Update on Cyrodiil Performance & Upcoming AOE Tests

SickleCider

Ooooooh, this is why sorcerers haven't been allowed to have any sustain.

JusticeSouldier

Cinbri wrote: »

Sugaroverdose wrote: »

Well after observing this topic for some time, i believe that game just need to reverse all of battle mechanics changes to 1.5 patch state, with soft caps and everyone will be happy

Remember that 10% increase on stats that noone needed. It was far better with 2000 hp, not current 20000hp. Those totally unnecessary 0.001% calculations they added "for precise" dont even have real value (like if you actually notice difference between 20000hp and 20009hp) apart from drastically increase amount of calculations for every character with every stat, i.e. lag.

it was done for champion system to be implemented, but champion system is now proven by time dead end.
agree that it's one of the sources of lag idk how much valuable exactly

HalvarIronfist

i can understand the logic behind these test as someone who's written code and programs before, but also looking at this from a player perspective, that's one major flaw.

You're removing fluid gameplay from PVP that's renown for it's fluid combat. Combat desyncs and lag have never felt as bad, and the cast timers surely dont help. Aren't those also calculations the server has to run?

Say, there's a 50 v 50 fight for instance. What if 25 people on each side use a cast-timed ability at once? The server would need to monitor each of those times to fire off the skill correctly.

Perhaps AOE is indeed a problem to some extent, but are these changes means to an end or truly a formidable solution? I just can't foresee that any of these changes are going to go live post-testing.

James-Wayne

I main a Templar, have since 2014 and these changes would just erase that class so I'm very very sad if this goes through... you would have to completely rework every Templar ability which would completely change the class.

The high ping I get currently in PvE means I cant light attack weave very well because the game just doesn't react fast enough but forcing me into a single target meta, reducing my damage by putting caps on AOE means I'm reduced to just easy story content and that would be a very sad day indeed.

LordSkruff

Slightly Modified idea, since in the upcoming patch group buffed sets are now only targeting group members, they have they're own advantages in a larger group already vs smaller groups...

if you make these AOE cost increases, cooldowns specific only to groups of 4+ and increase in severity based on group size, people would second think about running in large groups.

This would no doubt split the battlefield in PVP up a little, give the servers a much deserved rest. and leave a more tactical and strategic group compositions...

everyone is happy?

Sm0ke

Zos are so strange that they want to remove an entire branch of the community: pvp groups and pvp guilds, adding a cooldown to the AoE skills, which for a moment were designed to deal with large enemy stacks.
Why AoE? Why not solo skills? Take for example dizzy swing? It is also used often and spam.
If you don't have enough computing power for your servers, why can't you add more power, increase their number or make a individual pvp server?
Stop deceiving yourself and people, every month you find 100 reasons, if you remember, first our add-ons are to blame in lags, then Dot, now AoE skills.
What's next? Weapon swap cooldown?
The most interesting thing is that people continue to believe in this fairy tale.

It is obvious that over time your server will experience more and more problems with the amount of online player growth.
You must increase the capacity of the servers and optimize.
But do not resort to nerfing every patch, with the hope that something will get better.
This is my first game where a developer is trying to improve server performance through changes in game mechanics, namely global nerfing.

Now, if your proposed changes take effect, you are deliberately forcing players not to use AoE skills and not join a group in order not to get a cooldown and this is nonsense for pvp zone.

Alexium

Alone solution is the dedicated Cyrodiil server. But it is probably impossible.

Vaoh

“At some point, we crossed a threshold where most players in PvP were able to cast endless AOE abilities, without ever running out of resources. This is done through player knowledge, builds and group mechanics – resulting in a constant stream of AOEs with many players never using any other type of ability.”

Yeah, how dare a Templar use their skills.
Casting Restoring Focus, having a few Regen enchants, and then spamming jabs. Tremendously unforeseen knowledge of builds and mechanics......

