Campaign Performance

Enodoc

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

For Cyrodiil the answer is simply that it's one zone and if anything floods the server with requests from that zone, regardless of where it occurred in the zone, will effect the entire zone. There may have been a battle at Alessia bridge, but it could effect what happens at Fort Warden.

I suppose it wouldn't be possible to bubble the areas around keeps into their own phase/layer/channel (whatever you want to call it)? You can "see" the phasing in PvE zones around some places, as NPCs and scenery pop in an out of existence when you enter one of those phases. Of course, then you would end up with a situation where players on opposite sides of the phase boundary wouldn't know the others were there, or would lose them as they crossed the boundary, making battle difficult.

r.jan_emailb16_ESO

@ZOS_BrianWheeler did you consider an approach like they have in GW2?

Basically, they replaced individual character models and animations with standard ones. This means that in situations with lots of players around, the server would only send information on where a player is and that he is doing something. The client has standard models for each faction (could be a generic imperial for all of them, actually) in a specific colour (red, yellow, blue) and some simple animation for each weapon type. I'm sure you've thought about this approach, would it be useful from your point of view or is the problem entirely elsewhere?

Docmandu

Ezareth wrote: »

I was banned early in 1.6 and it was primarily because I had a raid of players reporting me daily for "hacking" because their leader couldn't accept that I was beating them fairly.

Yes I'm sure that was it.. people jealous of you.... although your stance in another thread where you consider cheating in PvE a non-issue kind of puts this theory in a different light.

ZOS_BrianWheeler

The culling of figures won't actually do anything server wise because those players still exist and are casting abilities that hit the server. It would help with your client sure, but so does turning down your graphics options, which in either of those cases, don't help at all with server performance. Running your client at 60 FPS is great, but when the server is hitching, it doesn't really matter what your client is doing.

The bubble/phasing approach would also be an issue with the server because it still tracks everyone in the same world/zone definition. You sort of see this already with a fight happening on Alessia Bridge affecting a fight in Fort Warden in the prior example.

MountainHound

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

In the case of BwB vs. "Vet Campaign X" we're looking at the XBOX where Haderus and BWB have quite literally the same population and BWB performance is great vs. Haderus' which isn't.

When PC switched over to Tamriel Unlimited, the same thing was noted with BwB vs. Azura in which case both had the same population and the same comparison was seen there.

That is because in BWB you don't have as many high level skills being spammed such as Meteors, Proxy dets, barriers left right and center.

Proximity det was meant to kill zergs but it now works the other way and zergs use them. This skill should DECREASE by 5% based upon how many allies are within its radius and there should be no cap on it. Make it so if a group of 12 are stacked when it goes off, it does -60% damage. You could even keep the increase damage based upon enemies inside it but this needs to be nerfed to discourage ball groups running to flags to detonate with it on.

r.jan_emailb16_ESO

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

The culling of figures won't actually do anything server wise because those players still exist and are casting abilities that hit the server. It would help with your client sure, but so does turning down your graphics options, which in either of those cases, don't help at all with server performance. Running your client at 60 FPS is great, but when the server is hitching, it doesn't really matter what your client is doing.

The bubble/phasing approach would also be an issue with the server because it still tracks everyone in the same world/zone definition. You sort of see this already with a fight happening on Alessia Bridge affecting a fight in Fort Warden in the prior example.

Thanks for the response, makes sense that the skills are the main problem. Btw no one has 60 FPS in PvP, I guess

Anyway I really hope that the next update + maybe 64bit client will improve the lag, it's really killing the fun for everyone.

Ezareth

Starshadw wrote: »

Ezareth wrote: »

Either in 1.7 (2.1) or later that stopped being the case. I don't know whether they've shrunk the server cluster or the number of players has grown significantly but things are now lagging in areas where before I'd never seen it.

Less that the number of players has grown overall, and more that they continue to close campaigns, thus further compressing the PvP population. So now, the lag is showing up everywhere because we're all crammed onto fewer campaigns.

I'm talking about PvE not campaigns in this respect so that theory wouldn't hold. They've also only ever closed dead campaigns so that wouldn't significantly contribute to performance degradation.

Ezareth

Docmandu wrote: »

Ezareth wrote: »

I was banned early in 1.6 and it was primarily because I had a raid of players reporting me daily for "hacking" because their leader couldn't accept that I was beating them fairly.

