Update on Cyrodiil Performance

Samadhi · March 2015

Fizzlewizzle wrote: »

Samadhi wrote: »

Fizzlewizzle wrote: »

Why not make the PvP area smaller, and provide other content in the areas which aren't used for PvP?

(Beware, Professionally drawn map in the next spoiler)
The red area could be the main PvP zone.
There won't be things like Dolmens, Quests or dungeons here. Just a pure PVP area.

Two Keeps for each alliance would provide an entrance to a tunnel (two tunnels per alliance), which will end at the scroll holding place (hidden underground).
The 2 scrolls will be held at these hiding places, two scrolls at the keeps that give access to it, and 2 scrolls at the small can be kept close to the wall, which would force an enemy group to get close to it to steal the scroll.

The Black circle would be the end of the PvP area. It will be a huge wall with at the "alliance borders" (the Blue, Red and Yellow lines) enough NPC's on the walls to kill any hostile groups that tries to "conquer" the walls.
The players that belong to said alliance could just pass through a gate (or multiple gates) on these walls.
There will be a town at the other side of the walls which level 10 players could teleport too when they start a campaign.

The Gray areas will be Neutral areas (you will see who belongs to which alliance, but you can't fight eachother) with an endgame (VR14) Dolmen at the keeps that are located in those areas.

These Dolmens will be extremely hard, spawning only the toughest enemies (the ones you normally fight just before destroying a normal dolmen) as normal mobs, and Uber Titan-like enemies for bosses.
All 3 alliances will be able to enter these areas, the two alliances next to the gray area by a "side door"and the third alliance through a door thats connected to the PvP area.

The Alliance areas (The red, Blue and Yellow zones) could be VR14 areas with quests, dolmens and dungeons for the players to do.

It nothing more then an idea, it would counter the horse simulator we have now.

So your solution to the issue of lag caused by too many PvP players in a small area is to forcibly confine all PvP players to an even smaller map, and turn the rest of Cyrodiil into PvE zones?

No thank you.

We need fixes to make PvP in Cyrodiil more viable in its intended format, not a castration of PvP in Cyrodiil.

Perfectly fine with turning all the PvE quests in Cyrodiil to v14 and dramatically increasing their experience output for endgame players, but they should also remain part of the PvP map to accomodate.

Perhaps the quest hub towns need to have their quest exp dramatically increased, and have the completion of 10 daily quests in a town provide a buff that is meaningful to PvP players (ex: increases spell power and weapon power by 5% and increases AP gains by 5% for 5 hours; only applies to a character while in Cyrodiil).

This could help spread people out a bit by giving other tasks worth doing in Cyrodiil, and turn the quest hubs back into small-scale PvP hotspots like they used to be before their experience got nerfed.

I personally haven't had any lag or anything while in PVP. I don't see many people (might be the cause), but when i find a group to siege with i don't notice a drop in performance or the like.
...

The OP of this thread explicitly states that many players gathered in a single area of the map is causing lag, and advises players to spread out over more of the existing map.

Speaking from experience, it is possible to participate in small-scale PvP in a different portion of the Cyrodiil map away from where the zergs are concentrated and not experience lag while Zone chat is going crazy about the lag issues.
Trying to enter the Keep where the large-scale PvP is happening lags me out and kills my connection to the server. It mysteriously tends to happen around specific groups pursuing objectives, but has also developed in other large scale battles.

Willing to acknowledge the OP's point that players gathered in one area is lagging out many of the people who try to participate.
While also agreeing with many other PvP players that ZOS needs to do something on their end to fix it, willing to do what the OP requests to help lessen the load on the server.

If ZOS wants players to be doing "other things" in Cyrodiil map as it exists now in order to break up the lag, ZOS does need to dramatically incentivize those activities. Currently they are asking end-game PvP players to go do v5 PvE content with no PvP incentive and very little PvE incentive (due to the nerfed experience of the quests and the low experience provided by such low-level mobs -- around 150 exp per kill for my v14s is not something to buy my time with).

Turning 90% of Cyrodiil into non-PvP maps and 10% into a PvP map will exacerbate the issue that the ZOS has pointed out in making this thread.
ZOS can however encourage PvP players to spread out over the existing map as they request by dramatically increasing the incentive to participate in Cyrodiil's other content. In this regard, your suggestion of making content rewarding for v14 characters is a good one, but the execution via turning the majority of Cyrodiil into PvE-limited zones is not appropriate nor beneficial.