ZOS_GregoryV

Greetings all,

After removing a handful of posts, we would like to remind everyone that all posts should be kept civil, constructive, and within the guidelines of the rules we have in place. Bashing, Flaming, as well as Trolling and Baiting, are all violations of the rules, and are stated as follows:

• 
  Bashing and Slanderous Comments: We do not permit the bashing of individuals (including ZeniMax employees), groups, or other companies on our forums. We believe that doing so is neither constructive nor in spirit of our game and community.
• Flaming: It’s okay to disagree and debate on the official ESO forums, but we do ask that you keep all disagreements civil, constructive, and on-topic. If a discussion gets heated and turns into a debate, remember that you should stick to debating the post and/or thread topic. It is never appropriate to resort to personal comments or jabs about those participating in the thread discussion.
• Trolling or Baiting: The act of trolling is defined as something that is created for the intent to provoke conflict, shock others, or to elicit a strong negative or emotional reaction. It’s okay and very normal to disagree with others, and even to debate, but provoking conflict, baiting, inciting, mocking, etc. is never acceptable in the official The Elder Scrolls Online community. If you do not have something constructive or meaningful to add to a discussion, we strongly recommend you refrain from posting in that thread, and find another discussion to participate in instead. It is also not constructive or helpful to publicly call out others and accuse them of trolling, or call them a troll—please refrain from doing so. If you genuinely believe someone is trolling, please report the post or thread to the ESO Team, and leave it at that.

If there are any questions in regards to the rules, please take a few moments to review them here.

Thank you for your understanding,
-Greg-

EatsManyPancakes

I feel like they're not going "Deep enough":

Q: Why is this such a prevalent issue now, and not at launch, or say 2 years ago?
There are two answers, with the second feeding into the former

• Short answer: POWER CREEP
• Long Answer (pt 1): CPs (they even mention this)
• Long Answer (pt 2): 24 Man Groups & Inter-Dependant Character Stats (thanks to gear set effects that can apply to others) leading to (effectively) "non-linear" scaling (dependant) calculations.

Calculating your magicka (for example) is easy as a solo player, it takes a little more processing time with a group of 4, as there are 3 other stat-sheets to read off (maybe someone has an item set boosting party member magicka) ... but what happens when you have 24(!) people in a group? And you need to also impose stops and limits to prevent double counting (item sets only apply for up to 12 groupies) so then you need to effectively flag and sort players for each active effect or gear set ... this suddenly leads to a lot more processor time being wasted on "administering" the stat-sheets for a large group, than for the same numnber of players if they were not in a group at all, or if they were in smaller groups

• incidentally this is probably why you'll also get more "infinite loading screens" in Cyrodiil than anywhere else - as your respawn is "queued up" after the server has finished dealing with your living party member's stat updates... which are always changing, so you're always sitting around, "loading".

If you've ever worked on a financial spreadsheet you quickly learn to design it in such a way as to avoid concurrent updates across multiple cells (e.g. like learning to not recalculate portfolio variance for 500 stocks constantly) - this is a similar issue here, character sheets are constantly in flux at runtime, constantly influencing one another, constantly leading to recalculations.

So thats an awful lot of stuff going on in the background, clogging up the server's threads, all to give people more resources that they can then spam like crazy with - and this is all going to be scaling off an inflated set of base stats thanks to CP variables.

And this doesn't even factor in that:

1. Having fewer, larger, groups promotes zerging as people will go "lfg" and be auto-added if free space exists then all stack up.
2. Unlike something like Planetside 2 there is virtually no dynamic quest/mission system to incentivise people spreading out around cyrodiil, rather than all dogpiling on 2-3 locations.
3. There is also very little in the way of an intelligent spawn system, unlike other large-scale pvp games, if you die you best hope there's a tent nearby or its back to the castle for you. This further encourages zerging, as it means if you die there's usually 50 other guys around you to rez you, unlike if you were soloing or even in a small team.
4. Combat plugins let people "trim the fat" off their rotations and really let them maximise their AOE uptime, just disabling combat plugins would probably dial down AOE spam a bit - though wouldn't on its own likely be a solution - it'd also level the playing field for players that dont (for whatever reason) use combat plugins.

So AOEs and unlimited spamming in concentrated locations does probably lead to the crippling lag spikes, as they suggest.

But the underlying reason for those infinite spamming abilities going off in a small area is because the game is plain poorly designed for large-scale PVP:

• It does nothing to incentivise non-zerg gameplay and its underlying code/maths probably isn't even structured in a way that can scale well (as seen with group sizes).
• (As the OP implied), ESO wasn't ever originally designed to be a game where combat skills were farted out every 0.5 secs by someone tracking their uptime via 3rd party plugins whilst having magika force-fed to them by a squad of buffers.

LordSkruff

Versispellis wrote: »

Ooooooh, this is why sorcerers haven't been allowed to have any sustain.

How do you do you dark deal?

renne

There is absolutely no way on this earth if any of these changes are made it doesn't affect PvE or BGs.