Yes I'm sure that was it.. people jealous of you.... although your stance in another thread where you consider cheating in PvE a non-issue kind of puts this theory in a different light.

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

The culling of figures won't actually do anything server wise because those players still exist and are casting abilities that hit the server. It would help with your client sure, but so does turning down your graphics options, which in either of those cases, don't help at all with server performance. Running your client at 60 FPS is great, but when the server is hitching, it doesn't really matter what your client is doing.

The bubble/phasing approach would also be an issue with the server because it still tracks everyone in the same world/zone definition. You sort of see this already with a fight happening on Alessia Bridge affecting a fight in Fort Warden in the prior example.

@ZOS_BrianWheeler

Brian,

Would it be possible to do something like remove all of the resource nodes in Cyrodiil and then specifically eliminate some of the anti-botting logic that was added which pushed a lot of the client-side computations back to the server (while keeping any in tact that could be used to gain a competitive advantage)? Or is this kind of thing done universally on the client with no way to distinguish how it is done depending on your zone?

I know that I for one would happily sacrifice every non-pvp essential component of Cyrodiil if it meant I'd see a noticeable improvement in performance.

It seems to me that you're basically saying that the true bottleneck that we're hitting is the servers ability to process all general requests and not specifically localized requests in real time. Is it possible to segregate certain components of PvP that operate independently from each other into separate servers within the same campaign? Like perhaps have a server dedicated to a campaign that does nothing but process damage calculations and ability procs/effects calculations etc and a separate server that calculates positioning, LoS checks, movement, zone chat etc which then passes information to the damage server after determining a hit/miss etc. I know something like this would not be easy but it is one way to load balance your bottlenecks.

Lastly, could you confirm that whatever is happening on Azura's Star for example has zero potential to impact the performance of Haderus? Does each campaign currently have its own dedicated resources or are they shared between multiple campaigns?

Docmandu

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

The culling of figures won't actually do anything server wise because those players still exist and are casting abilities that hit the server. It would help with your client sure, but so does turning down your graphics options, which in either of those cases, don't help at all with server performance. Running your client at 60 FPS is great, but when the server is hitching, it doesn't really matter what your client is doing.

The bubble/phasing approach would also be an issue with the server because it still tracks everyone in the same world/zone definition. You sort of see this already with a fight happening on Alessia Bridge affecting a fight in Fort Warden in the prior example.

You're a patient man.. must be quite frustrating / annoying at times when non-technical people try to tell you how to fix it all

Docmandu

r.jan_emailb16_ESO wrote: »

maybe 64bit client will improve the lag

fyi.. there's no reason why a 64 bit client would fix the server not being able to keep up with computations. (ie the server lag we're all experiencing)

Yaewinn

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

For Cyrodiil the answer is simply that it's one zone and if anything floods the server with requests from that zone, regardless of where it occurred in the zone, will effect the entire zone. There may have been a battle at Alessia bridge, but it could effect what happens at Fort Warden.

Lousy mapdesign and poor game mechanics?

ZOS_BrianWheeler

Each Campaign does have it's own dedicated "world" that it resides on. Furthermore, if Cyrodiil is having performance issues in Azura's Star, Imperial City in Azura's star is not effected by said issues.

Starshadw

Ezareth wrote: »

I'm talking about PvE not campaigns in this respect so that theory wouldn't hold. They've also only ever closed dead campaigns so that wouldn't significantly contribute to performance degradation.

You also referred to PvP, to wit (from your post):

Ezareth wrote: »

This was the primary reason that I enjoyed my nightblade so much and especially cracked wood cave because I could PvP in there with flawless response times and could count on everything just working. Either in 1.7 (2.1) or later that stopped being the case. I don't know whether they've shrunk the server cluster or the number of players has grown significantly but things are now lagging in areas where before I'd never seen it.

and that is what my comment was in reply to.

Ezareth

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

Each Campaign does have it's own dedicated "world" that it resides on. Furthermore, if Cyrodiil is having performance issues in Azura's Star, Imperial City in Azura's star is not effected by said issues.