Elsonso · March 2015

stefan.gustavsonb16_ESO wrote: »

Vahrokh wrote: »

ZoS kept a low profile and recoded the network code from "optimistic" to "realistic". That is, they had to move a lot of "anti-cheat checks" from the potentially tampered with clients to the server. This put a massive additional stress on the amount of data to be processed. There are some ways around this but they require a true recode from scratch, they can't affort it.

That original "optimistic" network code might actually work on consoles, because they are not nearly as easily hackable. I might be dreaming, but I think it's possible. I don't own a console, so it won't help me, but it would help the game.

Possible, but the PC/Mac and console code would be incompatible, which may or may not be something they care about. I have considered for some time that this might be the case. If you want PVP, Xbox or PS4 might be your dream come true.

cozmon3c_ESO · March 2015

Rasimir wrote: »

A lot of people are asking for more anti-zerg skills. How would that help in situations where no skill works? Yesterday we fought against a group at a flag for at least 15 minutes. Nobody died on either side, skills just didn't do any damage, most of the time my magicka didn't get reduced. There are enough videos of such fights around.

More skill damage isn't helpful in these cases. Lag capture of flags and scrolls will not stop that way.

Perhaps the server should infect players with a deadly disease when too many people stack at one place tor too long. Just kick then from that place when the server notices performance going down. It people risk waking up at the gates, they may avoid such crowds.

The point of upping the damage of siege and detonation is to kill the lag causing blobs before the lag happens, to spread the cause out. if they wish to stack, let them feel the pain for this no skill play. the reason zergs are everywhere right now is because its the only way to be effective, small groups cannot even take on the wave after wave of zergs. the problem is way worse then 1.5. no one can take on the blob unless they have a bigger blob, there is no definite counter to the blob. seige and detonation are not instant damage, giving players time to move out of the way or away from other players to mitigate damage. this is why these are the chosen abilities to do more damage to people, the more in the circle the more damage it does. sounds reasonable to me.

GorraShatan · March 2015

ZOS_PaulSage wrote: »

Just to clarify. There seemed to be a misunderstanding that I was saying we are "giving up" or "blaming this on players." Absolutely not. We are looking at the issue from many angles. I certainly didn't mean to imply we couldn't or wouldn't change code to improve performance, but rather that the answer wasn't more hardware. (It is often suggested this is the best way to fix problems.) I also wasn't implying you shouldn't play naturally, but unfortunately it is true that more players right now in a smaller area causes the performance problems. I say this not to discourage behavior or try push off the issue, but rather to give completely frank information about the root cause.

The thing is @ZOS_PaulSage - we want those big battles. Without the lag, they're really fun. I hope you find a technical solution to this (disabling some particle effects in Cyrodiil). We don't want to hear that you are going to discourage big battles - we want to hear that you will make them work.

Lionxoft · March 2015

@ZOS_PaulSage ,

Would you care to weigh in whether or not we can expect a full refund as you have no intention of delivering the product as advertised? I think that the community has waited long enough for your team to address these concerns however Zenimax Online Studios' efforts are falling short and by the way you phrased your response it seems you have no intention of actually delivering what was promised in the advertisements for the game. You have delivered plenty of pets, costumes, mounts and other cash shop items that no one really cares about when the game in the realm of Cyrodiil is so broken. There hasn't been any noticeable progress towards performance or stability in Cyrodiil. It has actually regressed majorly since the launch build.

The right thing to do would be start initiating the stages to fix it. Allocate the resources and hire the talent you need to get the project in a state that is functional and as advertised or fail at that and refund the players that have given you a chance. This should be your priority before you even think about touching a console build. Why branch out to other platforms when the current build is extremely broken? I think you can imagine the headlines of gaming media (bleh) if they were to post an article about the bait and switch that is ESO PvP in it's current state. I would assume that console gamers do in fact read quite a large portion of video game media as those media outlets rarely offer proper insight to PC gaming as opposed to console. Think of how much would that hurt your incoming sales? How much would that affect your current subscriptions? I doubt that people will pay money to a company that has blatantly lied to them for nearly a year. New customers probably wouldn't want to subject themselves to that experience either.

I imagine reaching out to gaming media and other forums would be the first step disgruntled players would take after requesting politely on the forums and being shut down here on the communication line. EG: Mods shutting down or deleting entirely a thread or post that mentions it. Multiple threads with discussion and/or feedback either being locked or completely removed for absolutely no reason.

