Campaign Performance

WalkingLegacy

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

In terms of "why are we lagging out when no one is doing anything around us?":

All things that happen in a zone will effect that zone, so in the case of a battle going on at Glademist where tons of server checks are being initiated, it can (and does) effect what is happening across the map at Bloodmayne. That's how the entire game functions where server processes of a zone are handled and effect the entire zone.

We believe the changes being made to these sorting/requirement changes will help more than other changes have in the past, but that also doesn't mean we believe it's a silver bullet. Each time we peel back a layer of optimizations, we find more we can change to make Cyrodiil perform better. There haven't been discussions about the anti-bot/hack code yet as we continue to have our engineers bang on the combat code.

We are focusing on that aspect the most because of evidence seen with our Non-Veteran Campaign populations vs. Veteran Campaign populations when paired with performance graphs. Looking at Blackwater Blade vs. Scourge on Xbox for example, we see that Blackwater Blade actually has a higher population than Scourge but Blackwater performs better than Scourge. It's this information that has been pointing us to abilities that Non-Veteran players don't have access to via morphs, item abilities, magicka/health/stam regeneration and more.

I feel like you answered somewhat my post on anti-bot/hack but I am disappointed that it's not even in your upper managements discussions.

You have literally lost entire guilds to how long this is taking.

How many team members do you guys have? I feel like performance is put on the back side by upper management. Blink twice if this is true. You're our only hope Brian.

Enraged_Tiki_Torch

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

We are focusing on that aspect the most because of evidence seen with our Non-Veteran Campaign populations vs. Veteran Campaign populations when paired with performance graphs. Looking at Blackwater Blade vs. Scourge on Xbox for example, we see that Blackwater Blade actually has a higher population than Scourge but Blackwater performs better than Scourge. It's this information that has been pointing us to abilities that Non-Veteran players don't have access to via morphs, item abilities, magicka/health/stam regeneration and more.

Graphs are nice but you guys seriously need to log in and play these campaigns to be able to get the full picture. It's not just a lack of abilities, they also don't have large groups of people balling up spam casting abilities on each other.

There is no reason for groups to be there to AP farm using such tactics. People on the non-vet campaigns seem to be play more like the vision you had for Cyrodiil. The stress tests you ran on those servers likely didn't account for ball group tactics which is why the vet campaigns struggle to provide playable performance. Sucks but those vet campaigns are hardly more than a place for players to AP farm and ball grouping is the most efficient way to do so.

VincentBlanquin

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

Abilities work on several stages when fired off whether hitting several players in an area, or checking an area to hit just 1 or 2 players. For explaining how this functions in real world terms, let's use Honor the Dead as our example because its a single target ability that has an Area (Radius) of 28 meters.

1 - Upon casting Honor the Dead, the server checks the radius around the Templar (area) as defined by the ability...in this case 28m Radius (an Area of 2463 meters) and gets a list of ALL players in that area (friend or foe).

2 - The server then checks any requirements Honor the Dead has, and begins sorting that list to find the legitimate target to apply the ability to. In this case, the ability needs to find the closest friendly target in that 2463m Area, that is not full health, and apply a heal to that target. This is accomplished by having a unique requirement made specifically for Honor the Dead. The list generated by the server on the Ability cast can be 2 people or 100 people ...it just depends on how many players are in that Area as noted by the ability before it sorts out who to apply the ability effects to.

3 - The server then fires the heal after picking the legitimate target from step number 2 after sorting the list of players according to the ability requirement to apply that heal.

Step number 2 is what we're in the process of changing to be less intensive on the server. Currently each requirement for abilities like Honor the Dead have unique hand crafted requirement lists. The same goes for many other abilities in the game. This includes checking things like lowest health, highest health, distance from target (nearest or furthest), etc. What we are changing is making these requirement not be individually unique, but remaking them as universal server rules which are far less intensive on the server.

As you can imagine, this is no small task to double check abilities in both PVE, PVP both generated from monsters and players. We are working to get all scenarios tested and confirmed that functionality of abilities are not effected and working as fast as we can to get this out to you all and appreciate your patience.

there is no time with checking abilities. you know that you have weak code for two years at least so MAKE THE GAME SIMPLER. If honor of dead is so big problem then remove it from the game.

Lava_Croft

Biggest problem with Cyrodiil performance is groups stacking up on a square meter and spamming the living daylight out of AoE abilities.

Taonnor

VincentBlanquin wrote: »

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

Abilities work on several stages when fired off whether hitting several players in an area, or checking an area to hit just 1 or 2 players. For explaining how this functions in real world terms, let's use Honor the Dead as our example because its a single target ability that has an Area (Radius) of 28 meters.

1 - Upon casting Honor the Dead, the server checks the radius around the Templar (area) as defined by the ability...in this case 28m Radius (an Area of 2463 meters) and gets a list of ALL players in that area (friend or foe).

2 - The server then checks any requirements Honor the Dead has, and begins sorting that list to find the legitimate target to apply the ability to. In this case, the ability needs to find the closest friendly target in that 2463m Area, that is not full health, and apply a heal to that target. This is accomplished by having a unique requirement made specifically for Honor the Dead. The list generated by the server on the Ability cast can be 2 people or 100 people ...it just depends on how many players are in that Area as noted by the ability before it sorts out who to apply the ability effects to.

