…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: Lag