The best case scenario would be for you to allocate the resources required to finish the project with the requirements and expectations set by Zenimax Online Studios for the customer in the marketing material for PvP. If you can't fulfill that obligation to your customers then I'm sure you can figure out a proper consolation or recourse that would make us feel that you aren't a completely disreputable studio.

Stating that you're looking at options to avoid fixing the problem at hand is bogus. You cannot just brush this problem underneath the rug and call it clean. Your customers won't and shouldn't accept that. That is something a 7 year old does to get out of achieving expectation. Your goal should be to exceed expectation instead of falling short . This might be a culture problem at your green studio but the solution you're exploring is not what was expected from the playerbase. The playerbase expects you to deliver what was advertised. "The Elder Scrolls Online supports hundreds of players on screen at once in an open world fight for control of Cyrodiil".

Again, the quote from your marketing.

The Elder Scrolls Online supports hundreds of players on screen at once in an open world fight for control of Cyrodiil.

Source:
http://www.elderscrollsonline.com/en-us/game-guide/the-alliance-war

After playing the game myself, I can tell you that it has never in any shape or form held true to that statement.

Thanks in advance for reading this and please do the appropriate thing. Just in case that isn't clear I'll state it again.

Please fix the lag in PvP.

Zhoyzu · March 2015

The lag is so bad i get better PvP in Deshaans zone chat.

Muizer · March 2015

How about enabling friendly fire (and, I suppose also "enemy healing")? People would have to be a lot more judicious about using AoE in crowded situations.

Lookstowindwards · March 2015

Thanks for letting us know that you at Zenimax do actually care (at least a little bit) about the situation in Cyrodiil!

If i interpret your comment right, the zerg ball itself has it fair share in producing the lag; one of my guildmates told me, that people in the ball spam their abilities before they even can hit, and as it laaaaags, the abilities do actually hit, while the other faction tries to fire their abilities, and fails due to the lag.

I dont know if this is true, but if you at Zenimax want us to spread out more, you have to fight the zerg balls, as others have said by making the catapults faster and more effective and maybe adding friendly fire as Muizer above me just stated. We need another way to stop a zerg ball, beside an even bigger zerg ball counterattacking!

But the zerg and its lag are not the only problem right now: Last and this week my guildmates and I did encounter a strange behaviour of the waiting queue: It shows EP as locked, but one does get an instance invite AND in Cyrodiil itself it looks like if almost nobody is there - its empty, you defend Arrius with 20 people, with nothing else happening on the whole map. When we lost our scrolls yesterday, the "whole" EP was there - still it looked as if the "whole" of EP yesterday was a bunch of at most ~50 people, fighting again a >50 AD and an at least 40 man DC zerg.

So either the queue counts wrong, not giving the "outnumbered"-bonus, or the people are indeed in Cyrodiil, but not involved in PvP. If the first assumption is true: FIX IT! If the latter is true, when they must be doing the PvE-Dailies, most likely, because they need the Exp for their CPs, having finished everything else - and dont get enough EXP for PvP to participate, and also not enoght EXP for dungeons etc. in other zones. And so they hang around Cyrodiil.

eliisra · March 2015

Adding multiple objectives and PvP quests around the map, would definitely help if we want to avoid to many players at one spot. But needs to be meaningful, fun, help the faction and somewhat rewarding in terms of exp and AP.

Loads of unused landscape where you can have interactive events in Cyrodiil. Things like escort missions or go fight the general of the Imperial uprising. Today all quests and such are PvE related, why not make some of them part of the war? Giving AP, giving the faction points when completed and so on. Let small group fight each other, trying to complete the same event or objective (or crash someone else's).

There's currently no objectives suitable for smaller groups in Cyrodiil. There's activities, like ganking or camping choke points for AP. But not objectives. That's a major reason you get mega-clusters and zerging. Smaller groups cant ride half the map and take on a keep or a scroll, they just die and get frustrated. To get stuff done you need a big raid, but if you run a big raid you lag the server out, catch 22.

Frenkthevile · March 2015

sc_prabhu1986rwb17_ESO wrote: »

I blame it all on the lighting patch, that's where it all began for me. Remove it from Cyrodiil, we PvPers don't need no fancy lights. What we need is a stable place to smash each other's heads with wood and metal.

You can keep the fancy lights for places outside of Cyrodiil.

