How to kill blobs?

[MahrinSkel]

Additionally, they have no way of dynamically rebalancing nodes, they have to shut a node down completely to transfer it to different hardware.  So, if you can warn them ahead of time, they can provide a dedicated node.  Even then you can get a situation like the F-T honeypot, where over 2000 players were prepared to fight in a single system.  But often there's no such warning, a battle may not even occur in the systems *either* side expected it to, but at some other system 3 jumps away because that's the chokepoint where some FC decided to make a stand (or got trapped).

If they implemented some kind of clustering virtualization, where the physical hardware and the logical system image weren't bound in stone, that would solve that problem.  But it would doubtless introduce overhead and inefficiency they'd have to throw more cycles at, and they're already using a staggering amount of hardware.

--Dave

[Stephen Zepp]

I just wanted to point out that the original post is incorrect in assuming the lines of WWI were caused by needing to protect your flanks.  They were caused because it became EASY to protect your flanks.  With the machine gun.  As soon as a good counter to the machine gun appeared (the tank) trench warfare ceased to exist.  If you want to see solid defensive lines to form in Eve then there has to be a way to create a solid defense.  I.E. and easy method of establishing an effective defense.

That means that the enemy cannot just appear in your back yard at random, at least not without facing complete obliteration, and that any arbitrary system on the line can be made to rebuff any arbitrarily large attack.

Personally, I doubt if trench warfare is the model Eve developers should be seeking to emulate.  It would be stagnant and tedious with gains eked out at great loss and battles mostly determined by attrition.  Trench warfare is probably the least interesting model the devs could be aiming for.  A better model might be the battles of the pacific in WWII but that would require there be a strategic reason why certain systems would have to be held over others.

Disclaimer: I don't play Eve, but the general "warfare picture" appears similar to other warfare scenarios.

I would think some type of rapid response interdiction (possibly automated somehow) would both avoid trench warfare, and also make supply lines/spheres much more important.

[Daztur]

I didn't really mean WW I specifically but more front warfare in general. Throughout most of history big armies formed and attacked each other in big showdowns. Now if the hardware can't handle that the devs have to give people an incentive to fight wars in a different style (either front-based warfare or guerilla warfare would be the historical options). What's wierd is that in attempting to break up blobs the devs don't seem to look at military history AT ALL for any of the things that historically caused concentrated armies to spread out into fronts.

[Endie]

I keep writing complete flameposts about this thread then not posting them.  Here is what I hope is a calmer version.

If you haven't played Eve, don't try and fix its most complex issues.  It is abundantly clear you have no idea what happens in large scale eve warfare, either tactically or logistically.  Eve Online may be Strategic Historical Analogy Online, and I do that as much as anyone, but, ultimately, the tactics and logistics are utterly unlike any real-world military problem, given its strange mixture of short- and long-range teleportation with highly-restricted movement.  Operationally and strategically, concepts of weight, concentration, manuevre, mobility and so on apply to some extent, but the game mechanics do not reflect real-world problems.  Don't bother weighing in with "oh but the gank-squads are just like Bedford Forrest's deep raiding" or "oh but Goons are just like second-echelon Soviet-era army groups" or "Bob tactics are just like the late-phase AirLand Battle Nato doctrine".  Everyone does that (I am prone to Stalingrad rhetoric, myself) and it's all very fun but unless you work on the very vaguest operational or strategic level (Sun Tzu, the Cunctator, occasional Napoleon, some Zhukov or Belisarius etc...) then the strangeness of Eve movement and engagement mechanics make comparisons facile.

As an aside regarding your specific prescriptions, there is a reason that wargames tend not to be based around static front warfare.

[Simond]

You see, Goonfleet is a lot like the Indomitable Gauls from the Asterix books.... 

[Endie]

You see, Goonfleet is a lot like the Indomitable Gauls from the Asterix books.... 

Nonono, RA are the Indomitable Gauls: they were reduced to a single village for a while, but ran Roman Encampments all across the empire, no matter who the locals were.  Goonfleet are...

Actually I dunno.. who are GF from Asterix?  The hilarious pirates, perhaps, who invariably lose fleets of ships but always turn up in new ones several times in every episode, apparently incapable of knowing when they are beaten?

[Comstar]

Don't bother weighing in with "oh but the gank-squads are just like Bedford Forrest's deep raiding" or "oh but Goons are just like second-echelon Soviet-era army groups" or "Bob tactics are just like the late-phase AirLand Battle Nato doctrine".  Everyone does that (I am prone to Stalingrad rhetoric, myself) and it's all very fun but unless you work on the very vaguest operational or strategic level (Sun Tzu, the Cunctator, occasional Napoleon, some Zhukov or Belisarius etc...) then the strangeness of Eve movement and engagement mechanics make comparisons facile.

