PSA: Changes To The Fleet Fight Notification System!

Greetings capsuleers, and especially greetings fleet commanders and CEO's.

After some discussion with the CSM early last week about issues with filing fleet fight notifications, teams Webster and Tech Co have collaborated to bring an update and improvement to the fleet fight notification tool. For those who have not seen this before, this tool allows players to confidentially notify CCP of their intention to have a large fight. This allows us to place the solar systems involved in the fight on a dedicated high-performance node to provide the best possible experience.

The CSM raised the issue of players struggling to use the tool, which would sometimes reject requests for node reinforcement for unclear reasons. The common concerns were that the issue seemed to be related to requests for fights within the next 24 hours.

After investigation, we have found that the exact cause of the issue was a logic statement that was not quite correct, and went like this:

"If the start time of the fight is less than 24 hours from the time the request is filed, reject the request".

This is incorrect because nodes are mapped at downtime. Thus, if you file a request at 17:00 for a fight starting at 14:00 the next day, it will be rejected. If you file a request at 17:00 for a fight starting at 19:00 the next day, it will be accepted. However, these two statements are actually functionally synonymous, because the node must be mapped at downtime on the day regardless.

Savvy FC's have figured this out, but it is confusing to those not in on the secret. Prior to last Tuesday's fight in 9-4RP2, some pilots expressed frustration over their inability to file notifications, while others were able to slip requests in mere hours before downtime.

We have changed the logic of this procedure. The notification tool now performs three checks, in this order:

1. Your start time may not be in the past.
2. Your finish time must be after your start time.
3. Your start time may not be within 25 hours of the 10:00 UTC that preceded the last downtime.

To put the third point another way: you must file a request at least one hour before the downtime prior to your anticipated battle.

We would like to remind pilots filing requests that more warning is better, but this change should take a lot of the pain out of filing short notice notifications.

This change was deployed today at 14:00 UTC.