3 - The server then fires the heal after picking the legitimate target from step number 2 after sorting the list of players according to the ability requirement to apply that heal.

Step number 2 is what we're in the process of changing to be less intensive on the server. Currently each requirement for abilities like Honor the Dead have unique hand crafted requirement lists. The same goes for many other abilities in the game. This includes checking things like lowest health, highest health, distance from target (nearest or furthest), etc. What we are changing is making these requirement not be individually unique, but remaking them as universal server rules which are far less intensive on the server.

As you can imagine, this is no small task to double check abilities in both PVE, PVP both generated from monsters and players. We are working to get all scenarios tested and confirmed that functionality of abilities are not effected and working as fast as we can to get this out to you all and appreciate your patience.

there is no time with checking abilities. you know that you have weak code for two years at least so MAKE THE GAME SIMPLER. If honor of dead is so big problem then remove it from the game.

Honor of Dead is not realy the problem. He used it as example to illustrade how the server works.

Akgurd

Players are suffering in Cyrodiil.

Yet, that doesn't mean you should spam so much hatred or post "I have the greatest idea and your approach is crap" attitude against a ZOS designer who had enough balls to show up here and share their difficulties

At least he updated us, explained his view of the issue, and even gave us what he is going to do in next few months.

Again, Cyrodiil is in fact complete broke in NA prime hours. It's sad, irritating, and needs to be addressed asap but some of you should tone down a little or at least show a guy some respect.

Zheg

Akgurd wrote: »

Players are suffering in Cyrodiil.

Yet, that doesn't mean you should spam so much hatred or post "I have the greatest idea and your approach is crap" attitude against a ZOS designer who had enough balls to show up here and share their difficulties

At least he updated us, explained his view of the issue, and even gave us what he is going to do in next few months.

Again, Cyrodiil is in fact complete broke in NA prime hours. It's sad, irritating, and needs to be addressed asap but some of you should tone down a little or at least show a guy some respect.

Brian is certainly one of the better ones that will post eventually, but it's still a very low bar. One post on 1/20+ of the important things that need to be addressed and only done so every few weeks is not indicative of an improved effort at communication. The reason ZOS gets crapped on all the time is because in addition to their buggy and poor performing game, they can't even get the simple stuff right like communicating at least on a semi-regular basis.

Over a month after TG was released (not even including the time it was on PTS) and does a single person have any idea what Wrobel or Wheeler think about where combat, balance, and the meta stands? They personally pushed in significant changes, some of which players seem to be almost unanimously opposed to, and they haven't said a peep since. Brian (and the others) will start getting praise when they start doing the bare minimum of basic communication. No one thinks they should be responding to every post, but we're now a month away from DB hitting PTS and we still know jack about what they think needs to be fixed in TG, and we know jack about what the plans are for DB. We're perpetually left in the dark. Does anyone actually think they'll have the new bugs they introduced just in the TG patch alone fixed by the time we get DB? Hells no.

Sallington

WalkingLegacy wrote: »

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

In terms of "why are we lagging out when no one is doing anything around us?":

All things that happen in a zone will effect that zone, so in the case of a battle going on at Glademist where tons of server checks are being initiated, it can (and does) effect what is happening across the map at Bloodmayne. That's how the entire game functions where server processes of a zone are handled and effect the entire zone.

We believe the changes being made to these sorting/requirement changes will help more than other changes have in the past, but that also doesn't mean we believe it's a silver bullet. Each time we peel back a layer of optimizations, we find more we can change to make Cyrodiil perform better. There haven't been discussions about the anti-bot/hack code yet as we continue to have our engineers bang on the combat code.

We are focusing on that aspect the most because of evidence seen with our Non-Veteran Campaign populations vs. Veteran Campaign populations when paired with performance graphs. Looking at Blackwater Blade vs. Scourge on Xbox for example, we see that Blackwater Blade actually has a higher population than Scourge but Blackwater performs better than Scourge. It's this information that has been pointing us to abilities that Non-Veteran players don't have access to via morphs, item abilities, magicka/health/stam regeneration and more.

I feel like you answered somewhat my post on anti-bot/hack but I am disappointed that it's not even in your upper managements discussions.

You have literally lost entire guilds to how long this is taking.

How many team members do you guys have? I feel like performance is put on the back side by upper management. Blink twice if this is true. You're our only hope Brian.

This is why I don't put much blame on the devs themselves (except that one guy, everyone knows who). Brian seems like he honestly cares a lot about getting Cyrodil right, but we all know what it's like to have a boss you can't reason with.

Akgurd

Zheg wrote: »

Over a month after TG was released (not even including the time it was on PTS) and does a single person have any idea what Wrobel or Wheeler think about where combat, balance, and the meta stands? They personally pushed in significant changes, some of which players seem to be almost unanimously opposed to, and they haven't said a peep since. Brian (and the others) will start getting praise when they start doing the bare minimum of basic communication. No one thinks they should be responding to every post, but we're now a month away from DB hitting PTS and we still know jack about what they think needs to be fixed in TG, and we know jack about what the plans are for DB. We're perpetually left in the dark. Does anyone actually think they'll have the new bugs they introduced just in the TG patch alone fixed by the time we get DB? Hells no.