See if that works.

This.

c.winchell1975_ESO · March 2015

Hello Mr Sage!,

Long time player, first time poster here (at least since beta).

There are a few suggestions here that I agree with. One of them is NOT arena battlegrounds. Once that happens, you may as well kiss world pvp goodbye.

One of the suggestions I like here is, MOAR damage from catapults and other anti-personnel devices. Make people have to put Siege Shield on their bars. This will help spread the folks out and make it beneficial for people to actually put up seige in the first place. Some people run into battle with no siege at all! And as it is now, you yourself can heal right out of it so what's the point?

Another suggestion I like is the checkpoints. Even if there is no flag to "claim", just an opportunity for small groups and even single players to earn AP without being in the zerg. Currently, if you want AP (which, let's face it, pvp'ers don't care about their team winning, only that they themselves get AP) then you HAVE to stay with the zerg. Give us an opportunity to help our "team/faction" out by calling out players that are moving towards one of these small objectives. Like pressing a big red button that puts a beacon on the map when a group is moving towards an objective. Scouting missions are kind of a joke but if you could elaborate on those, maybe that would help.

I LOVE the big scale war. I have sold this game to my friends for over a year now, claiming to them that the battles are massive. So anything that is going to destroy that is going to hurt my feelings a bit. I REALLY hope you guys can figure out how to fix your game, rather than fixing US. However, if it really is OUR behavior that needs to be changed, then help us earn FAST AP without being in the zerg.

Have a great day.....and come play with us! It's fun until we crash the server.

PeggymoeXD · March 2015

The very first time my friend and I 2-manned an outpost and killed an AD during the cap, I felt like a beast. But the AP reward was literally like killing two v1's. There is almost no incentive to break off and play offensively because defense gives insane amounts of AP in comparison to takes, especially with no resistance. I understand most people will call this PvDooring. But if the goal here is to split people up, taking an outpost to cut reinforcements or just capping a keep's resources to cut its transitus, needs to reward more AP. As of now people only want to do what gets them more AP, and that will ALWAYS be defense.

C3N50R3D · March 2015

ZOS_PaulSage wrote: »

Hello everyone,

Our Cyrodiil performance is something we are very aware of. Performance drags when there are numerous players in the same place at the same time. This is why performance in Cyrodiil is fine for much of the day, but gets worse during more popular times. We are currently investigating ways in which we can reduce the spike of performance loss. We added in some features for Update 6 which we hoped would help, but ultimately did not. This is not a situation where we can just add more hardware. Player population in a given area hurts the performance and the more people that are in one area, the more performance is going to be hurt.

Actively, we are looking at changing the behavior of the players to remove incentives for large groups to stay in the same area. We want to do this by providing larger incentives for Alliances to split up and take on multiple-challenges in Cyrodiil. We’ll continue to work on this. We are also asked by players if there is anything they can do to help. In this situation, the best thing you can do is split off to different objectives when you notice performance going down. Cyrodiil is a big place with lots of different things to do. And thank you for asking.

Lol. How about adding more server resources like other mmo's have done?

OtarTheMad · March 2015

Tried to PvP today but kept crashing. I tried it all- repaired my game, restart my computer, restarted my router... nothing. Weren't even that many people on yet and I still kept crashing about every 15 minutes or so. It's not like I have a bad computer either so ZOS... don't give me that crap. Fix your lag already or this relaunch will FAIL!

Rune_Relic · March 2015

Request more and more damage types, hitting more and more people....then cry servers cant handle extra work.
Guys and girls...adding even more damage calcs and hitting more and more people to improve performance is not going to work.
1.6 is even worse then 1.5 with 50 target damage than the 6+ target damage.

In a 30 v 30 fight....if 30 people fire off magicka spells with aoe that's upto 1500 damage calcs that have to be done.
In a 30 v 30 fight...if 30 people fire off melee skills single target that's upto 30 damage calcs that have to be done
That's upto 50x the workload because everyone is spamming aoe of some kind instead of single target.
And that's happening every couple of seconds.
Where do you expect all these damage calcs are being held until delivered ?

Did you really expect removing aoe caps and making an even bigger damage queue would help with lag ?
AoE is not the only issue though ..you also have 1 person being hit by 20 others at the same time.

Option 1 - kill off as much AoE as you can.
Option 2 - Use CD to force people outside of the damage radius and reduce the accumulated hit queues.
Option 3 - Limit the size of the hit queue per person and drop/refund hits if too busy to handle the load.

Clearly if as you stated the Graphics/lighting are not the problem...and there is no problem in small battles....then the servers simply cant handle the amount of skills that are being fired. So stop trying to do the impossible.

TCP....Serial comms... most network protocols all handle overload situations with busy signals of some kind. Flow control. You have to do the same without impeding the flow of combat.

Fizzlewizzle · March 2015

Rune_Relic wrote: »

Request more and more damage types, hitting more and more people....then cry servers cant handle extra work.
Guys and girls...adding even more damage calcs and hitting more and more people to improve performance is not going to work.
1.6 is even worse then 1.5 with 50 target damage than the 6+ target damage.

In a 30 v 30 fight....if 30 people fire off magicka spells with aoe that's upto 1500 damage calcs that have to be done.
In a 30 v 30 fight...if 30 people fire off melee skills single target that's upto 30 damage calcs that have to be done
That's upto 50x the workload because everyone is spamming aoe of some kind instead of single target.
And that's happening every couple of seconds.
Where do you expect all these damage calcs are being held until delivered ?

Did you really expect removing aoe caps and making an even bigger damage queue would help with lag ?

Option 1 - kill off as much AoE as you can.
Option 2 - Use CD to force people outside of the damage radius and reduce the accumulated hit queues.
Option 3 - Limit the size of the hit queue per person and drop/refund hits if too busy to handle the load.

Clearly if as you stated the Graphics/lighting are not the problem...and there is no problem in small battles....then the servers simply cant handle the amount of skills that are being fired. So stop trying to do the impossible.

Or return the AOE cap for PvP.

Rune_Relic · March 2015

Fizzlewizzle wrote: »

Rune_Relic wrote: »

Request more and more damage types, hitting more and more people....then cry servers cant handle extra work.
Guys and girls...adding even more damage calcs and hitting more and more people to improve performance is not going to work.
1.6 is even worse then 1.5 with 50 target damage than the 6+ target damage.

In a 30 v 30 fight....if 30 people fire off magicka spells with aoe that's upto 1500 damage calcs that have to be done.
In a 30 v 30 fight...if 30 people fire off melee skills single target that's upto 30 damage calcs that have to be done
That's upto 50x the workload because everyone is spamming aoe of some kind instead of single target.
And that's happening every couple of seconds.
Where do you expect all these damage calcs are being held until delivered ?

Did you really expect removing aoe caps and making an even bigger damage queue would help with lag ?

Option 1 - kill off as much AoE as you can.
Option 2 - Use CD to force people outside of the damage radius and reduce the accumulated hit queues.
Option 3 - Limit the size of the hit queue per person and drop/refund hits if too busy to handle the load.

Clearly if as you stated the Graphics/lighting are not the problem...and there is no problem in small battles....then the servers simply cant handle the amount of skills that are being fired. So stop trying to do the impossible.

Or return the AOE cap for PvP.

Which might help a little....but 1.5 wasn't brilliant lets face it.
AND that doesn't help with someone being hit by 20 people at the same time rather than 1 person hitting 20 people at the same time. Both of which have the same effect on the damage queue at the end of the day. Only option 3 can fix both.

Fizzlewizzle · March 2015

Rune_Relic wrote: »

Fizzlewizzle wrote: »

Rune_Relic wrote: »

Request more and more damage types, hitting more and more people....then cry servers cant handle extra work.
Guys and girls...adding even more damage calcs and hitting more and more people to improve performance is not going to work.
1.6 is even worse then 1.5 with 50 target damage than the 6+ target damage.

In a 30 v 30 fight....if 30 people fire off magicka spells with aoe that's upto 1500 damage calcs that have to be done.
In a 30 v 30 fight...if 30 people fire off melee skills single target that's upto 30 damage calcs that have to be done
That's upto 50x the workload because everyone is spamming aoe of some kind instead of single target.
And that's happening every couple of seconds.
Where do you expect all these damage calcs are being held until delivered ?

Did you really expect removing aoe caps and making an even bigger damage queue would help with lag ?

Option 1 - kill off as much AoE as you can.
Option 2 - Use CD to force people outside of the damage radius and reduce the accumulated hit queues.
Option 3 - Limit the size of the hit queue per person and drop/refund hits if too busy to handle the load.

Clearly if as you stated the Graphics/lighting are not the problem...and there is no problem in small battles....then the servers simply cant handle the amount of skills that are being fired. So stop trying to do the impossible.

Or return the AOE cap for PvP.

Which might help a little....but 1.5 wasn't brilliant lets face it.
AND that doesn't help with someone being hit by 20 people at the same time rather than 1 person hitting 20 people at the same time. Both of which have the same effect on the damage queue at the end of the day. Only option 3 can fix both.

Refunding hits would be a bad idea, since hitting to many people could mean that you get more resources back then you originally spend (or at least, thats how i understand it).
With the hit que you mean that the first X hits will be calculated and the rest will be ignored. That could work. It would basically become a first come, first serve type of thing.

Another option might be (though not to sure how that might work out) that people become immune to any form of damage for X seconds after each hit (not big numbers, maybe 0.5-1 second after each hit) so that running in and spamming AOE's with a group becomes more useless then everyone aiming for a single opponent (shouldn't be an AOE cap in this scenario, for the solo runners)

Fizzlewizzle · March 2015

Fizzlewizzle wrote: »

Rune_Relic wrote: »

Fizzlewizzle wrote: »

Rune_Relic wrote: »

Request more and more damage types, hitting more and more people....then cry servers cant handle extra work.
Guys and girls...adding even more damage calcs and hitting more and more people to improve performance is not going to work.
1.6 is even worse then 1.5 with 50 target damage than the 6+ target damage.

In a 30 v 30 fight....if 30 people fire off magicka spells with aoe that's upto 1500 damage calcs that have to be done.
In a 30 v 30 fight...if 30 people fire off melee skills single target that's upto 30 damage calcs that have to be done
That's upto 50x the workload because everyone is spamming aoe of some kind instead of single target.
And that's happening every couple of seconds.
Where do you expect all these damage calcs are being held until delivered ?

Did you really expect removing aoe caps and making an even bigger damage queue would help with lag ?

Option 1 - kill off as much AoE as you can.
Option 2 - Use CD to force people outside of the damage radius and reduce the accumulated hit queues.
Option 3 - Limit the size of the hit queue per person and drop/refund hits if too busy to handle the load.

Clearly if as you stated the Graphics/lighting are not the problem...and there is no problem in small battles....then the servers simply cant handle the amount of skills that are being fired. So stop trying to do the impossible.

Or return the AOE cap for PvP.

Which might help a little....but 1.5 wasn't brilliant lets face it.
AND that doesn't help with someone being hit by 20 people at the same time rather than 1 person hitting 20 people at the same time. Both of which have the same effect on the damage queue at the end of the day. Only option 3 can fix both.

Refunding hits would be a bad idea, since hitting to many people could mean that you get more resources back then you originally spend (or at least, thats how i understand it).
With the hit que you mean that the first X hits will be calculated and the rest will be ignored. That could work. It would basically become a first come, first serve type of thing.

Another option might be (though not to sure how that might work out) that people become immune to any incoming form of damage for X seconds after each hit (not big numbers, maybe 0.5-1 second after each hit) so that running in and spamming AOE's with a group becomes more useless then everyone aiming for a single opponent (shouldn't be an AOE cap in this scenario, for the solo runners)

Rune_Relic · March 2015

Fizzlewizzle wrote: »

Rune_Relic wrote: »

Fizzlewizzle wrote: »

Rune_Relic wrote: »

Request more and more damage types, hitting more and more people....then cry servers cant handle extra work.
Guys and girls...adding even more damage calcs and hitting more and more people to improve performance is not going to work.
1.6 is even worse then 1.5 with 50 target damage than the 6+ target damage.

In a 30 v 30 fight....if 30 people fire off magicka spells with aoe that's upto 1500 damage calcs that have to be done.
In a 30 v 30 fight...if 30 people fire off melee skills single target that's upto 30 damage calcs that have to be done
That's upto 50x the workload because everyone is spamming aoe of some kind instead of single target.
And that's happening every couple of seconds.
Where do you expect all these damage calcs are being held until delivered ?

Did you really expect removing aoe caps and making an even bigger damage queue would help with lag ?

Option 1 - kill off as much AoE as you can.
Option 2 - Use CD to force people outside of the damage radius and reduce the accumulated hit queues.
Option 3 - Limit the size of the hit queue per person and drop/refund hits if too busy to handle the load.

Clearly if as you stated the Graphics/lighting are not the problem...and there is no problem in small battles....then the servers simply cant handle the amount of skills that are being fired. So stop trying to do the impossible.

Or return the AOE cap for PvP.

Which might help a little....but 1.5 wasn't brilliant lets face it.
AND that doesn't help with someone being hit by 20 people at the same time rather than 1 person hitting 20 people at the same time. Both of which have the same effect on the damage queue at the end of the day. Only option 3 can fix both.

Refunding hits would be a bad idea, since hitting to many people could mean that you get more resources back then you originally spend (or at least, thats how i understand it).
With the hit que you mean that the first X hits will be calculated and the rest will be ignored. That could work. It would basically become a first come, first serve type of thing.

Another option might be (though not to sure how that might work out) that people become immune to any form of damage for X seconds after each hit (not big numbers, maybe 0.5-1 second after each hit) so that running in and spamming AOE's with a group becomes more useless then everyone aiming for a single opponent (shouldn't be an AOE cap in this scenario, for the solo runners)

Alas...you cant have people hit anoth player...incur the cost...and do no damage (single target).
People would be up in arms they hit someone 10 times, did no damage, run out of stamina/magicka and then died due to the lack of resources.
With AoE it doesn't matter so much as you are likely to hit someone and trying to figure out who was and wasn't hit wouldn't exactly help with the load. Besides you are hitting a location with AoE rather than a player. Only people who stand in the aoe get damaged regardless.

So single target busy gets a refund although the skills fires (cant refund what wasn't spent).
AoE a busy player gets no refund as you hit location ...not player.

Immunity works on the same kind of principle. You cant be hit by anymore than say 10 attacks at once. Any more then that you are in effect immune to until the damage queue drops below 10. They are dropped...but still fire. That way there is no delay in combat at all. You don't have to wait for the calcs to be run on server while it lags out at +999. It just tells the client to fire the ability at no cost if its single target.

Islyn · March 2015

DHale wrote: »

I am glad one of the leaders is engaged in fixing this. We all love this game and I certainly do. I have invested many hundreds of hours into the game so I have a few thoughts:

There was better performance before around 1.2 and 1.3 and I think your security measures (bots and exploiters) and the patch with "improved lighting" messed things up. There were more ppl in Cyrodil and yet better performance at the time.

The Zergers have way more AP than non zergers. If you do not change that the incentive is to be where the biggest population of players are at. The zergers help you within your faction or to kill other faction players then it won’t be addressed any time soon. If you can’t fix the lag then you need to give incentive to spread out as you say. Also it take a lot of AP to level alliance rank and therefore Assault and Support ranks so the incentive is to farm AP any way you can. Let us level assault and support like any other skill. I for one won’t chase AP as I am chasing AP to get vigor and combat frenzy and the combat medic.

You have reduced damage for siege significantly which used to be the best way to get groups to scatter. This needs to be reversed and buffed up. Neither I nor other ppl in my guild even bother with personnel siege since the update.

Imminent destruction is not the not the zerg buster I was hoping for. The channel time gets lagged out and 2 seconds become 10 and sometimes it does not fire at all and makes it look like I am perma hitchhiking. It should do way more damage like when 6 enemy are near or something like that. It will discourage grouping and zerging. The other ability is soul shatter when you are about to die. It does min damage and should really level the playing field as in really doing tremendous damage but your death is imminent so it’s not ever going to be spammed. Maybe it does min damage when one person is there and scales as more ppl are within 5 meters for example. Players that have this passive are ticking time bombs and if multiple ppl have this then zergs will hesitate running into other groups that all are ticking time bombs that would stack on one another.

Those two abilities should be the hardest hitting abilities in the game and generate min damage alone but more ppl near the damage goes up dramatically but really close proximity say again 5 meters. I put 2 points into soul shatter when close to death but currently this does minimum damage... buff this up considerably. ppl should fear being close to you when you die. Currently, zerging maximizes damage and increase survivability and lowers risk you must address these variables or nothing will change.

Those are my thoughts,

Yeah exactly - I think the same and I am a vet of Wabbalag and Skullcrusher and never had the kind of lag/issues as before that patch you mention here.

tinythinker · March 2015

Draehl wrote: »

If I might offer just some general ideas how to both achieve this and add to the fun of Cyrodiil:
Extend the bounty system to add quests to hunt a specific player. Have it give the general area of the map they are currently in, and provide a nice bonus for killing said player! Tie into this more bountiful PvE quests in Cyrodiil and you'll see players start splitting up and then going after one another.

