"When pilots have been baptized in the fire of time dilation, they have all one rank in my eyes."
In addition to scams, espionage and political maneuvering,
Eve Online is know for its epic wars and epic battles. How epic? Fights involving 1,000 players are not uncommon in 0.0 space and fights of up to 2,000 players are playable. How does CCP do that?
Time dilation. When the servers start to become overloaded and begins to lag, time slows down in order to allow the servers to catch up with the requests.
The result? Lovelocke gave an example in
his battle report on a battle in 92D-OI on 21 January:
"We carried on fighting, many of us died and we killed many. But do you know what was most remarkable about this fight? The lag was barely noticeable. 1400+ in local, super capitals with fighter bombers swarming, doomsdays, Drake missiles, etc, yet with TiDi in full force there were no crashes, no unresponsive modules, no MWD’s that wouldn’t turn off. Astonishing. I still don’t fully understand what TiDi is, its explanation far too technical for my fragile little mind, but whatever it is CCP have certainly struck gold. This was by far a huge improvement over even smaller battles I’ve encountered in the past."
Many pilots shower disdain on the "blob" warfare in 0.0, preferring smaller fights in wormholes or low sec. Others shy away from combat altogether. In Eve Online, players have a choice of how they want to play. But to my knowledge, no other MMORPG offers the scale of combat and war that
Eve players take as a normal part of day to day life.
I'll take a stab at explaining Tidi (disclaimer: I'm not all that technical and this could be wrong).
ReplyDeleteNormally in a massive multiplayer game when lots of people try to do things at once it overloads the hamsters running the show. With Tidi all actions are queued. However the queues are very very small. So in a microsecond instead of you trying to fire your guns a bazzillionty-one times and confusing the hamsters, you get to fire your gun once, after queuing for a microsecond or two.
People, not being hamsters, can't differentiate between microseconds so we think there's no lag when in fact we have to wait in a very very short queue.