Zheg, I'm not against how you feel about recent changes for Cyrodiil. I feel the same in most part here and there.

However, I'm not sure what you are expecting from "what they think" part. Even if they are the lead whatever-designer, they are still payed by the company and normal company does not allow you to bash your own product nor leak roadmap without permission. If designers are silent and not showing off their success, it pretty much means "Sorry, we fcked up on recent DLC. " or "Future roadmap isn't allowed to share at this point".

I'd rather blame their community manager or QA for not being responsive to current severe issues.

Sallington

Akgurd wrote: »

Zheg wrote: »

Over a month after TG was released (not even including the time it was on PTS) and does a single person have any idea what Wrobel or Wheeler think about where combat, balance, and the meta stands? They personally pushed in significant changes, some of which players seem to be almost unanimously opposed to, and they haven't said a peep since. Brian (and the others) will start getting praise when they start doing the bare minimum of basic communication. No one thinks they should be responding to every post, but we're now a month away from DB hitting PTS and we still know jack about what they think needs to be fixed in TG, and we know jack about what the plans are for DB. We're perpetually left in the dark. Does anyone actually think they'll have the new bugs they introduced just in the TG patch alone fixed by the time we get DB? Hells no.

Zheg, I'm not against how you feel about recent changes for Cyrodiil. I feel the same in most part here and there.

However, I'm not sure what you are expecting from "what they think" part. Even if they are the lead whatever-designer, they are still payed by the company and normal company does not allow you to bash your own product nor leak roadmap without permission. If designers are silent and not showing off their success, it pretty much means "Sorry, we fcked up on recent DLC. " or "Future roadmap isn't allowed to share at this point".

I'd rather blame their community manager or QA for not being responsive to current severe issues.

I think it's pretty unanimous that ZOS' management and project management is god awful. IT has a very "made by suits, for gamers" feel as apposed to a "for gamers, by gamers" feel.

You have to remember that this is now a F2P game. People dropping subscriptions isn't a talking point within the company's management.

"We're making a killing selling these costumes and mounts? People are buying $40 NPCs? Better keep doing exactly what we're doing."

Joy_Division

While I appreciate the more specific explanation offered by Brian, I'm not buying that streamlining a few server calculations will make a perceptible difference. The deer are gone, my Blazing Spear procs nerfed, and I can't purge my ally dying to siege damage who is right next to me and the performance in Cyrodiil still sucks; all that has happened was to make the game mechanics more frustrating to play with.

I suspect the "solution" to the lag problem will solves itself: the performance so terrible that it will dissuade us from logging in to play whatsoever. Two weeks ago, ques for NA Trueflame that numbered 45 and 30 minute waits were fairly common, hence the calls for an additional NA server. Now, so many have left for Paragon, BDO, the Division or wherever there are now no more ques, no more calls for another server ... and no more objective based threat from AD as it has got 2 bars and are relegated to ganking. Attacking a emperor keep with the 13 of us that bothered logging on with the perma-snares, stacking heal debuffs, and 38K coldstone treb one-shots was so much fun that after 45 minutes our lead said: "This just isn't fun. I'm going to play the Division with [guildmate who used to log in every night]."

I know PvP doesn't make money for you ZoS, so I don't blame you for giving us a pittance and instead devoting the lion's share of your resources to pushing out PvE themed DLCs and purchasable cosmetic items that do make you money. The tragedy is that it did not have to be like this. Once upon a time, the PvP is what helped sell this game. But ZoS was too busy insisting that they knew what we wanted and shutting us out of the development process - I mean every templar has just started using Healing Ritual since the TG update, right?

Zheg

Akgurd wrote: »

Zheg wrote: »

Over a month after TG was released (not even including the time it was on PTS) and does a single person have any idea what Wrobel or Wheeler think about where combat, balance, and the meta stands? They personally pushed in significant changes, some of which players seem to be almost unanimously opposed to, and they haven't said a peep since. Brian (and the others) will start getting praise when they start doing the bare minimum of basic communication. No one thinks they should be responding to every post, but we're now a month away from DB hitting PTS and we still know jack about what they think needs to be fixed in TG, and we know jack about what the plans are for DB. We're perpetually left in the dark. Does anyone actually think they'll have the new bugs they introduced just in the TG patch alone fixed by the time we get DB? Hells no.

Zheg, I'm not against how you feel about recent changes for Cyrodiil. I feel the same in most part here and there.

However, I'm not sure what you are expecting from "what they think" part. Even if they are the lead whatever-designer, they are still payed by the company and normal company does not allow you to bash your own product nor leak roadmap without permission. If designers are silent and not showing off their success, it pretty much means "Sorry, we fcked up on recent DLC. " or "Future roadmap isn't allowed to share at this point".

I'd rather blame their community manager or QA for not being responsive to current severe issues.

We all know that they aren't/won't/can't fix the lag issues, for whatever reason. All we can have then is marginally improved combat and a meta that doesn't make you want to ragequit. While this is true for most problems with combat, it is certainly true for this meta that the driving reason why it was such a cluster eff is because we are shut out of whatever moronic ideas that Wrobel thinks up and only find out about them when the patch notes are released.

