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My name is Hallan Turrek. This is my blog.

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Why Does it Work Like That?

Lord Jeffrey

I would like to start this rant with a simple proclamation: In the wide world of CCP petition responses, I've gotten the better end of things more often than not.

That said, in this case, I'm more bothered by the original mechanic not working as intended than anything else.

You see, I went down to 0.0 for a trip to play around with some story ideas, been a while since I did any fiction and I felt like trying for some inspiration ingame. So I went to a very hot system, the home station of the Society of Concious Thought. I figured once I undocked I'd be dealing with some pretty fucked up shit, but I was ready to have a bit of fun while dying. Sure enough I undock into a Crow, Stilleto and Curse. Man am I fucked, right?

So I get ready to burn out and see how far I get before my cap gets neuted or see if I can somehow get aligned and slip away... when my game crashes. Full on shuts down. Windows error message comes up.

So at this point, I'm thinking to myself, "Well darn, that sucks, but at least I've emergency warped away, I'll just log back in and land whereever I crashed at," No bubbles up, so it's nothing more than a delay of what was going to happen anyway.

I try repeatedly to get my game running again, but the lag from the start up screen is unbearable. Nothing works. I sit there for a few minutes, and give my computer the three finger salute. Sure enough windows says two Eve clients are running. I end both tasks and try again.

Now despite all this, nothing else is actually running.

I think most people can figure as to where this story ends. I log back in to my pod, a million kilometers away from what I can only assume is my wreck. I then emergency warp back into combat, and then I warp myself away. Then I take a moment to savor the irony.

Dozens, if not hundreds of people have escaped death at my hands by abusing the game and logging off. I genuinely crash and still die.

I've seen the mechanic at work. In log offs, the target is completely unlockable from the moment he starts to initiate the emergency warp.

But apparently that's only in the case of deliberate log offs. Now if you crash, there's nothing that can be done about it.

The petition I made said explicitly that in reply. I didn't bother escalating it since I most likely would've died anyway, and I don't think it should work ever, even in my case.

But it does bother me to know that the mechanic only protects those who abuse it. As for those that it's meant for, well... those people may or may not find it useful.

I've defended CCP on this very point to corp mates frustrated at how the mechanic works. I could totally see where they were coming from, since it's supposed to protect people when they crash.

Only it doesn't, so tear it the fuck down.


  1. I am not sure if it is even possible to protect the player against every and all crashes. However, tearing the e-warp out altogether would be throwing the child out with the bath water - the e-warp is still useful when faced with a flaky network connection (which happens more often than client crashes).

  2. I'm not saying that this is an excuse; but my take on the Emergency Warp (EW) function would seem to work on the connections of client and server. With regard to the "Log Offers" they are sending a message to disconnect them from the server therefore their EW is almost instantaneous. With respect to a: client crash, network issue, power failure, etcetera; the server was never given notice that the client was disconnecting. So EW doesn't happen instantly, which is why your ship blew up.

    If it were my game I would keep the EW function but have some sort of time delay on it for signal received disconnects as opposed to server side determined disconnects. In this case, a player wouldn't be able to just Log Off to avoid death but would actually need to pull their network connection to get an EW. And those that truly get disconnected would then have the greater advantage of EW. Though, it still would not really be of the instant variety, the pod and the pilot would surely serve.

  3. Bad luck mate. Hope this doesn't put you off any fiction writing!