I disagree, in that though WW2 doesn't match to The Great Eve War that much (though LV's collapse and BoB's failure to save them matches with the Italian experience), but you get parallels in warfare coming up in Eve all the time. Morale issues, logistics, movement of armies, great leadership and not-so-great leadership etc etc. D2 didn't really die from losing combat vs MC as more they lost (or never had) the will to fight them (conversely, MC failed to beat IAC twice because IAC didn't have the same morale problems, though IAC never beat MC in a straight up fight in Prohibition I and II).

Hell, when CRS was demoing it's game to the Pentagon, the game itself didn't get so much attention in how it was an example of taking some completly untrained civilans and forming them into a rough and ready army. Leadership and Logisitics are what really run wars in both real life and online.

Someones PHD is going to write about Eve-Online (or some future MMOG) warfare and it's applications to 21st century combat .

[Morat20]

Someones PHD is going to write about Eve-Online (or some future MMOG) warfare and it's applications to 21st century combat .

I'd love to read that. I can think of several topics. "Rape Train Hasn't Brakes: Forum Trash Talking and Morale in Space Combat" would be one. "Band of Developers: Is Claiming "God's on Their Side' an effective morale tool?", for two.

[Slayerik]

I Didn't Want That Titan Anyways: A Study in Online Propaganda and Forum Whoring

[Morat20]

I Didn't Want That Titan Anyways: A Study in Online Propaganda and Forum Whoring

'Twas a Fair Kill, Gov'ner: Popular Opinion Shaping And Personal Pwn'mobiles.
Bowling For Goonies: Pushing the envelope for 4th Generation Combat.

[JoeTF]

I Didn't Want That Titan Anyways: A Study in Online Propaganda and Forum Whoring

Wins the thread so far.

[Endie]

Don't bother weighing in with "oh but the gank-squads are just like Bedford Forrest's deep raiding" or "oh but Goons are just like second-echelon Soviet-era army groups" or "Bob tactics are just like the late-phase AirLand Battle Nato doctrine".  Everyone does that (I am prone to Stalingrad rhetoric, myself) and it's all very fun but unless you work on the very vaguest operational or strategic level (Sun Tzu, the Cunctator, occasional Napoleon, some Zhukov or Belisarius etc...) then the strangeness of Eve movement and engagement mechanics make comparisons facile.

I disagree, in that though WW2 doesn't match to The Great Eve War that much (though LV's collapse and BoB's failure to save them matches with the Italian experience), but you get parallels in warfare coming up in Eve all the time. Morale issues, logistics, movement of armies, great leadership and not-so-great leadership etc etc.

That's what I said!  Specific analogies and tactical levels don't work.  Trying to say that covops are like submarines or pos guns like machine guns is wrong.  Trying to impose specific, foreign logistical challenges is foolish.   But fundamental issues or morale, mass, velocity (those two in their very specific manuevre-warfare senses) on the "vaguest operational or strategic level" are fine.

But in Eve, it all boils down to numbers, resources and morale.  And the greatest of these is morale.

[Daztur]

Endie: Yup I know fuck-all about Eve mechanics and less about the logicalic POS stuff you're talking about, but I don't think that applying historical examples to videogames is all that inappropriate as long as you take a very very broad view. Of course comparing POS guns to machine guns is silly but looking at similarities in the way that war is waged is still valid, at least I think it is. Basically Eve tactics are completely alien to anything in the real world, but I don't think that the broad strategies really are.

Basically in all of history and in Eve territorial warfare in the real world you don't want to split your forces up when you don't have to. Pretty much all real world generals preferred to "blob" when they could get away with it by concentrating their forces. I don't see any real differences between this and Eve. Of course you can only stretch analogies so far, but there's definite similarities there.

In all of the history that I can think of (I'm sure there's a few more I'm forgetting) generals generally spread out their forces for the following reasons:
1. Long borders and slow moving soldiers so if you bunch your forces you leave a lot of undefended border.
2. Armies that couldn't forage at they marched and who had to split up their forces to protect their lines to supply
3. Armies that split up to hit enemy lines of supply or to outflank the enemy.
4. Feints (to some extent)

As far as I can tell (in my Eve ignorance) none of those historical reasons really apply very well to Eve and there's nothing else in Eve that gets people to split their forces up. I don't think that looking at historical reasons why generals split their forces up in order to figure out how to make Eve generals split their forces up is completely stupid as long as you don't take the analogies far, but then what do I know...

