Dear FDev: please improve the BGS trigger mechanism.

Bard Voronwe

Bard Voronwe
I think that people who are fond of BGS for different reasons (may it be owning a PMF, roleplaying or Powerplay) would agree on this: the so-called tick is often pretty unreliable, unfair and most importantly it's too long to properly show on the game, making some actions difficulty to coordinate.

My proposal is to make the BGS tick more regular, fair and clear.

Fixed cycle lenght
First of all cycle lenght should be fixed: 25 hours would be perfect to let the tick "slip" to every time zone in less than a month and make it fair for everybody.

Servers going down daily to process the tick
I think that 5 to 10 minutes should be enough to update the galaxy BGS if the servers are shut down, people could then play with a truly updated political and economical situation.

What do you think about it?
 

Ian Doncaster

Ian Doncaster
An automatic server downtime which is for 2/3 of the month outside Frontier's core working hours and 1/3 of the month also in the middle of the night seems to be the sort of thing which could become a multi-hour server downtime pretty quickly.

It'd also be a lot of inconvenience for everyone who didn't need super-accurate BGS data - the weekly maintenance/powerplay/thargoid reset gets complaints as it is, and that's only once a week at one of the quietest times of the day for active players.
 

Bard Voronwe

Bard Voronwe
Yeah I understand what you are saying, people usually tend to brag about everything (as I am doing right now of course :p ).

I agree with you about the downtime that could be tragic so... as you said 0700 UTC seem to be one of the quietest times, we could make it a daily downtime. People would get used to it honestly.
 

RoyalTS

R
It's not only that the tick is unreliable:
the new data is shown at different times from different sources in my interface. Usually station news is first to show me changes, and far later the system status changes. then even later the squadron allegiance changes.
Why? It's all the same data.
And the worst is the time for the tick:
Here in Europe where (my guess) is the biggest part of the player base the tick comes around 18:15 -18:30. All data sources (Station news, system status, squadron allegiance are updated somehow around 22:00) The evening is over by then, then comes the night, the next workday, and then we all sit there again waiting for the next tick because no one knows what happened last day. What a rubbish. Make it at least so that the normal worker can start after work and has clean data everywhere to know what's going on.
Today the tick didn't come till 19:30 so I'm offline now frustrated while my faction is engaged in a war and 2 elections...
 

Dommarraa

Dommarraa
Yeah it's an Omnishambles.
I would have bet my mortgage that it would be sorted when they merged the base games, but apparently not.
Suck it up, it is what is is and will stay that way.
 

Jmanis

Jmanis
RE: Reliability of the tick, it's been repeatedly stated on various streams that the tick is very roughly every 24 hours, and can swing by as much as hours. It's also kinda cute hearing it described as unfair, since the BGS designed with a competitive mechanism in mind.

That people use the BGS as a mechanism for competition is fine... but it was never designed expressly for that purpose.
 

Danieros

D
I expressed my discontent when Frontier said this tick situation is here to stay. I fully agree that the tick propagation post-Odyssey is currently inadequate.

When you have unreliable data in some extreme cases even 8-10 hours in the tick, it makes it a nightmare to the folks out there that are putting BGS orders for their squadrons/groups. For many this is their end game content, and it is excellent at being so - few games offer such replayability through such a large sandbox for action.

I'm not sure about downtime for this though, as the 25 hour would mean it'd eventually happen in prime time - hitting folks who aren't involved at all with BGS.
 

metatheurgist

metatheurgist
Jmanis said:
RE: Reliability of the tick, it's been repeatedly stated on various streams that the tick is very roughly every 24 hours, and can swing by as much as hours. It's also kinda cute hearing it described as unfair, since the BGS designed with a competitive mechanism in mind.

That people use the BGS as a mechanism for competition is fine... but it was never designed expressly for that purpose.
Click to expand...
You know what would be unfair? Having the servers go down at a specific time every week which may well be someone's main play time. ;)
 

Walter2

Walter2
I suspect that the BGS is a victim of its own unintended success. In the early days the conflict changes were resolved first and the rest within half an hour. But that was when there were only FD's factions (remember the systems with just one faction?).

Not only have many of those original factions expanded through player actions, there are all the player-inspired factions - including those no longer supported - that have to be processed for every system in which they have a presence. Blazing your own trail has consequences.

As @Jmanis said, the BGS wasn't supposed to work the way it has evolved, so the devs have had to tinker with the code to make it work.

And we've all seen what can happen then the little tinkers bow to evolution and change the code.
 

Disemboweled Ego

D
The thargoid war also has delayed progress updates, usually up to an hour and that's pretty annoying for tracking and that's a new system built from the ground up with fewer systems to update most of which aren't even populated or see much action.

If we take BGS (and the unwillingness to optimize those bits) as an example that might drift to become longer and longer until it becomes a half a day and then on the final day you don't know if a system is/will complete.
 

Ian Doncaster

Ian Doncaster
Alec Turner said:
If the "tick" was simply renamed a "sweep" instead perhaps people might understand the process better and then wouldn't all these issues with it simply go away?

🤔
Click to expand...
It's not really a sweep, though. The tick happens at about 1900 each day (until it moves again) and doesn't take that long to calculate.

Players observe the effects of the tick at wildly different times, including to each other, and including to themselves if they use different sources of information. If you watch the journal output through EDDN for a busy system you can often see a sawtooth effect for several hours as different people report "last" and "current" data. But the tick had ticked before the first of those reported the new data.

It's that intermediate - client and server - caching that makes it appear to take hours.
 

Nepeta Uchiha

Nepeta Uchiha
My PMF has one system that fully ticks, state and influence, within 15-30 minutes of recorded initial tick. We have another system that does it all within the first 90 minutes, Then we have systems that take 3 hours to fully do it all. The only thing that remains consistent is the state tick usually happens across all of our systems at once.

Best thing to do is always keep your systems up to date on Inara and just compare data to see if the system in question has changed. Of course this is ideal for people less educated on the inner BGS machinations.
 

Walter2

Walter2
Nepeta Uchiha said:
Usually just news board but some days yes everything shows right away.
Click to expand...
This exemplifies the apparent chaos behind the current methods.
I mostly get the news board updating and hour or two after the tick, then updating again some hours later and the side panel and galaxy map changing hours after that.
It's very difficult to plan under these conditions.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom