I had two characters it saved completely. I only saved them in the first place because they were fully leveled up but they were unplayable, subclassing saved them and made them worthy of play rotation.

React wrote: »

MincMincMinc wrote: »

They have already gone over and upgraded the hardware with really no difference.

For about 6-9 months post-hardware upgrade, the game ran at a level I'd never seen in it's history up till that point (and since!). I was streaming often during this time and would frequently be in keeps where there were 50+ players present and on screen at once with zero ability delay whatsoever.

I wish they would explain why the performance suddenly degraded back to pre-upgrade levels just a short 6 months later. It was like someone had flipped a switch - they released a patch and suddenly the ability delay was back during prime time. Since they never bothered to offer any explanation for this series of events, we're just left to speculate on what occurred. Whether the sudden drop was related to the return of ball groups en masse, the spaghetti code compounding the issues further each consecutive patch, or a straight up reduction in server capacity for a reason not given to us.

But to say there was no difference at all is just untrue - the upgrade was genuinely the one single thing they've done in the history of the game that actually made a difference, and a massive one at that.

100% spot on.

i made a post about this exact thing ... 4 days ago? got swept under the rug and moved to a different forum.

you are 100% correct tho. it worked amazing after the upgrade.... slowly went back to crap.

also.... mysteriously works well during midyear mayhems (except this last one).

its not a conspiracy theory its obvious.

Punches_Below_Belt wrote: »

There’s no point in analyzing PvP for the twelfth year, developing complex challenging encounters and milking crowns with day-glo mounts with nonsensical animations if the servers just lag and crash. Raising the floor and offering new ability options won’t improve anything if the abilities don’t work when we press the buttons.

I actually agree with this. It doesn't matter if you keep coming out with new/fun things for the game if they don't function right and they continue to erode server performance. This is true in PVP and in PVE. Many people have been asking for years to focus on improving server performance over adding new things to the game, and it would be wise for them to listen to this advice because server performance continues to get incrementally worse every time they add something new.

I'm going to guess that poor server performance is not tied to just ONE thing alone, but a culmination of multiple things: from animation canceling (overloading input into the server system), to graphic lag because of all the new flashy visuals, to being able to stack on so many other/different bonuses on your character and teammates that you weren't able to stack on before. my guess is that it all contributes.

And what Vengeance showed us is that PVP can still be fun, even if they start taking away many of these fun things from us. So IMO, they need to take a hard look and figure out what players can and can't live without, and start simplifying the game. Even if that means they have to go back and reoptimize the game code to get rid of old/unused assets, or assets that are no longer going to be used, they need to do it - that or seriously consider upgrading their game engine and spend the money to buy upgraded modern servers.

There’s no point in analyzing PvP for the twelfth year, developing complex challenging encounters and milking crowns with day-glo mounts with nonsensical animations if the servers just lag and crash. Raising the floor and offering new ability options won’t improve anything if the abilities don’t work when we press the buttons.

I prefer a carrot to a stick approach! I bought the Apocrypha year dungeons because they came with an awesome guar mount and I liked the themes and design from what I’d seen. Last year, they weren’t really Mirrormoor related beyond the enemies in one and didn’t feel new…

Anyway, I’m interested in Solstice and enjoy dungeons so that I consider buying them in addition to ESO+, but I’m not digging the “content pass” approach.

Pretty sure this is just a bug, since it wouldn't be the first time something like this had happened.

Rittings wrote: »

Okay, so I've had several guildies test this, and had my wife test it also. Not having the Botanist achievement on a character is seemingly the factor between getting 6 and 12 pulls on alchemy nodes.

100% of all pulls without that achievement have come back as only getting 4 or 8 from an alchemy survey node... whilst having the trait on a character has resulted in lots of 6 and 12s. For sure, go test for yourself and come back and show me the results

You can't have the Botanist achievement on a character. It's account wide, so your whole account has it or is missing it. You proved this achievement was not a factor when you noted that you had two different characters on the same account experience different things with 4 vs 6. The testing on the PTS confirmed that.

Trait knowledge is also not a factor, as shown in the screenshots I posted above from the PTS.

In further testing, the issue is reproducible on the PTS, but not with either of the parameters you identified.

On a fresh template character without any alchemy trait knowledge (and without Botanist on the account, as shown), I got 6s and 12s no problem. That character by nature has level 50 in alchemy and came with all the alchemy passives filled. I tested it as such.

When I passed alchemy surveys to my level 6 character, who had never unlocked Alchemy at all, they only got 4s for 3 surveys in a row.

So there is something that seems to unlock the ability impact the chance to get 6, but trait knowledge and Botanist are not it.

I will continue to test to see if I can figure out what the unlock is.

Update: Back on the template character I used to test, on whom I got 6x and 12x no problem in my previous post, I removed all the alchemy passives (except 1/8 in proficiency, which cannot be removed).

Three surveys, all 4x and 8x.

Something in the alchemy skill point passives seems to be affecting the drop rate for 6x/12x.

Update 2: Maxing all the passives except the first (Proficiency), I still got only 4x and 8x from three surveys.

Update 3: At 7/8 Proficiency, I was able to draw 6x and 12x, but the rate may well be lower than at 8/8 Proficiency. Three surveys resulted in only 3 of 18 nodes producing 6x or 12x.

Based on this, I'm thinking that the drop chance of 6x/12x may increase with skill points invested in Solvent Proficiency, until it reaches the equal chances between 4x/8x and 6x/12x at 8/8 in Proficiency. It will take further testing to know better.

At 60 nodes (10 surveys) with 7/8 Proficiency, I have gotten 6x or 12x on only 12 of those pulls (20%). (ETA: 22 of 102 nodes now, or 21.6%.) That's too low a number to know for sure what the actual drop chance is, but it does at least seem it's lower than the 50% chance at 8/8 Proficiency.