Of course there's probably some ways to get people to split their forces up that would apply to Eve but not the real world, but so far CCP has had a horrible track record of making this work.

[bhodi]

Why are you still talking Daztur? You're trying to speculate and force parallels when you admit that you know fuck all about a game.

[ajax34i]

[...]but I don't think that applying historical examples to videogames is all that inappropriate as long as you take a very very broad view.

EVE players, they're not playing EVE in order to draw fun from re-creating historical events of any kind.  The developers did not set out to make a historical combat re-enactment game; in fact to me it looks like they invented, on the spot, a bunch of rules about how they wanted a fight between two spaceships to happen, and then they made it complicated, and voila the game took shape.

Nothing and nobody in EVE pays any attention to history, and they don't care to, and so when you sugest to "look at history" in order to fix an EVE problem (blobs), everyone refuses to and finds ways to show you how it won't work.

[Endie]

But there are things to split up forces for: last night we had forces at D2 facing Bob forces, while Bob had Rise in significant strength holding a blocking position about five jumps out to try and interdict our movement.  Similarly, when Bob reached the high water mark of their offensive (JV-1V, I think) and were attacking our station system, we launched a substantial second fleet two systems to their rear in 9-9, with a blocking force in the way, and ended up holding our system (and starting the retaking of 9-9).

Blobs are not necessarily a bad thing, any more than someone with 20,000,000 skill points in a T2 craft being able to reliably beat two newbies in T1 craft is a problem.  The fundamental quandary is: how do you keep numbers at a level manageable by the current iteration of the back end (software and hardware) while ensuring that everyone can do something valuable, and that alliances with high participation levels gain the benefit of attracting those members.

[tazelbain]

Spaceships should explode when they are destroyed.
Like Edge of Extinction from GW,  a tightly packed blob should fall like dominoes once they start significant damage.

[ajax34i]

They do explode, heh, and "tightly packed blob" probably has kilometers between ships, if not distances measured in 10k chunks.

In any case, you have 900m+ armored/shielded chunks of metal capable of withstanding direct hits from multiple megaton nukes or impacts with car-sized metal projectiles travelling at serious speeds (not c-fractional, of course); they're not going to worry about shrapnel and debris from something blowing up 10k away.

They got the realism of it down, I think, as far as physics at the local level are concerned, and the problem with blobs is, as it's been said, simply that the current hardware cannot support them.  They're otherwise desired by the players and I'd say devs too, so much so that as soon as they beef up the hardware, the blobs increase taking up all available resources again, as soon as they're made available.

[LC]

Make it so the fleet/wing/squad commanders have to equip certain modules to support the number of people under their command. Anything over that limit will start to give negative bonuses. Eventually filling that gang up with too many "unsupported" people would cripple (negative bonuses) it. If the enemy destroyed a wing commander, his wing would have to replace him quickly or break off from the fleet. If the fleet commander dies then the whole fleet would have to retreat (a new purpose for capital ships) or quickly replace him. Also make it so that the range for gang bonuses is 600km. If their fleet commander is sitting inside a POS 1AU away, he doesn't count.

The leadership would actually have a job to do other than spamming invites. Hopefully this would discourage them from bringing more people than they actually need.

The penalties could be:

Locking speed - Who do I target? Imagine waiting 90 seconds to get target information because your chain of command has broken down.
Movement speed - Where do I go? You can't move around very fast in a fleet formation without orders.

[Simond]

People would just stop using the gang & fleet systems altogether then. I mean, they're laggy at the best of times - start adding penalties to them and people will just fly solo or in gangs and co-ordinate over TS/Vent/whatever.

[LC]

People would just stop using the gang & fleet systems altogether then. I mean, they're laggy at the best of times - start adding penalties to them and people will just fly solo or in gangs and co-ordinate over TS/Vent/whatever.

Which means they can't "Warp to gang member" anymore. It will be hard to effectively blob that way.

[ajax34i]

Then simply disable the "warp to member" feature, if that's what's causing the problem (in your opinion).  What's the point of creating the whole gang mechanic, with bonuses to being in the gang, and then slapping penalties on it so big that people won't touch it with a 10 foot pole?

[LC]

Then simply disable the "warp to member" feature, if that's what's causing the problem (in your opinion).  What's the point of creating the whole gang mechanic, with bonuses to being in the gang, and then slapping penalties on it so big that people won't touch it with a 10 foot pole?