Awesome and good to know for certain because I've wondered sometimes. It also gives you an option to still contribute to your PvP ranking on your home campaign when it is lagging too bad for you. Thanks for keeping the communication open, it's a step above what we're experiencing elsewhere. I'll just have to trust that we'll see some noticeable improvement in the next major content patch and grin and bear the performance issues until then. Hopefully they figure out the no left click interface bug by then as well.

Starshadw wrote: »

Ezareth wrote: »

I'm talking about PvE not campaigns in this respect so that theory wouldn't hold. They've also only ever closed dead campaigns so that wouldn't significantly contribute to performance degradation.

You also referred to PvP, to wit (from your post):

Ezareth wrote: »

This was the primary reason that I enjoyed my nightblade so much and especially cracked wood cave because I could PvP in there with flawless response times and could count on everything just working. Either in 1.7 (2.1) or later that stopped being the case. I don't know whether they've shrunk the server cluster or the number of players has grown significantly but things are now lagging in areas where before I'd never seen it.

and that is what my comment was in reply to.

I'd wager that Cracked Wood cave (and other Cyrodiil delves) aren't even run on the same shard as Cyrodiil as it has its own loading screen and I've seen cracked wood cave run flawlessly in Azuras where it was laggy as hell the moment you load up outside.

Enodoc

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

The bubble/phasing approach would also be an issue with the server because it still tracks everyone in the same world/zone definition. You sort of see this already with a fight happening on Alessia Bridge affecting a fight in Fort Warden in the prior example.

Yeah I thought that would probably be the case; there's no loading screen when you go between phases in PvE, so it makes sense that this is because the server is tracking every phase concurrently, and just putting you in the correct one. So phasing would probably make Cyrodiil worse because it would be tracking multiple phases of the same location instead of just one.

MisterBigglesworth

Ezareth wrote: »

Would it be possible to do something like remove all of the resource nodes in Cyrodiil and then specifically eliminate some of the anti-botting logic that was added which pushed a lot of the client-side computations back to the server

^^^ THIS ^^^
seriously tho... ^^^ THIS SO HARD ^^^

People! You need to understand!
This right here is THE CENTRAL ISSUE to this game's performace. It cannot be overstated how important this is.

The netcode issues introduced in patch 1.2.3 vastly supercedes all problems with AOE caps, Champion Point system imbalance, lack of softcaps, etc.

June 26th, 2014
A day that will live in infamy...
The day the Lag Bombs fell...

kenpachi480

meanwhile my best friend left the game due to lagg and problems in pvp. even right now i am playing on azura and its not fun,. i wish it can be all fixed but as it stands now Iam looking for other games with pvp options.

CaptainObvious

The question is: would the performance trade off of splitting zone checks into 3 zone threads with a 4th manager thread responsible for moving players between zones offset the oddities encountered with combat occurring right at the likely seams (bridges between "home" territory areas such as Alessia and the gate near Ash)?

Enodoc

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

Each Campaign does have it's own dedicated "world" that it resides on. Furthermore, if Cyrodiil is having performance issues in Azura's Star, Imperial City in Azura's star is not effected by said issues.

Considering that, and going off on a slight tangent, does one Campaign's "world" include both its Cyrodiil and its IC, and is that why they share a pop cap? Or do they share a pop cap in order to avoid having to re-queue when entering/exiting the city?

Going off on a further tangent - why do you hear the ESO Theme Tune when loading into Cyrodiil, but not when loading between PvE zones or between Cyro and IC? Conversely, why do you not get the theme tune when returning to PvE-land from Cyro? Is that also to do with the "worlds"?

Zaldan

Enodoc wrote: »

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

Each Campaign does have it's own dedicated "world" that it resides on. Furthermore, if Cyrodiil is having performance issues in Azura's Star, Imperial City in Azura's star is not effected by said issues.

Considering that, and going off on a slight tangent, does one Campaign's "world" include both its Cyrodiil and its IC, and is that why they share a pop cap? Or do they share a pop cap in order to avoid having to re-queue when entering/exiting the city?

Going off on a further tangent - why do you hear the ESO Theme Tune when loading into Cyrodiil, but not when loading between PvE zones or between Cyro and IC? Conversely, why do you not get the theme tune when returning to PvE-land from Cyro? Is that also to do with the "worlds"?