@Draehl, did you mean something like this...?

tinythinker wrote: »

Would you be interested in a Most Wanted system for Cyrodiil?

A special AP bonus for killing the top ten enemy players in terms of how many kills (with a killing blow) they have against your own Alliance per some regular interval? Say, from 8AM EST one day to 8AM EST the next. In other words, the top ten would be updated at the same time every day, and you could only collect the reward for each player in the top ten once (per day they remain Most Wanted). You would have to home the campaign in which you try to collect the bonus.

Do you think it would add something fun to the AvA experience? What if it came with an achievement series (1, 5, 10 or something)?

[Edited for typos.]

GorraShatan · March 2015

Some transparency/honesty on why things got worse since 1.5 would be nice too.

Chillic · March 2015

So when taking a keep and the enemy zerg arrives, you must leave so you don't stress the server. How about you just get better at your *** job.

Roechacca · March 2015

Ok . Thanks Paul ...

helltiger · March 2015

Remove AoE from game(pvp) and we get that battle, what we see on this video https://youtu.be/MQFxE4AESn4?t=50s. AoE can be present in pvp only a: siege machines, healing, disabling(without any damage: mass stun with AoE cap, negate, etc). Also meele>>range, single>aoe.

Septimus_Magna · March 2015

sc_prabhu1986rwb17_ESO wrote: »

I blame it all on the lighting patch, that's where it all began for me. Remove it from Cyrodiil, we PvPers don't need no fancy lights. What we need is a stable place to smash each other's heads with wood and metal.

You can keep the fancy lights for places outside of Cyrodiil.

See if that works.

Great suggestion, maybe include shadow and water reflection to further improve performance in Cyrodiil. I would be totally fine with average graphics in pvp if it would cause less latency problems. I would also suggest making two separate graphic settings, one for pve and one for pvp so players dont have to adjust them when switching between pve and pvp.

Bashev · March 2015

Septimus_Magna wrote: »

sc_prabhu1986rwb17_ESO wrote: »

I blame it all on the lighting patch, that's where it all began for me. Remove it from Cyrodiil, we PvPers don't need no fancy lights. What we need is a stable place to smash each other's heads with wood and metal.

You can keep the fancy lights for places outside of Cyrodiil.

See if that works.

Great suggestion, maybe include shadow and water reflection to further improve performance in Cyrodiil. I would be totally fine with average graphics in pvp if it would cause less latency problems. I would also suggest making two separate graphic settings, one for pve and one for pvp so players dont have to adjust them when switching between pve and pvp.

Removing the lighting patch won't help to reduce the server lag. It is related to the FPS drop. Currently the biggest issue in Cyrodiil is the server lag which happens because of the extreme number of the calculations that have to be done in AoE 50vs50 battles.

Fizzlewizzle · March 2015

helltiger wrote: »

Remove AoE from game(pvp) and we get that battle, what we see on this video https://youtu.be/MQFxE4AESn4?t=50s. AoE can be present in pvp only a: siege machines, healing, disabling(without any damage: mass stun with AoE cap, negate, etc). Also meele>>range, single>aoe.

This isn't the worst idea, it would give a whole different feel when going to PvP.
Lets all be honest, the battles against a group of people that are "disorganized" and try to take out 1 person at the time are much more fun (and lasting) then the ones where some zerk group rolls over the field and just wipes everything.

If you're in a 1 X Many fight it wont matter if you can or can't aoe, since most will just bombard the single player with spells and skills until he dies. Group gameplay would become a lot more fun and interesting.

Sacadon · March 2015

If not already, please consider using designs other non-gaming organizations have used successfully for a long time now. I'm thinking that budget is your constraint though versus talent or technology.

Think of how many calcs/sec apps like Soundhound and Shazaam have to do on HPC systems in order to recognize a song in 2-5 secs. There are many companies that already use massively parallel high-performance cloud computing systems across the globe to do these things.

Another extremely parallel system design that has been in place for a long time is high-frequency electronic trading. Yes there's arbitrage to take advantage of delays but a gaming system could just write off such delays. I bet TradeStation would give you some ideas without giving you their IP. A friend of mine is a developer on their core system and I could make a connection for ZOS, but expect that you'd not need one too.

One thing is for sure, achieving a highly distributed client-to-server design that performs well is within reach and has been for the past 5 years. So this is ZOS's opportunity otherwise someone else is going to eventually.