I'm saying it should go both ways. Bonuses for a well made/managed gang. Penalties for a poorly managed one. The larger your gang gets the harder it will be to manage it.

[Viin]

Removing warp to gang member would limit the ability of gangs to do anything together.

I don't know the answer to this but I most certainly find blobs annoying.

Maybe there should be some kind of detection penalty if there is a large number of ships near each other - make it easier for folks to sneak up to or away from a blob of ships pinging the heck out of each other.

[Murgos]

They do explode, heh, and "tightly packed blob" probably has kilometers between ships, if not distances measured in 10k chunks.

In any case, you have 900m+ armored/shielded chunks of metal capable of withstanding direct hits from multiple megaton nukes or impacts with car-sized metal projectiles travelling at serious speeds (not c-fractional, of course); they're not going to worry about shrapnel and debris from something blowing up 10k away.

They got the realism of it down, I think, as far as physics at the local level are concerned...

They got the realism of it and the speeds down?  Am I misremembering that the average speed of a large ship in this game was ~140m/s?  (There are CARS faster than that)  Also, 10k away is still within the fireball of a moderately sized nuke much less megaton ranged devices.

Lets not try and equate Eve with reality.

[ajax34i]

Not many cars can go 313 MPH, although, granted, the rocket ones probably go that fast.  And a nuke's fireball only happens in an atmosphere; in space you get a bright flash of light and a tiny pop.  I imagine that the flash of light from a nuke would hit with the same energy/square inch as a laser (but on a wide area).  Shrapnel flies forever but does disperse, and is smaller that the projectiles used.  All in all, the EVE ship defenses could theoretically deal with nukes and shrapnel, since they already deal with laser and projectile damage just fine.

Yes, EVE physics suck in terms of drag in space, maximum speeds, and all that other crap.

Shrug, they can put in the "if one ship blows up, the whole blob blows up" stuff, I don't care.  They can also reduce targetting effectiveness (lock time) based on how many ships are in the area around you, they could prevent you from locking frigates hiding in a blob of cap ships, or they could enlarge the collision box of all ship models so that you cannot make two ships get closer than 20km to each other.  Shrug.

[Fordel]

The actual literal blobs of ships, don't have any real benefit game wise, just a side effect of the warp system. Spacing everyone out wouldn't really have any benefits either outside of avoiding a dictor bubble.

I would estimate 80-90% of a fleet fight for most grunts revolves around "Is it in range of my guns? Is it big enough and slow enough to track? Okay pew pew" Being 2k or 20k away from anyone else is mostly moot. It isn't like the ships are forming a shield wall or anything. You can't even block LoS, since everyone shows up on a nice ordered list to the right. Not that EVE has any kind of LoS mechanics to begin with, or any kind of 'terrain'.



As to the physics, I remember reading a Dev post long ago saying that they could make EVE near true to actual space flight, it would just suck incredibly for a game system. Even something as simple as removing the Up/Down to EVE space, would probably screw over three quarters of the player base.

[WindupAtheist]

Also, 10k away is still within the fireball of a moderately sized nuke much less megaton ranged devices.

An airburst one-megaton nuke will generate a fireball way less than one kilometer wide.  (In space, as pointed out, there is no fireball.)  At ten kilometers distance it won't do anything that would bother a starship, unless for some reason the crew is all walking around on the outside of the hull.

[Murgos]

I'm curious as to what you thinks happens to dissipate energy in space?  4,000 Tera Joules at 10km even with the inverse square law isn't just going to feel like a soft breeze you know.  That there is no fire does not mean it is not hot.

Anyway, my point wasn't to drag this down into yet another bout of WUA induced stupidity but rather to point out that it's silly to say that the physics are 'done right' and to stay away from that line of discussion.  That there are cars on the earth that go faster than interstellar spacecraft in Eve is really all that needs to be said on the matter.

[ajax34i]

How can they entice corps to remain big, and keep recruiting, and join together to form huge-ass alliances, yet not have combat operations that involve so many people/ships?  I don't think it's possible.

[Murgos]

How can they entice corps to remain big, and keep recruiting, and join together to form huge-ass alliances, yet not have combat operations that involve so many people/ships?  I don't think it's possible.

Now that, is a salient point.  The other games do it by artificially limiting who gets to play.  A big guild in WoW or EQ2 will have to turn people away from a raid, this is acceptable to a point because while it means you don't get to go on the raid sometimes you do get to go MUCH more often in general that if you were with a guild that only raids but rarely because they can't get enough bodies.  How you could manage the same thing in Eve is a very good question.