If they're not just straight up deleting Templars, they'll have to rework the entire class and they're not just going to have a PvP version of Templars and a PvE version of Templars.

And wow, guys, way to make it look like you just absolutely hate the Templar class. Between this and the skill and class changes you've still not reverted on the PTS (lmao imagine trying to get burning light to proc on jabs now!) it's pretty clear you've got zero interest in it being a viable class in anything other than overland questing.

If these changes go live can we Templar mains get a class change token, because there'll be absolutely no point in anyone running the class anymore.

Casterial

renne wrote: »

There is absolutely no way on this earth if any of these changes are made it doesn't affect PvE or BGs.

If they're not just straight up deleting Templars, they'll have to rework the entire class and they're not just going to have a PvP version of Templars and a PvE version of Templars.

And wow, guys, way to make it look like you just absolutely hate the Templar class. Between this and the skill and class changes you've still not reverted on the PTS (lmao imagine trying to get burning light to proc on jabs now!) it's pretty clear you've got zero interest in it being a viable class in anything other than overland questing.

If these changes go live can we Templar mains get a class change token, because there'll be absolutely no point in anyone running the class anymore.

No I agree, Templars will be absolutely ruined. Half of the Templar skills suck, half the stamina skills in the game suck, Stamina Templars for example would be absolutely done. The game would be done. This class would need to be gutted, or all their abilities will need to turn to instant, single target. Because at this point, I don't see how a class that is forced to use 3 AOEs (Rune, Purge, Jabs) can function in a fast paced game. @ZOS_Gilliam do you play your game?


Your game was playable 2014-2015, it was playable 2017, it was playable Nov 2019, what did you do? In Gordon Ramsay's voice... "STOP RIGHT NOW".

technohic

Casterial wrote: »

renne wrote: »

There is absolutely no way on this earth if any of these changes are made it doesn't affect PvE or BGs.

If they're not just straight up deleting Templars, they'll have to rework the entire class and they're not just going to have a PvP version of Templars and a PvE version of Templars.

And wow, guys, way to make it look like you just absolutely hate the Templar class. Between this and the skill and class changes you've still not reverted on the PTS (lmao imagine trying to get burning light to proc on jabs now!) it's pretty clear you've got zero interest in it being a viable class in anything other than overland questing.

If these changes go live can we Templar mains get a class change token, because there'll be absolutely no point in anyone running the class anymore.

No I agree, Templars will be absolutely ruined. Half of the Templar skills suck, half the stamina skills in the game suck, Stamina Templars for example would be absolutely done. The game would be done. This class would need to be gutted, or all their abilities will need to turn to instant, single target. Because at this point, I don't see how a class that is forced to use 3 AOEs (Rune, Purge, Jabs) can function in a fast paced game. @ZOS_Gilliam do you play your game?


Your game was playable 2014-2015, it was playable 2017, it was playable Nov 2019, what did you do? In Gordon Ramsay's voice... "STOP RIGHT NOW".

Is rune really AOE? I dont see it.

Vaoh

Player 1: Take my PUNCTURING SWEEPS
Player 2: I cast my IMPULSE on you
Player 1: *after 3 seconds* Let’s see if you can survive my RITUAL OF RETRIBUTION
Player 2: *after 3 seconds* Heh, I’m still at 100% Health. Take my IMPULSE again
Player 1: *after 3 seconds* Eat these PUNCTURING SWEEPS again

Casterial

technohic wrote: »

Is rune really AOE? I dont see it.

Rune is an aoe, its stand in the area to get the buff

Casterial

Vaoh wrote: »

Player 1: Take my PUNCTURING SWEEPS
Player 2: I cast my IMPULSE on you
Player 1: *after 3 seconds* Let’s see if you can survive my RITUAL OF RETRIBUTION
Player 2: *after 3 seconds* Heh, I’m still at 100% Health. Take my IMPULSE again
Player 1: *after 3 seconds* Eat these PUNCTURING SWEEPS again

World of Scrolls Online?

StShoot

technohic wrote: »

Casterial wrote: »

renne wrote: »

There is absolutely no way on this earth if any of these changes are made it doesn't affect PvE or BGs.

If they're not just straight up deleting Templars, they'll have to rework the entire class and they're not just going to have a PvP version of Templars and a PvE version of Templars.

