The tick takes so long now because it has to mash two servers of BGS into one. We will probably not see it fixed until the console launch when we're back to one server.
while i share your timeline assessment, i fail to see why that is.
there has always been a slight delay between state tick and influence update, but not several hours as it is now. sure, odyssey has added thousands of places/ways to affect that, but for sure there isn't that much more of activity.
even if the problem is to collect and calculate the effects between two servers, i fail to see why that should take hours.
to me it looks as if the bgs collecting algorythm currently visits all systems three or four times, and calculates with the calculated result of the previous visit. the increased time would than be mostly down to the kick-off times of its visits, not because the calculation itself gets longer or is more complicated.
the whole cycle was less than an hour before odyssey update, and should now take up to 8 hours, because ... 2 servers?
anyway, even if that is the only solution right now until console or so, i think i would like fdev to simply state what to expect, and how the process is supposed to work, so we can at least work around it.
something like:
- first tick happens, state updates visible via station news. every action from here can still count into new influences
- 2 hours later: influence update by one of the client specific servers. assets change hands, new active states go live for all clients, but influence calculation is still partial, and no states go pending.
- 6 hours later: second influence calculation, now merging activities from both clients, influence depending states go pending.
while that would be a serious step back from the situation pre odyssey, it would allow me to at least manage expectations (and spot inconsistencies).
as it is now, it feels to me as trying to make sense of something, which might work somehow or simply is a bug. and that is surely not necessary.
