have been many forums posts and blog posts concerning lag, what I would like to talk about how have you actively changed your game play to avoid lag.  I am not talking about tweaking to the game client or staging ships in a system before a fight, I am talking about a directly change in game play decisions to avoid lag .

Do you stay in empire to avoid the lag in low sec combat/faction warfare PvP?  Have you held off on joining a nullsec alliance due to the lag reports from large fleet battles that plague the forums and the blog community?

I personally have lived in every security section of EVE from my beginnings in a 1.0 system all the way to nullsec.  By live, I am not talking about traveling through a system nor a region, I am talking about spending months and in some cases, years in a particular division of highsec, lowsec or nullsec.

I can tell you from my experience,  lag does not discriminate.  It’s just as bad in fleet fights in empire as it’s in nullsec.  Granted, the numbers in the battles in 0.0 are significantly larger, but empire has it’s fair share of 15 minute delays to modules activating when there is only 50 people in system.

Have the lag issues that have been present for years affected my game play?  Yes, I would have to say it has.  I held off for a long time heading out into nullsec due to the recurrent lag issues.  I also made the decision to venture into low sec after CCP made some serious headway into curtailing the lag monster.

Where am I heading with this rambling post?  Well, to understand, first you need to know something about me.  I work in IT for a living.  I support desktop users with issues with Outlook, I also address hardware issues on AS/400′s as well as networks and everything in between.  Lag is, unfortunately, not something limited to the gaming world.  Lag or more accurate, network latency, is a constant problem in the rest of the world.

Don’t think so?  Try accessing a popular website during peak hours of internet usage in your country and compare that to the off hours.  You will see a significant change in performance of that website.

What causes that lag?  Well, many things.  The server load at the web server at that given time, the number of people in your country trying to use the same network infrastructure of the Internet, etc…  It’s a multifaceted issue that for the real world, millions upon millions of dollars are spent each month to try to resolve.

EVE has the same issues. CCP has to resolve the every heavy demands of users consuming more and more network bandwidth, server resources and database storage.  It’s a never ending battle that every technology department in the world struggles with.

It’s a rule of the real universe, Users will always grow to consume 150 percent of the resources you put online at any given time.

You can’t win, you really can’t.  All you can hope to do is come close to the user demand.  CCP has a long way to go to resolve the issues, but they fell into a trap that many IT departments fall into.  They stopped making progress toward meeting those end user demands.  I’m not saying that they were not working on the issue, they just stopped making headway and that’s the real trick.  To keep ahead of the surge.

Lag is a menace of not only the EVE gaming universe, but the entire technological side of our world.  It causes millions of dollars is lost work time due to network delays and/or outages.  It wastes our time at work, at home, in traffic due to traffic signal systems failing, etc…

It’s a fact of life that we all hate and I think that is one of the reasons we all have such passions about encountering lag in EVE.  We deal with it in real life everyday and when someone deters our fantasy life, we just snap.  We all need our creature comforts and then those are snatched away, we turn into our own kind of monsters.

What do you think?

Tags:

Related posts

CCP, Discussion Point, Server Issues August 18th 2010

Threadnaught has entered “siege mode”

22 Comments »

Oh my. I’ve not seen a forums thread filled with so much venomous anger since I played Star Wars Galaxies and SOE had just released the NGE.

THREADNAUGHT

I can’t say I am shocked by recent events. I called this back when I was posting about how Dominion was potentially an NGE event. It seems that the quality of EVE Online has fallen since that expansion considerably.

Many people are angry and want answers but more importantly, we want accountability, honesty and ultimately our beloved game fixed.

So, am I going to rant about it here?  No, I just can’t bring myself to rake them over the coals. I can’t. If an army fails to take a beachhead, who is to blame? The generals who were leading that army.

Good leadership and organization comes from the top down and that’s who you blame when the advance fails. The soldiers may be smart, but they have to follow orders and when those orders are faulty, objectives are not achieved.

Look, if CCP is to succeed and find a way out of this mess, they need to realize that they have bitten off more than they can chew. They need help. It’s obvious that they simply do not have the resources to fix the current game play issues and release the Incarna/Dust expansions that they need for cash flow.

CCP, you have a time honored tradition of doing things differently, perhaps it’s time to get back to those roots. You need help from both a business standpoint and a technical one.