And wow, guys, way to make it look like you just absolutely hate the Templar class. Between this and the skill and class changes you've still not reverted on the PTS (lmao imagine trying to get burning light to proc on jabs now!) it's pretty clear you've got zero interest in it being a viable class in anything other than overland questing.

If these changes go live can we Templar mains get a class change token, because there'll be absolutely no point in anyone running the class anymore.

No I agree, Templars will be absolutely ruined. Half of the Templar skills suck, half the stamina skills in the game suck, Stamina Templars for example would be absolutely done. The game would be done. This class would need to be gutted, or all their abilities will need to turn to instant, single target. Because at this point, I don't see how a class that is forced to use 3 AOEs (Rune, Purge, Jabs) can function in a fast paced game. @ZOS_Gilliam do you play your game?


Your game was playable 2014-2015, it was playable 2017, it was playable Nov 2019, what did you do? In Gordon Ramsay's voice... "STOP RIGHT NOW".

Is rune really AOE? I dont see it.

It is because you get the bonusbuff if you standing inside the area of effect. its not a skill that buffs other players so it shouldnt be affected by those changes. Than again its zos... they always like to go all or nothing

Recremen

I have a few questions mixed in with my commentary to try to understand the rationale here, and while I am a software developer I'm not a game programmer, so bear with me.

From what little I'm able to find on the matter, it seems that AoE in a gridless combat game is calculated with a point-in-polygon algorithm, where every point would be a player. Thus, for every AoE ability cast, it sounds like you have to check against every player on the server who could be affected. Is that correct?

If so, does that mean every hit of a multi-hit ability like Hurricane is causing such a check? I can't see any way it wouldn't. Then moves such as Biting Jabs, which appear to hit multiple times per second, sound especially troublesome, which is awful because that's literally their spammable.

How many other mitigation strategies have been attempted? For example, pursuant to the above assumption, is it possible to have a temporary no-check table for characters far enough outside an AoE effect? If someone is on the exact opposite side of a keep to me and I start spamming steel tornado, for example, it's an incredibly safe assumption that we are not going to be able to close the distance between us for a certain amount of time based on distance from my first cast. If every potential target is evaluated for being in the polygon of a caster's AoE, could there be a gradated number of seconds that they remain on such a table for the casting player's AoEs based on their distance from the source? You could math it out to just be a function of max move speed if two players are assumed to be full sprinting at each other on mounts with max speed buffs, idk. If the cost of maintaining that table is less than having to do the AoE calculation every time for every player, that may be a good avenue to pursue.

Another assumption I have is that Cyrodiil is not actually a single server, but multiple servers with overlapping transitions zones to enable continuous movement. That might be totally wrong, but it would partially explain some phenomenon we experience, such as "render lines" and the ability to have fights at different parts of the map wind up more stable than one big fight with everyone showing up. If this is the case, is it possible to increase the number of these servers so that the map is more finely subdivided? Or has it been mathed out already to be at optimal placement given the inter-server communication needs? Is this even a real thing to begin with?

How many other redesign options are on the table besides the cost increases and GCD? There are a lot of continuously-firing AoE abilities going off every second that maybe don't need to and whose redesign would be considerably more palatable. For example, going back to Hurricane again, right now it looks like it deals damage every 1 second. That's a check every second just for having one of your main sorc buffs up, on top of other AoE abilities you might want to cast. Could it not instead tic less often (every 2 or three seconds) and instead deal more burst damage? Or how about Caltrops? Why do a check every second when you could just apply the snare and a bleed on the first hit and then have that player enter the aforementioned no-check table? Naturally any ability you're doing this for would need an extensive balance pass based on your change, but players will probably find "Mandatory 3 second AoE GCD" a lot less palatable than "Maybe Caltrops works differently a little".

How about a stacking AoE lockout, either per skill or generally, as per the testing schedule? Very coordinated groups (who are admittedly the main culprits for our issues, I imagine) tend to only have a window of a handful of seconds to do their damage when fighting each other. We proxy up, cast our shalk, then push in and cast our AoE spammable while the first two (plus our ults) go off. If a character is not dead within a few seconds of all that going off, odds are they will just heal up to full health and further uncoordinated AoE spam won't do you any good beyond that regardless. We seem to really like that type of engagement, but we also are all different in terms of how disciplined we are to stop casting AoE past the point of its usefulness. If instead of a GCD we build stacks, say with a max of 5 or so, and then got locked out of AoE upon getting the full stack, we would still have that dynamic gameplay we know and love, while simultaneously saving ourselves from our worst impulses, or worst Impulse spams, as it were. Naturally that might not actually be enough to mitigate the issue, but it might be worth its own testing bracket if and when the GCD test succeeds.