[Endie]

I'm curious as to what you thinks happens to dissipate energy in space?  4,000 Tera Joules at 10km even with the inverse square law isn't just going to feel like a soft breeze you know.  That there is no fire does not mean it is not hot.

Anyway, my point wasn't to drag this down into yet another bout of WUA induced stupidity but rather to point out that it's silly to say that the physics are 'done right' and to stay away from that line of discussion.  That there are cars on the earth that go faster than interstellar spacecraft in Eve is really all that needs to be said on the matter.

The physics model is awful, sure, but playable.  We'd not be having this discussion if even newtonian mechancs were modelled, and if constant accelleration rather than capped speed were allowed, because the game would have a few dozen neck-bearded players, not counting occasional goons lining themselves up with stations from 400AU away and accelerating constantly at the huge rate allowed by interceptors in order to hit them at relativistic speeds.  Which, of course, would not answer the question of where the expelled propellant is stored in order to maintain such huge changes of velocity etc etc...

Re the other question, if you set off a nuke in space then almost all the energy is expelled as electro-magnetic radiation, rather than being converted into other forms due to atmospheric interaction, such as kinetic energy in the form of a shock wave.  Of course, if you are in a ship a few km away you're going to receive a substantial dose of radiation, but since we theorise fairly solidly already about near-future nuclear ramjets for space propulsion, the shielding involved is by no means impractical, especially since the joys of the inverse cube law make the fall-off in absorbed radiation substantial.

Morat works for NASA, though, doesn't he?  He can just ask the nearest von Neumann...

[WindupAtheist]

I'm curious as to what you thinks happens to dissipate energy in space?  4,000 Tera Joules at 10km even with the inverse square law isn't just going to feel like a soft breeze you know.  That there is no fire does not mean it is not hot.

You're the fucking twat who thinks a sub-megaton nuke generates a fireball 20+ kilometers in diameter.  In space, no less.  So quit talking about "Tera Joules" like you have the faintest clue as to what the fuck you're talking about, when you've made it painfully obvious that you don't.

Anyway, my point wasn't to drag this down into yet another bout of WUA induced stupidity but rather to point out that it's silly to say that the physics are 'done right' and to stay away from that line of discussion.

Oh, you don't need me to induce your stupidity.  You walked into a thread, and in this all-knowing tone started spewing shit that wasn't just dubious or over-simplified, but factually wrong to such a massive extent that it's obvious you were just making shit up.

But who cares, right?  It's not a big deal, which is why my initial correction of your nonsense was so short and dry.  But you can't just go "Whatever, my bad."  Oh no.  You've got to be a fucking pissant and blather about "Tera Joules" and how WUA is "inducing stupidity" by pointing out that you're basically a bullshitter.

That there are cars on the earth that go faster than interstellar spacecraft in Eve is really all that needs to be said on the matter.

Then quit making shit up.

[Slayerik]

I'm curious as to what you thinks happens to dissipate energy in space?  4,000 Tera Joules at 10km even with the inverse square law isn't just going to feel like a soft breeze you know.  That there is no fire does not mean it is not hot.

You're the fucking twat who thinks a sub-megaton nuke generates a fireball 20+ kilometers in diameter.  In space, no less.  So quit talking about "Tera Joules" like you have the faintest clue as to what the fuck you're talking about, when you've made it painfully obvious that you don't.

Anyway, my point wasn't to drag this down into yet another bout of WUA induced stupidity but rather to point out that it's silly to say that the physics are 'done right' and to stay away from that line of discussion.

Oh, you don't need me to induce your stupidity.  You walked into a thread, and in this all-knowing tone started spewing shit that wasn't just dubious or over-simplified, but factually wrong to such a massive extent that it's obvious you were just making shit up.

But who cares, right?  It's not a big deal, which is why my initial correction of your nonsense was so short and dry.  But you can't just go "Whatever, my bad."  Oh no.  You've got to be a fucking pissant and blather about "Tera Joules" and how WUA is "inducing stupidity" by pointing out that you're basically a bullshitter.

That there are cars on the earth that go faster than interstellar spacecraft in Eve is really all that needs to be said on the matter.

Then quit making shit up.

WUA catches em with a straight right, Murgos is visually stunned!!! Can he recover!?!?!1questionmark1?1?!!!

More nerd drama after this!!! ;)

[Slayerik]

This one time I sat my Tera Joules on my passed out buddy's face, thus the term T-Bag.

True story.