I'd say it's purely to avoid re-queuing, having IC be separate from Cyrodiil with itself being separated into districts and sewers would be a way to handle lag or at least contain it to the area the lag is being caused in.

ZOS_BrianWheeler

Campaigns consist of Cyrodiil, IC, the Sewers, Cathedral, and all 18 delves when considering population of a Campaign. Imperial Prison and WGT are not included in the cap as they are separate PVE instances.

The Campaign zones don't get separated into their own population capped areas because of queue'ing just like you're saying. Once you're in your Campaign, you're in, as opposed to having to Queue for each individual thing attached to Cyrodiil.

Morozov

@ZOS_BrianWheeler
im curious to know if your team has run into issues/differences with fixes for Cyrodiil between PC and Mac clients?

Are there different issues to address when applying your fixes to each client? Will one fix work for PC and not Mac? and vice versa? Or will the changes you are making be a blanket fix for both?

The reason I ask is my wife and I play together (I pc, she Mac) and we run into similar lag when in AZ, however I have noticed that I have an easier time of handling disconnects in those laggy keep fights whereas she on the Mac will disconnect quite frequently as soon as we see our ping begin to spike. I am not trying to turn this into a Mac issues thread, but both of us are very interested to know with the "supposed" release of 64 bit PC/Mac clients and the work you and your team are doing if we can expect a noticeable difference for Mac clients as well.

Preyfar

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

Campaigns consist of Cyrodiil, IC, the Sewers, Cathedral, and all 18 delves when considering population of a Campaign. Imperial Prison and WGT are not included in the cap as they are separate PVE instances.

Factoring in IC into population has made relying on server population unreliable at best. I've seen campaign populations at two bars, but we don't have a single person defending or available to help attack on Trueflame. Trueflame was dead yesterday during the first part of prime time, picked up later, then died off again. It's really discouraging to jump to another campaign hoping/praying to find some combat, and the campaign you jumped to, with two bars, is likewise just as dead.

I just really wish there was a way to know if people were are in IC or elsewhere.

Starshadw

Ezareth wrote: »

Would it be possible to do something like remove all of the resource nodes in Cyrodiil and then specifically eliminate some of the anti-botting logic that was added which pushed a lot of the client-side computations back to the server (while keeping any in tact that could be used to gain a competitive advantage)? Or is this kind of thing done universally on the client with no way to distinguish how it is done depending on your zone?

I know that I for one would happily sacrifice every non-pvp essential component of Cyrodiil if it meant I'd see a noticeable improvement in performance.

If the anti-botting logic is intended to prevent macro-ing...

1. It's not working properly - people are still macroing
2. I for one do NOT want to see it eliminated

If the resource nodes in Cyrodiil are adding to the headache, then yes, eliminate them. There are very few people who go out specifically to resource hunt in Cyrodiil - sure, you might stop and pick up a particularly nice one on your way to wherever it is you're going (I brake for Columbine! should be a bumper sticker on my horse's backside). But if wiping all resources off the map would improve performance? I'm all for it.

ETA: Last evening for the first time ever, a number of my guildies experienced lag on BWB of the same horrible level as found on the vet campaigns. This was during prime-time, when there were significant numbers in the campaign. I didn't see proxy dets, but I did see a lot of Vigor spam.

Enodoc

Zaldan wrote: »

Enodoc wrote: »

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

Each Campaign does have it's own dedicated "world" that it resides on. Furthermore, if Cyrodiil is having performance issues in Azura's Star, Imperial City in Azura's star is not effected by said issues.

Considering that, and going off on a slight tangent, does one Campaign's "world" include both its Cyrodiil and its IC, and is that why they share a pop cap? Or do they share a pop cap in order to avoid having to re-queue when entering/exiting the city?

Going off on a further tangent - why do you hear the ESO Theme Tune when loading into Cyrodiil, but not when loading between PvE zones or between Cyro and IC? Conversely, why do you not get the theme tune when returning to PvE-land from Cyro? Is that also to do with the "worlds"?

I'd say it's purely to avoid re-queuing, having IC be separate from Cyrodiil with itself being separated into districts and sewers would be a way to handle lag or at least contain it to the area the lag is being caused in.

Based on what Brian said above, I assume it's already like that. Essentially each place with its own loading screen contains its own lag.