Let us, the community, help you. We are one of the greatest gaming communities out there and we are so angry because we are eager to continue be part of something that we together have spent many years building.

The CSM has people who are very business savvy. Mynxee and her in game friend Venom Orchid have collectively forgotten more about how to run a business than you will ever know. Talk to them, listen to their words and do what they are telling you. They have more to offer you than you can see.

At the FanFests, you are always telling use how impressed you are with the multitude of third party applications that exist, such as the EVE Dev billboards, EVEmon and Capsuleer. Obviously you have a number of technically capable people who like to spend time coding on EVE related applications. Get these people to sign an NDA, send them the code and let them have at it. It might surprise you what they can produce.

Thoughts?

Tags: , , , ,

Related posts

No Local Exploit

No Comments »

Yup, it’s true.

There is a lovely EVE Forums “threadnaught” on this issue and now a story over at Massively on this now confirmed exploit.

What’s the issue?

Well, the TL;DR is that with a bit of coding work, you can create a way in which you will not show up in the local chat in normal space, thus surprise your target as they don’t see you coming.

Is this an exploit?  In a word, yes and it’s an interesting one.

Head over to the EVE forums and read the thread, it’s about 37 pages at the time of this post.  There is some very convincing video of this exploit being used by more than one individual.

The real kicker here is that CCP has yet to respond to this whole drama as it’s been building on their forums all day.

As to how this can be fixed, well, I am not a programmer, I have no idea.

Until CCP responds, I would urge everyone to stay calm.  I am sure there will be more news on this problem soon.

Tags: , , , ,

Related posts

CCP, EVE Forums Posts April 22nd 2010

I hope you like flying a freighter, your time has come!

12 Comments »

Well, here we are.  Dominion has been deployed and ahead of schedule.  Well done CCP.

I am at a loss as to what to write about Dominion.  Many of my fellow bloggers have pretty much hit on most of the awesomeness and I am continuing to add blog posts to this Google collection, so, please do take the time to read everything.  There is a lot and it’s worth it for the screenies.  Planets look awesome!

After looking at all the new sovereignty structures, I can see that freighters will be used a lot and I mean A LOT.  If you want to deploy a Territorial Claim Unit to claim sovereignty, you can do that with a transport ship.

If you want to deploy an Infrastructure Hub, you need 750,000 m3 of cargo space to carry it.  That means a freighter.  You want to install an upgrade?  You need 500,000 m3 of cargo space to carry one upgrade.

So, if you build freighters for a living in game, get busy, they demand for them just soared.  Build away my little industrialists, your time to make lots of isk is at hand.

Now, with any patch or expansion, there will be issues and people will go nuts trying to sort them out.  Head over to http://www.eveonline.com/updates/knownissues.asp and get up to speed with the issues that currently exist with the new patch.  Just a note, as of this blog post, most of these issues are being addressed with the patch being released on Thursday between 0930 and 1200 game time.  Set those long skills again.

See you out there!

Tags: , , , , , , ,

Related posts

CCP, Dominon, Expansions December 2nd 2009

Patch Day!!

2 Comments »

We come to it again, Patch Day.  This is the time where everyone in EVE Online spends an entire day sitting with clenched teeth and butterflies in their bellies.

IF YOU ARE READING THIS BLOG POST AT THE VERY MOMENT THAT IT WENT LIVE ON MY BLOG, GO SET A LONG SKILL THAT WILL TAKE MORE THAN 2 DAYS TO TRAIN NOW!!!!!

I always seems to come across a post on the EVE forums that  someone complaining either before or after Patch Day that they forget to set a long skill or did not set a long skill to cover the extension to the Patch Day outage.  We have also seen in the past that Patch Day will start early and we have see Patch Day be extended longer than planed, SO FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THINGS SACRED, GO SET THAT LONG SKILL RIGHT NOW!!

Ahem, sorry about that, it had to be said…..AGAIN!

While we are all waiting for the Dominion Expansion to be deployed and for our updated game clients to download and install, you have some free time.  Go outside, breath the fresh air, clean the kitchen sink, do some laundry and when you come back, go do something else as watch Patch Day is like watching the kettle on the stove boil water.  It will take longer than you think it will.

While you are waiting, here are some things to keep you occupied:

See you out there!!

Thanx to Seraphina Orina for the suggestion to listen to EVE Radio!

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Related posts

CCP, Dominon, Expansions, Patch Notes November 30th 2009