What I am expecting from 'what they think', is that once players are aware of what the devs actually think about combat and the meta and once players are aware of what's coming BEFORE it's finalized in a patch, we can mitigate the damage Wrobel does ahead of time. Otherwise we remain in the same endless cycle of poor decisions being forced down our throats for one patch and only a fraction of them are rectified by the time we get the next quarterly patch and more poor decisions are made on top of the remaining ones from the previous patch. I'm sure wrobel (and maybe even wheeler, who knows, they don't actually tell us) thought that VD was a brilliant idea. Sane players realized the disaster that was coming well beforehand, and now even the not so logical players have finally come around now that it's become the meta and they see the issues firsthand. The hope is that if we know about stupid ideas like VD before they're even coded and are still in the brainstorming stage, we can shut them down before resources are wasted on developing it, and further resources are wasted trying to fix it afterwards.

Obviously, it's never going to happen, but if we're stuck with Wrobel, that's the only path forward I can see working.

And as an aside, I came the conclusion a long time ago that the problem is NOT the community managers. I get a strong sense that they're not allowed to discuss controversial topics on their own.

Rylana

I am playing the no-cp campaign against my will now because its the lowest pop server.

Trueflame and Haderus are just laggy jokes now. I dont want to be on Azuras damnit.

But I cant function in 1000 ping silent movies.

JamilaRaj

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

We are focusing on that aspect the most because of evidence seen with our Non-Veteran Campaign populations vs. Veteran Campaign populations when paired with performance graphs. Looking at Blackwater Blade vs. Scourge on Xbox for example, we see that Blackwater Blade actually has a higher population than Scourge but Blackwater performs better than Scourge. It's this information that has been pointing us to abilities that Non-Veteran players don't have access to via morphs, item abilities, magicka/health/stam regeneration and more.

You know what is sad? a) this is not the first time you say that, b) performance has not improved since you first said that, which I believe was months, if not year ago, and, which is the most tragic and completely disheartening point, c) it is the noob campaign that catches up, in terms of performance (i.e. utter lack of it), with vet campaigns, regardless of what noobs have access to or not, not vice versa.

EDIT: ok, it was in december, at leas this particular sample: http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/comment/2514324#Comment_2514324
You just swapped Haderus with Scourge. Just admit it, instead of campaigns, you have been hacking "looking to it" post generator.

Sugaroverdose

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

Abilities work on several stages when fired off whether hitting several players in an area, or checking an area to hit just 1 or 2 players. For explaining how this functions in real world terms, let's use Honor the Dead as our example because its a single target ability that has an Area (Radius) of 28 meters.

1 - Upon casting Honor the Dead, the server checks the radius around the Templar (area) as defined by the ability...in this case 28m Radius (an Area of 2463 meters) and gets a list of ALL players in that area (friend or foe).

2 - The server then checks any requirements Honor the Dead has, and begins sorting that list to find the legitimate target to apply the ability to. In this case, the ability needs to find the closest friendly target in that 2463m Area, that is not full health, and apply a heal to that target. This is accomplished by having a unique requirement made specifically for Honor the Dead. The list generated by the server on the Ability cast can be 2 people or 100 people ...it just depends on how many players are in that Area as noted by the ability before it sorts out who to apply the ability effects to.

3 - The server then fires the heal after picking the legitimate target from step number 2 after sorting the list of players according to the ability requirement to apply that heal.

Step number 2 is what we're in the process of changing to be less intensive on the server. Currently each requirement for abilities like Honor the Dead have unique hand crafted requirement lists. The same goes for many other abilities in the game. This includes checking things like lowest health, highest health, distance from target (nearest or furthest), etc. What we are changing is making these requirement not be individually unique, but remaking them as universal server rules which are far less intensive on the server.

As you can imagine, this is no small task to double check abilities in both PVE, PVP both generated from monsters and players. We are working to get all scenarios tested and confirmed that functionality of abilities are not effected and working as fast as we can to get this out to you all and appreciate your patience.

Hm, and how universal rules will help if you'll meet same number of calculations? Also, step 1 is your problem, instead of using basic requirement to reduce number of calculations you servers just warming air while calculating targets which cannot be affected by casted skill at all.

And, honestly, i think you looking into wrong direction - it's large scale, who create lags, so you need to make optimizations specifically for it:
1. Make cells from players with radius of 76 meters(which is maximum skill radius), and if they crossed - connect to "large zone", after that make precalculations for this "large zone" every 0.05(which is 50ms) secs when 30 or more players from different alliances meets each other
2. Use precalculated results instead of calculating half number of same data for each cast (or just move calculations of "large zone" to separate VM)
3. Profit, you have large scale detector and optimization, which can be also tuned to change precalculation timeout when population in "large zone" grow up/down

Yes it may make some issues like "cast touched target on 1m radius bigger than tooltip says", but no-one will give a f about it because it will remove lags with proper realization(not this basic idea but something, which utilizes all game-specific features)

UPD: changed much after initial post.

Mumyo

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

In terms of "why are we lagging out when no one is doing anything around us?":

All things that happen in a zone will effect that zone, so in the case of a battle going on at Glademist where tons of server checks are being initiated, it can (and does) effect what is happening across the map at Bloodmayne. That's how the entire game functions where server processes of a zone are handled and effect the entire zone.