@ZOS_BrianWheeler We know the pop caps for Cyrodiil have been adjusted up and down as you've implemented different measures to alleviate lag; is the value on this article of 1800 players per campaign, whch would be 600 per alliance, still accurate?

Per Preyfar's comment, would there be any way of indicating on the campaign population bars whether players are in IC (districts/sewers) or Cyrodiil (inc delves)?

Izanagi.Xiiib16_ESO

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

Lighting would effect your client and not the server, and that's what these changes are focused on.

@ZOS_BrianWheeler Note that when we say the Lightning patch we dont necessarily mean that the lighting effects are the exact issue.

Within that patch there were a number of other changes (bot controls etc? right?) This is what we believe to be the root cause of the issues.

Huckdabuck

MaxwellC

How about we remove a lot of the enemy AI from cyrodill (keep the ones in caves/delves ofc). You could also decrease the time dolmens are active as they're not usually played with unless players want to do them every once in a blue moon.
By decrease I mean for example if I ride near a dolmen sometimes it'll get activated but I obviously have no intention on completing the dolmens as they're useless to me.

Another option is to create a separate campaign where all enemy AI/Dolmen/wild life were removed.

WarrioroftheWind_ESO

Starshadw wrote: »

Ezareth wrote: »

Would it be possible to do something like remove all of the resource nodes in Cyrodiil and then specifically eliminate some of the anti-botting logic that was added which pushed a lot of the client-side computations back to the server (while keeping any in tact that could be used to gain a competitive advantage)? Or is this kind of thing done universally on the client with no way to distinguish how it is done depending on your zone?

I know that I for one would happily sacrifice every non-pvp essential component of Cyrodiil if it meant I'd see a noticeable improvement in performance.

If the anti-botting logic is intended to prevent macro-ing...

1. It's not working properly - people are still macroing
2. I for one do NOT want to see it eliminated

If the resource nodes in Cyrodiil are adding to the headache, then yes, eliminate them. There are very few people who go out specifically to resource hunt in Cyrodiil - sure, you might stop and pick up a particularly nice one on your way to wherever it is you're going (I brake for Columbine! should be a bumper sticker on my horse's backside). But if wiping all resources off the map would improve performance? I'm all for it.

ETA: Last evening for the first time ever, a number of my guildies experienced lag on BWB of the same horrible level as found on the vet campaigns. This was during prime-time, when there were significant numbers in the campaign. I didn't see proxy dets, but I did see a lot of Vigor spam.

I'd be for resource removal. I mean if there's a war going on wouldn't resources be monopolized by the three factions? Perhaps have vendors at keep resource nodes that sell goodie bags with a mixed amount of a particular resource type, for example farms have alchy/prov mats, mines have glyphs and ore, and LM's have wood and tailor mats, similar to the siege merch. I know in LOTRO a particular faction area will have vendors that trade a region-specific currency for goodies, and if you get to the point where you're wiping your butt with said currency, you have the option of buying crates or satchels of stuff. It's never been alot afaik, like 5 tokens for a crate with 5 chunks of ore or scholar papers etc, but you can't get them unless you've done associated quests to get said currency. So if there are bots running aruond getting mats, they wouldn't be able to buy them unless they kill people to gain enough AP.

I still want my ravens back tho. Gimmie back my Crows Wood Whistle birds.

umagon

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

The culling of figures won't actually do anything server wise because those players still exist and are casting abilities that hit the server. It would help with your client sure, but so does turning down your graphics options, which in either of those cases, don't help at all with server performance. Running your client at 60 FPS is great, but when the server is hitching, it doesn't really matter what your client is doing.

The bubble/phasing approach would also be an issue with the server because it still tracks everyone in the same world/zone definition. You sort of see this already with a fight happening on Alessia Bridge affecting a fight in Fort Warden in the prior example.

Please consider the following:
If players casting abilities repeatedly is creating problems with the server; and the reason they can cast those abilities repeatedly is do to the fact that many people don't run out of resources to cast those abilities. Then maybe it's time to actually re-balance the ability system so there is proper stamina/magicka resource management. Which would reduce abilities from being used repeatedly in rapid succession and lessen the load on the server scripting; while at the same time correcting the long standing ability "spam" problem that has plagued the game for some time.