The truth / reality about Rackham's Peak ?/!

[netchild]

Hi,

after some more testing, we came to the conclusion that there was/is some silent testing by you (FDev) going on in HIP 58832.

The currently observed behavior: Only for EDO users, and only at the Peak (confirmed by Operation IDA that other systems in the galaxy don't show this behavior), the limit of 16 FCs per body was increased to 31 (initially 30, but seems to have changed to 31 at some point during our investigation), and the total number of FCs for the Peak was increased from 7 bodies times 16 slots = 112 to 126 (at least we observed at one point no carrier jump possible into the system with 126 carriers in the system). Pictures below.

As the biggest consolidated player group at the Peak around the Public Holiday there (we had 46 unique carriers up there with about 250 players, and even if we didn't occupy >=50% of the carrier parking spots, no other group came with that much carriers) we would like to provide some feedback to you from our perspective:

• As carrier owners: This is a great change and a huge improvement for carrier based community activities!
• As people doing traffic management during the public holiday at the choke-point one system before HIP 58832 with the goal to let as much carriers cycle through HIP 58832 during the public holiday as possible (no matter if they come as part of the PTN Booze Cruise, or independently): We welcome this change, it is much less work for us as traffic managers to get as much carriers as possible close to the outpost Rackham's Peak and we can focus more on community managent and having fun (even if it is fun for some people to manage the traffic...).

We hope that the testing we did during the public holiday at the Peak to the server side of this reached the goals you've set (we assume at least less (parallel) jumps / stress on the FC jumping bookkeeping and synchronization as we had much less jumps per hour (respectively per minute on average) given the amount of carriers in the system) and that you may decide to roll this change out to all systems in the galaxy (we expect similar benefits, at least from our side of the game, to engineering and other high carrier traffic systems). Not only for EDO users, but also EDH/EDB users to keep the same seamless cross-platform and cross DLC experience players had with carriers.

In case you roll out such a change, it would be nice to get an announcement of the behavior / limits, so that future community events where carriers may approach the limits can planed in a way that player expectations can be set in advance and all have fun.

System map with 30 carriers at the star and 19 carriers at planet 1:

Orrery view of 30 carriers around the star:

Bye,
Alexander.

 

[aclamendo]

increased to 31 (initially 30, but seems to have changed to 31...

Interestingly enough, I actually counted 33 carriers orbiting the star at one point. I reported this in traffic management, however you must not have actually seen the message. Unfortunately I did not get a screenshot of the system map when I counted the carriers.

 

[netchild]

Hi,

after some more testing, we came to the conclusion that there was/is some silent testing by you (FDev) going on in HIP 58832.

@Bruce G , @Zac Cocken , @Paul_Crowther
At your community event last Friday in Cambridge your colleague Dav had a talk with a Cmdr which has an affiliation with the PTN and OpIda. They had a discussion about several topics, one of them the FC parking behavior which is different at Rackham's Peak than at the rest of the galaxy. The message Dav gave was, that there is no special setup for the Peak. If you look at my message #61 (first message on page 4), then it still describes the situation at the Peak right now which is different from the FC parking behavior everywhere else.

We had about 60 FCs on Feb 23-25 there. We funneled them through to the Peak despite the one system before it (HD 105341) being full (at one time even 20 FCs in that system while theoretically to Davs explanation the limit shall be 16 FCs like in every other system of the galaxy which only has a star and no other bodies). Clearly, the expectation of Dav of how the server side behaves, and the observed reality of several hundred Cmdrs on the client side which we had with us, has a big gap.

If you look right now at HIP 58832 (the Peak), you will see more than the normal 16 FCs per body parking there (if I counted correctly, 31 FCs at the star, whereas in every other system of the galaxy only 16 can park at the star):

We, the people of the PTN which organize more or less every month a trip with at least 30 FCs up to the Peak (at one month last year we had more than 100 FCs with us... and unfortunately broke your servers in terms of FC jumping a few times on that occasion), and as such are the player group with the most experience of pushing that amount of FCs through the traffic jam system one jump away from the Peak into the Peak which has way to many abandoned FCs, would like to politely ask you to make Dav aware of my posting.

To us it would be very welcome if the parking behavior for FCs at the Peak would either match that of the rest of the galaxy (16 FCs per body in a system, ~126 FCs max if there are enough bodies), no matter if in EDH or in EDO, or alternatively the behavior of EDO at the Peak (32 FCs per body, ~126 FCs max if there are enough bodies) everywhere else in the galaxy, no matter if in EDH or in EDO. Experience over several months showed, that the current difference in behavior between EDO and EDH hurts more than it helps.