We believe the changes being made to these sorting/requirement changes will help more than other changes have in the past, but that also doesn't mean we believe it's a silver bullet. Each time we peel back a layer of optimizations, we find more we can change to make Cyrodiil perform better. There haven't been discussions about the anti-bot/hack code yet as we continue to have our engineers bang on the combat code.

We are focusing on that aspect the most because of evidence seen with our Non-Veteran Campaign populations vs. Veteran Campaign populations when paired with performance graphs. Looking at Blackwater Blade vs. Scourge on Xbox for example, we see that Blackwater Blade actually has a higher population than Scourge but Blackwater performs better than Scourge. It's this information that has been pointing us to abilities that Non-Veteran players don't have access to via morphs, item abilities, magicka/health/stam regeneration and more.

Wow, u have no idea, dont you?
Now reading this everbody should jump ship... WTF!

Taonnor

Sugaroverdose wrote: »

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

Abilities work on several stages when fired off whether hitting several players in an area, or checking an area to hit just 1 or 2 players. For explaining how this functions in real world terms, let's use Honor the Dead as our example because its a single target ability that has an Area (Radius) of 28 meters.

1 - Upon casting Honor the Dead, the server checks the radius around the Templar (area) as defined by the ability...in this case 28m Radius (an Area of 2463 meters) and gets a list of ALL players in that area (friend or foe).

2 - The server then checks any requirements Honor the Dead has, and begins sorting that list to find the legitimate target to apply the ability to. In this case, the ability needs to find the closest friendly target in that 2463m Area, that is not full health, and apply a heal to that target. This is accomplished by having a unique requirement made specifically for Honor the Dead. The list generated by the server on the Ability cast can be 2 people or 100 people ...it just depends on how many players are in that Area as noted by the ability before it sorts out who to apply the ability effects to.

3 - The server then fires the heal after picking the legitimate target from step number 2 after sorting the list of players according to the ability requirement to apply that heal.

Step number 2 is what we're in the process of changing to be less intensive on the server. Currently each requirement for abilities like Honor the Dead have unique hand crafted requirement lists. The same goes for many other abilities in the game. This includes checking things like lowest health, highest health, distance from target (nearest or furthest), etc. What we are changing is making these requirement not be individually unique, but remaking them as universal server rules which are far less intensive on the server.

As you can imagine, this is no small task to double check abilities in both PVE, PVP both generated from monsters and players. We are working to get all scenarios tested and confirmed that functionality of abilities are not effected and working as fast as we can to get this out to you all and appreciate your patience.

Hm, and how universal rules will help if you'll meet same number of calculations? Also, step 1 is your problem, instead of using basic requirement to reduce number of calculations you servers just warming air while calculating targets which cannot be affected by casted skill at all.

And, honestly, i think you looking into wrong direction - it's large scale, who create lags, so you need to make optimizations specifically for it:
1. Make cells from players with radius of 76 meters(which is maximum skill radius), and if they crossed - connect to "large zone", after that make precalculations for this "large zone" every 0.05(which is 50ms) secs when 30 or more players from different alliances meets each other
2. Use precalculated results instead of calculating half number of same data for each cast (or just move calculations of "large zone" to separate VM)
3. Profit, you have large scale detector and optimization, which can be also tuned to change precalculation timeout when population in "large zone" grow up/down

Yes it may make some issues like "cast touched target on 1m radius bigger than tooltip says", but no-one will give a f about it because it will remove lags with proper realization(not this basic idea but something, which utilizes all game-specific features)

UPD: changed much after initial post.

Seems interesting idea.

L2Pissue

@ZOS_BrianWheeler can you rename this thread to "Campaigns Performance" instead "Campaign Performance"?
because all PvP areas in ESO are filled with dirty lag and such title is misleading.

Darnathian

Zheg wrote: »

Over a month after TG was released (not even including the time it was on PTS) and does a single person have any idea what Wrobel or Wheeler think about where combat, balance, and the meta stands? They personally pushed in significant changes, some of which players seem to be almost unanimously opposed to, and they haven't said a peep since. Brian (and the others) will start getting praise when they start doing the bare minimum of basic communication. No one thinks they should be responding to every post, but we're now a month away from DB hitting PTS and we still know jack about what they think needs to be fixed in TG, and we know jack about what the plans are for DB. We're perpetually left in the dark. Does anyone actually think they'll have the new bugs they introduced just in the TG patch alone fixed by the time we get DB? Hells no.

Zheg it is very clear pvp is extremely low on the totem pole. Pvpers simply do not make money for them at this point.

I looked back a little and saw that since they went F2p their communication and fixes with the pvp community has dropped off.

I saw those videos the other day of this game two years ago and came to a realization

I loved that game. not this piece of turd. and i quit that second and havent been happier.

i am having more fun just reading forums of other games than playing this.

its time for all the OGs to just walk away. Its time. And you will feel much better. trust me

GaldorP

I think you should really consider globally making AoE abilites consume more resources (they are globally too strong and efficient when compared to single target abilities), add-cooldowns to all skills and greatly nerf mechanics that allow players to regain resources (Magicka, Stamina, and Health) including all healing effects.

That way, there would be a lot less AoE abilities used, a ton less calculations to make for the server, and combat would be more about strategic skill use (all balancing problems that occur because a skill or action can be spammed indefinitely would be solved as well).

But I guess that change would be too radical at this point...