Additionally to message #61, we also observed some kind of race condition. Sometimes there can be more than the 126 FCs max be in a system (at least at the Peak). We haven't fully tested it, but it looks like if an EDO and an EDH FC jump at the same time, the max limit can be exceeded sometimes. When this happens, we need to push 2 FCs out to be able to get 1 FC in.

If you want to discuss this with us, Zac came already into the PTN discord in the past (on that occasion where we made you aware of an issue at the Peak in the super cruise livestream) and may still have it somewhere in his list of surely numerous discord servers. If you ping in our discord the @sommelier role, you will have the full attention of all those people which organize the monthly event and are fully aware of the parking behavior at the Peak. We can then organize quickly a quiet place for keyboard or voice based real-time discussion in case there are open questions on your side.

Update 1: limits described here are based upon numerous tests in both EDH and EDO. If some limits or some kind of inconsistent elasticity (EDH behaves clearly different than EDO) are expected to be different by you than described by me, then your expectation clearly doesn't match the observation of the owners of hundreds of FCs over the last months...

Best regards,
Cmdr netchild.

 

[Crypto Nym]

Case in point, I've just delivered a Cmdr back to their carrier after they got bumped back to the bubble. The carrier I used was an Horizons's only client, but was unable to jump to P1 or P2. If I had been using an Odyssey client, I would have had my choice of any planet in the system.

 

[netchild]

@Bruce G @Zac Cocken @Dav Stott
I hope I got the notifications right... sorry if this is not the Dav which knows about the FC backend behavior...

We had again a community event at the Peak in the last two days and all Horizons FC owners had a very bad experience.

The system before the Peak which has only 1 star (HD 105341) showed very bad behavior this time. Similar to what I said in #63 above, instead of having the same FC parking limit between EDH and EDO (16 FCs in total no matter which client for this particular system), EDH had a limit of 16 FCs and EDO had a limit of 28 FCs this time.

Due to the immense amount of abandoned FCs at the Peak, the system before the Peak was constantly at the 28 FCs limit. A very little amount of those 28 where FCs we controlled by us as we expected issues, and we were able to open parking spots to guide FCs out of the Peak and as such let other FCs rotate through the Peak and back out. But only EDO FCs. Our EDH FCs which came with some highly needed commodities by the population at the Peak were off course frustrated. If the parking limit would be the same between EDO and EDH, we could have prevented this frustration for them with our traffic management. Not only us was going there, other independent FC owners were there too and as they didn't coordinate with us, this creates this miserable situation for all EDH FC owners up there. Our discord stats haven't catched up to the last 2 days yet, but my expectation is that we had about 600-800 Cmdrs involved in this over those 48h. Other groups there came probably with several hundred more Cmdrs. And we all suffered from this in some way.

So please! Make the FC parking limits the same between EDO and EDH! Alternatively some means to make the abandoned FCs at the Peak less of an issue (this forum post has several ideas about that) would help at the Peak too (and not only there but in a lot of other systems in the bubble too).

Best regards,
Cmdr netchild (and all participants of our community event).

 

[zaszrespawned]

I think I may have been the 18th or 19th carrier at P1 at one point in time

 

[Northpin]

@Bruce G @Zac Cocken @Dav Stott

...
We had again a community event at the Peak in the last two days and all Horizons FC owners had a very bad experience.
...

This silly protest might had something to do with your issues this month at Rackhams
Some commanders may have been parked in HD 105341 some in HIP 58832

Fleet Carrier “Full Acct Transfers” has made it to Rackham’s Peak, HIP 58832. Join the occupation today in protest for full account transfers!

forums.frontier.co.uk

 

[Bottom Hat]

Yeah you have encountered the future hippies protesting and spoiling the game for you. Might be worth emailing support to get this looked at, as I doubt said hippies plan to move or grow up anytime soon.

 

[Kakamage]

I was one of the non-FC owners participating. While watching these fine folks attempt to get us and their goods to the peak, it was clear their hands were extremely tied. They still performed outstandingly, although at a cost of an extreme amount of effort.

I assume this is a code issue because otherwise it makes ZERO sense that FCs would actually be constrained in the insane vastness of space.

FDev, please consider this my humble begging to resolve this issue. Increase the cap to a much higher level or eliminate it. Please.

 

[cmdr Startempler]

i truly hope Fdev finds a solution to this. a lot of people have fun with this event held by P.T.N. and the amount of work that these people have to suffer through on something that should be a non-issue is not fun for the people playing the game and the people there for the community.

its already a limited time event because the faction holiday only lasts 48 hours. add in FC traffic jam and you get very little time to enjoy the rackham peak event and make some money.

when you add FC blockade and abandoned FCs parked there plus the people who are not part of the P.T.N. community event you end up with a lot people getting frustrated and impatient and the ones trying to resolve the issue get the frustration aimed at them.

 

[Erei]

It seems a part of the disruption was done by consoles extremists with limited understanding of the concept of logic. Either that or they just used an excuse to grief others.
I'm sorry the good folk at PTN had suffer from those trolls. You work hard for the community and you are all good in my book. You might want to report them for harassment and griefing.

Yeah you have encountered the future hippies protesting and spoiling the game for you. Might be worth emailing support to get this looked at, as I doubt said hippies plan to move or grow up anytime soon.

I understand the issue at hand, and even sympathize with the console playerbase. But those people were told they are working on full account transfer, if they can do it. Not only that, but instead of targeting Fdev directly, they target their fellow players, even other consoles player, who can't do a thing.

When players were angry against Blizzard for one of their recent scandal (pick one), like the harassment allegation and so on, they went on "strike" in major WOW capital, and stopped their subscription. That's meaningful, they target the company and don't grief the players.

They did the opposite, and that's wrong, period.

 

[Bottom Hat]

It seems a part of the disruption was done by consoles extremists with limited understanding of the concept of logic.

Aside from the fact that I totally agree with what you wrote above, this part has won the forums today! Blunt, accurate, yet diplomatically put as well lol!

 

[CMDR PyroRaptor841]

As an independent carrier operating over both days, I agree with you entirely. The PTN did a great job managing the mess, but there was little that could be done. At the very least the carrier caps should be increased in N0 and N1. I was lucky enough to be one of the first up but I couldn't help but feel bad for everyone in the discord missing out on hauling and being stuck just 1 or 2 jumps away.

Maybe a dockable megaship could be enlisted to ferry and haul for the PTN during these events? It would fix the crowding and supply issues in the peak, and give everyone a chance to participate! Not like the peak is lacking cash either..

 

[netchild]

This silly protest might had something to do with your issues this month at Rackhams
Some commanders may have been parked in HD 105341 some in HIP 58832

Fleet Carrier “Full Acct Transfers” has made it to Rackham’s Peak, HIP 58832. Join the occupation today in protest for full account transfers!

forums.frontier.co.uk

While there are a few of them... that's not the issue. After a day or two after the event EDH FCs were able to leave the Peak, so there are/were not too much protesters during the event. The real issue is the combination of FC parking differences between EDO and EDH and abandoned FCs (no matter if you include the protesters or not) occupying parking slots. This is not an issue the community can solve (by giving a sane insight to the protesters or whatever, or by PC EDH owners buying EDO), this is an issue only FDev can really solve.

 

[Northpin]

While there are a few of them... that's not the issue.

I did not say it was the issue, but that it could be part of the issue. It's right there in the post you just quoted.

Even if there are only 5-10 carriers "protesting" (*) and getting parked at there = that's not going to help the traffic flow.

It will turn to worse an already bad situation



* (And the fact that the console protesters are affecting more the other horizons/console players but much less the Odyssey players, does make the protest even sillier)

 

[Stealthie]

I went up to Rackham's Peak a while back and made around Cr2bn and, honestly, I wouldn't do it again for 10x that amount.

As a means of protest, people might as well picket a Nigerian sewage works, for all the effect it'll have on me.



Which is not to say I don't sympathise with the cause.
I just think it might've been better to find a more effective method.

 

[R4dioS1lence]

I wonder if FDev will put a queuing and auto-multi-jump system for FC jumps. These could solve issues like that internally on the server and streamline FC jumping and system busyness.

 

[cmdr Startempler]

I wonder if FDev will put a queuing and auto-multi-jump system for FC jumps. These could solve issues like that internally on the server and streamline FC jumping and system busyness.

no matter what they do it will still be better then doing nothing.

 

[Neilski]

This thread kicked off back in June, with a beautifully written plea for guidance from a player group that has been badly affected by goalposts being moved with no warning or explanation. Not one reply since then from the devs? Omfg.

 

[Banana's_Are_Good_For_You]

I see this is going well.