Ghost-Shot

GaldorP wrote: »

I think you should really consider globally making AoE abilites consume more resources (they are globally too strong and efficient when compared to single target abilities), add-cooldowns to all skills and greatly nerf mechanics that allow players to regain resources (Magicka, Stamina, and Health) including all healing effects.

That way, there would be a lot less AoE abilities used, a ton less calculations to make for the server, and combat would be more about strategic skill use (all balancing problems that occur because a skill or action can be spammed indefinitely would be solved as well).

But I guess that change would be too radical at this point...

This game doesn't give you enough ability slots for cool downs to work, it would only force us further into a burst meta because you would basically have to get the kill with your cool down or gg.

GaldorP

Ghost-Shot wrote: »

GaldorP wrote: »

I think you should really consider globally making AoE abilites consume more resources (they are globally too strong and efficient when compared to single target abilities), add-cooldowns to all skills and greatly nerf mechanics that allow players to regain resources (Magicka, Stamina, and Health) including all healing effects.

That way, there would be a lot less AoE abilities used, a ton less calculations to make for the server, and combat would be more about strategic skill use (all balancing problems that occur because a skill or action can be spammed indefinitely would be solved as well).

But I guess that change would be too radical at this point...

This game doesn't give you enough ability slots for cool downs to work, it would only force us further into a burst meta because you would basically have to get the kill with your cool down or gg.

Part of my suggestion was to greatly reduce all resource recovery and regain mechanics in combat (Magicka, Stamina, and Health), including all healing effects and globally reduce damage to other players along with it. This would force people to spread out without the need of sets like Vicious Death, several players would have to work very well together to kill a group of enemy players with burst damage (AoE skills were globally nerfed as part of my suggestion, too, but I would remove AoE caps, of course), but yes, several players would be able to burst down a single enemy with a well coordinated attack. 1v1 would be much less about burst dmg than it is now and more about strategic use of your resources (regular light and heavy attacks, blocking and bashing, etc. at the right time would be a lot more important). No single player should be able to burst down another player in just a second or two with any combination of skills and/or actions (current travel/respawn and stealth mechanics call for a longer time to kill than most fps MMOs have).

_Chaos

4/13/16 Update

Cyrodiil still sucks.

Lava_Croft

_Chaos wrote: »

4/13/16 Update

Cyrodiil still sucks.

The one thing in ESO that pays actual homage to the sandbox that The Elder Scrolls games have always stood for is the one thing that's criminally neglected by the developers.

Such a shame.

frozywozy

Enraged_Tiki_Torch wrote: »

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

We are focusing on that aspect the most because of evidence seen with our Non-Veteran Campaign populations vs. Veteran Campaign populations when paired with performance graphs. Looking at Blackwater Blade vs. Scourge on Xbox for example, we see that Blackwater Blade actually has a higher population than Scourge but Blackwater performs better than Scourge. It's this information that has been pointing us to abilities that Non-Veteran players don't have access to via morphs, item abilities, magicka/health/stam regeneration and more.

Graphs are nice but you guys seriously need to log in and play these campaigns to be able to get the full picture. It's not just a lack of abilities, they also don't have large groups of people balling up spam casting abilities on each other.

There is no reason for groups to be there to AP farm using such tactics. People on the non-vet campaigns seem to be play more like the vision you had for Cyrodiil. The stress tests you ran on those servers likely didn't account for ball group tactics which is why the vet campaigns struggle to provide playable performance. Sucks but those vet campaigns are hardly more than a place for players to AP farm and ball grouping is the most efficient way to do so.

Bingo.

VincentBlanquin wrote: »

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

Abilities work on several stages when fired off whether hitting several players in an area, or checking an area to hit just 1 or 2 players. For explaining how this functions in real world terms, let's use Honor the Dead as our example because its a single target ability that has an Area (Radius) of 28 meters.

1 - Upon casting Honor the Dead, the server checks the radius around the Templar (area) as defined by the ability...in this case 28m Radius (an Area of 2463 meters) and gets a list of ALL players in that area (friend or foe).

2 - The server then checks any requirements Honor the Dead has, and begins sorting that list to find the legitimate target to apply the ability to. In this case, the ability needs to find the closest friendly target in that 2463m Area, that is not full health, and apply a heal to that target. This is accomplished by having a unique requirement made specifically for Honor the Dead. The list generated by the server on the Ability cast can be 2 people or 100 people ...it just depends on how many players are in that Area as noted by the ability before it sorts out who to apply the ability effects to.

3 - The server then fires the heal after picking the legitimate target from step number 2 after sorting the list of players according to the ability requirement to apply that heal.

Step number 2 is what we're in the process of changing to be less intensive on the server. Currently each requirement for abilities like Honor the Dead have unique hand crafted requirement lists. The same goes for many other abilities in the game. This includes checking things like lowest health, highest health, distance from target (nearest or furthest), etc. What we are changing is making these requirement not be individually unique, but remaking them as universal server rules which are far less intensive on the server.

As you can imagine, this is no small task to double check abilities in both PVE, PVP both generated from monsters and players. We are working to get all scenarios tested and confirmed that functionality of abilities are not effected and working as fast as we can to get this out to you all and appreciate your patience.

there is no time with checking abilities. you know that you have weak code for two years at least so MAKE THE GAME SIMPLER. If honor of dead is so big problem then remove it from the game.

Joy_Division wrote: »

While I appreciate the more specific explanation offered by Brian, I'm not buying that streamlining a few server calculations will make a perceptible difference. The deer are gone, my Blazing Spear procs nerfed, and I can't purge my ally dying to siege damage who is right next to me and the performance in Cyrodiil still sucks; all that has happened was to make the game mechanics more frustrating to play with.

I suspect the "solution" to the lag problem will solves itself: the performance so terrible that it will dissuade us from logging in to play whatsoever. Two weeks ago, ques for NA Trueflame that numbered 45 and 30 minute waits were fairly common, hence the calls for an additional NA server. Now, so many have left for Paragon, BDO, the Division or wherever there are now no more ques, no more calls for another server ... and no more objective based threat from AD as it has got 2 bars and are relegated to ganking. Attacking a emperor keep with the 13 of us that bothered logging on with the perma-snares, stacking heal debuffs, and 38K coldstone treb one-shots was so much fun that after 45 minutes our lead said: "This just isn't fun. I'm going to play the Division with [guildmate who used to log in every night]."

I know PvP doesn't make money for you ZoS, so I don't blame you for giving us a pittance and instead devoting the lion's share of your resources to pushing out PvE themed DLCs and purchasable cosmetic items that do make you money. The tragedy is that it did not have to be like this. Once upon a time, the PvP is what helped sell this game. But ZoS was too busy insisting that they knew what we wanted and shutting us out of the development process - I mean every templar has just started using Healing Ritual since the TG update, right?

BUFF TEMPLAR!!

Zheg wrote: »

Akgurd wrote: »

Zheg wrote: »

Over a month after TG was released (not even including the time it was on PTS) and does a single person have any idea what Wrobel or Wheeler think about where combat, balance, and the meta stands? They personally pushed in significant changes, some of which players seem to be almost unanimously opposed to, and they haven't said a peep since. Brian (and the others) will start getting praise when they start doing the bare minimum of basic communication. No one thinks they should be responding to every post, but we're now a month away from DB hitting PTS and we still know jack about what they think needs to be fixed in TG, and we know jack about what the plans are for DB. We're perpetually left in the dark. Does anyone actually think they'll have the new bugs they introduced just in the TG patch alone fixed by the time we get DB? Hells no.

Zheg, I'm not against how you feel about recent changes for Cyrodiil. I feel the same in most part here and there.

However, I'm not sure what you are expecting from "what they think" part. Even if they are the lead whatever-designer, they are still payed by the company and normal company does not allow you to bash your own product nor leak roadmap without permission. If designers are silent and not showing off their success, it pretty much means "Sorry, we fcked up on recent DLC. " or "Future roadmap isn't allowed to share at this point".

I'd rather blame their community manager or QA for not being responsive to current severe issues.

We all know that they aren't/won't/can't fix the lag issues, for whatever reason. All we can have then is marginally improved combat and a meta that doesn't make you want to ragequit. While this is true for most problems with combat, it is certainly true for this meta that the driving reason why it was such a cluster eff is because we are shut out of whatever moronic ideas that Wrobel thinks up and only find out about them when the patch notes are released.

What I am expecting from 'what they think', is that once players are aware of what the devs actually think about combat and the meta and once players are aware of what's coming BEFORE it's finalized in a patch, we can mitigate the damage Wrobel does ahead of time. Otherwise we remain in the same endless cycle of poor decisions being forced down our throats for one patch and only a fraction of them are rectified by the time we get the next quarterly patch and more poor decisions are made on top of the remaining ones from the previous patch. I'm sure wrobel (and maybe even wheeler, who knows, they don't actually tell us) thought that VD was a brilliant idea. Sane players realized the disaster that was coming well beforehand, and now even the not so logical players have finally come around now that it's become the meta and they see the issues firsthand. The hope is that if we know about stupid ideas like VD before they're even coded and are still in the brainstorming stage, we can shut them down before resources are wasted on developing it, and further resources are wasted trying to fix it afterwards.

Obviously, it's never going to happen, but if we're stuck with Wrobel, that's the only path forward I can see working.

And as an aside, I came the conclusion a long time ago that the problem is NOT the community managers. I get a strong sense that they're not allowed to discuss controversial topics on their own.

VD was actually a brilliant idea! The damage is just way too high, should not scale and should definitely not burst down a pack of players, no matter their damage mitigation only by timing certain abilities in a certain time. It should take more than 1 or 2 players to wipe an entire group in a few seconds.

Weberda

The rumor mill has it that one of the solutions to performance in Cyrodiil is to have a separate bank of servers for each campaign. the story says Zenimax won't make the financial commitment because PvP is not a priority (the infamous "business decision").

So if I'm @ZOS_BrianWheeler I'm probably asking myself "what the heck am I doing here". Sadly all he can do is to string us along in the futile hope that TESO will eventually be the game that was planned way back in the beginning. I'm pretty sure Zeni gave up on that idea over a year ago.

A major portion of the player base that supported PvP and this game have left. Many aren't happy about it because they know what the potential was for the game. The end of 2016 may see the rest of us "old timers" leave as new competition comes on on line. We won't be happy about it either but Zenimax doesn't care about us then we can't afford to care about them.

VincentBlanquin

Weberda wrote: »

The rumor mill has it that one of the solutions to performance in Cyrodiil is to have a separate bank of servers for each campaign. the story says Zenimax won't make the financial commitment because PvP is not a priority (the infamous "business decision").

So if I'm @ZOS_BrianWheeler I'm probably asking myself "what the heck am I doing here". Sadly all he can do is to string us along in the futile hope that TESO will eventually be the game that was planned way back in the beginning. I'm pretty sure Zeni gave up on that idea over a year ago.

A major portion of the player base that supported PvP and this game have left. Many aren't happy about it because they know what the potential was for the game. The end of 2016 may see the rest of us "old timers" leave as new competition comes on on line. We won't be happy about it either but Zenimax doesn't care about us then we can't afford to care about them.

i am sure they agree on instanced pvp only because they know they cant do nothing significant with cyrodiil

RMerlin

ZOS, do you have any Plan B? Because after 18 months of Plan A (consisting of "optimizations"), the results simply aren't there. Optimizations can take a "medium performance" situation back into "good performance" levels. But going from "Unplayable" into "Good" or even "Average" performance level ain't gonna happen through gaining 0.5% performance gains here and there throughout the code. You need changes that will make a 400% or 500% performance difference under many situations. Otherwise, these past 18 months would have shown us any encouraging signs of things improving if that current plan of yours had any chance of ever succeeding in making things playable again. The only measurable improvement I would say I've noticed so far is that we no longer lose our siege weapons that we try to lay down during heavy lag. Beyond that, still the frequent ping times bumping to 999+ ms.

These past two days I have to mostly give up on PvP, because I can't even stay connected while in PvP. Last night, when I got disconnected for the fifth time within an hour I simply gave up and switched to an alt to play on PvE. And now I'm even starting to notice lag spikes of 400-500 ms in PvE, something that never happened before.

Tonight things ain't better - as soon I get anywhere close to a combat zone, things stop updating, and 90 seconds later I get dumped back to login screen. First login attempt fails after 2 minutes, with the game helpfully asking me to "Make sure you have a valid Internet connection". Maybe ZOS should make sure THEY have a valid internet connection

ZOS, you need a Plan B if you are to ever address these issues in any meaningful manner, before you lose a large portion of your PvP player base (many of which are already making plans to move to a different game). Personally, the main reason I'm still around paying for an ESO Plus subscription is because I've waited for years for an Elder Scrolls game, and so far I had kept hope that you might eventually get things sorted out. This is becoming increasingly difficult when I see the current lack of concrete results. And that's on top of plain silly regressions such as the randomly disappearing audio bug in PvP that, after close to 5 weeks now, still haven't resolved (and with the lack of maintenance this week that means another week without any resolution on that front). Five weeks to track down a code regression totally puzzles me, makes me wonder if your programmers even use any form of RCS with their code so they could track down past changes that could potentially be causing it. I must say it doesn't help that they pile up 3 months of changes, and push them all in one big, huge DLC update. Incremental updates would go a long way toward avoiding such situations. You need to separate those mechanical updates from the content updates. Keep a 3 months schedule for content or gameplay updates, but anything more technical need to occur in smaller increments.

The audio issues aren't just cosmetic. Kinda harder to PvP on a siege when you can't even hear people attacking you. And since ESO relies heavily on visual and audio cues, this does have a pretty real negative impact on playability.

So please, tell us that you DO have a plan B (even if you're not ready to discuss its details yet). Cause if all you've got lined up are the current incremental optimizations, forgive me for being left rather skeptical about the results.

I love ES in general. And I love ESO and what it COULD become. As I often say, it's ripe with potential. But time isn't on your side at this point to ensure that the negatives don't outweight all the positives of this game.

You still have a dedicated player base, for now. If you need more technical info that only a debug build of your client could gather by having people run it during prime time rather than during your office hours, I'm sure that quite a few of us would be happy to play with a special debug build to help you gather additional telemetry data.

Göttermutter

The performance is death after wheeler changed to the american standards and doesent look out, hat he broke down by that.
He changed existing challanges, who are working by that, for cryings by USA childs.
The smuddeling now comes over and over by the same players, because their is no relasition shipanymore,who can control them,so they do what they want in smuddeling, crossrealming,double and... accounts, exploitings.
Before on the european servers with the old Chalanges,- i call it realms like the "old school" does and this means maybe a correct one like each game needs his rules or you can not call it anymore a game- the population was so ,you can have a look on it, also thy do not everything smuddling at prior time, only in the mornings. Now you have the gank guys on every morning and as teacher of the "old school", i knew clearly what is going on and how double accounts work together. Also over ts they arranged over cross, that has to get attacked and this is not allowed.
So Wheeler you brought bad thinks in and before you do this the next time, ask your members first you can trust on, before you believe in cryings, that is allways the bad decission, also if your chef says so, search another job, if it so is and nether play a god for crying kids,this goes always in the wrong direction.
Take it as warning and write it behind your ears wheeler, that europe playings work a little bit other than you might think and you can not push all together.
The mother -teaching the old school-

Necronhex

Lol
Ganking is the way to go now so many noobs its awesome and noobs and lag is even better cross account log in makes it even funnier don't take this game seriously any more ZOS dosnt.