I would also like to express some caution regarding the tests. As always, anything that affects the balance of healing and purges is going to risk polluting the results with the potential heavy siege meta. Siege is already too strong for the amount of effort involved, and if we can't even heal or purge it consistently on top of all the other dots, debuffs, and damage that we're taking, then its presence on the battlefield is directly antithetical to the purpose of the tests. We cannot reliably reproduce the same hard-hitting fights causing the server performance problems if we can't even do open field fights without pugs dropping a handful of siege, never mind actually going to a keep and trying to take it. This already happens on live, but is more or less manageable by good groups who run heals, purges, and siege shields, so believe me when I say that this will severely handicap your ability to gather truthful data that has parity with normal live performance.

That said, I look forward to these tests and appreciate the honesty about the state of the game and the challenges we're facing. To five more years of Cyrodiil!! 🍺🍺🍺

doomette

When I first read about the tests in a different thread I thought maybe they just overlooked how this would absolutely ruin templar’s spammable, but not, it’s specifically mentioned. Flabbergasted to say the least. Sorry PC templars, my condolences 😕

StShoot

Just out of curiosety but wouldnt the 3./4. option increase the stress on the server ? since it always has to calculate the new cost of your abillitys while you could still spam other abilitys in between ?

In5pire

This change is going to destroy templar considering its spammable counts as an AoE. At the very least, this should not affect jabs and sweeps. A MUCH BETTER change would be to simply move the game's balance towards a more individualized combat system. So that large scale has more LIFE to it. MAKE SINGLE TARGET ABILITIES MORE USEFUL IN LARGE-SCALE SCENARIOS. Discourage AoE spam through nerfs to AoE damage, cut regen values from set bonuses in half, and make it so that even in a group of 24, it is 1 person killing another through single target abilities and AoE's just complement that. Another idea would be to REDUCE MAX GROUP SIZE TO 12. This game is so much fun and the combat is so intense due to its fluidity and speed. Recent changes to animation canceling have made that worse WITH NO IMPROVEMENTS TO PERFORMANCE. Un-nerf animation canceling, nerf large zergs, remove ALL incentive to group up and stack 24+ people in 1 area. Reduce group heals, reduce group damage. Buff vicious death damage so people spread out more, keep proxy det the same, etc. It needs to be a war. People need to WORK for kills, not just go in with a group spamming AoEs with their brains turned off killing people. Nerf major vulnerability from necro ult. Seriously, there are way better fixes for this problem. And also - the servers are toasters. We ALL KNOW you can afford to upgrade the servers to more modern hardware, we ALL spend plenty of money in the crown store - WHERE IS IT GOING???

Sugaroverdose

In5pire wrote: »

This change is going to destroy templar considering its spammable counts as an AoE. At the very least, this should not affect jabs and sweeps. A MUCH BETTER change would be to simply move the game's balance towards a more individualized combat system. So that large scale has more LIFE to it. MAKE SINGLE TARGET ABILITIES MORE USEFUL IN LARGE-SCALE SCENARIOS. Discourage AoE spam through nerfs to AoE damage, cut regen values from set bonuses in half, and make it so that even in a group of 24, it is 1 person killing another through single target abilities and AoE's just complement that. Another idea would be to REDUCE MAX GROUP SIZE TO 12. This game is so much fun and the combat is so intense due to its fluidity and speed. Recent changes to animation canceling have made that worse WITH NO IMPROVEMENTS TO PERFORMANCE. Un-nerf animation canceling, nerf large zergs, remove ALL incentive to group up and stack 24+ people in 1 area. Reduce group heals, reduce group damage. Buff vicious death damage so people spread out more, keep proxy det the same, etc. It needs to be a war. People need to WORK for kills, not just go in with a group spamming AoEs with their brains turned off killing people. Nerf major vulnerability from necro ult. Seriously, there are way better fixes for this problem. And also - the servers are toasters. We ALL KNOW you can afford to upgrade the servers to more modern hardware, we ALL spend plenty of money in the crown store - WHERE IS IT GOING???

Your proposal literally says "make no option but zerglinks spam execute, pvp for masses"

ZarkingFrued

Why nerf AOEs when you can delete proc sets and procs in general? These sets have to be hard on a server. The more procs we got, the worse performance was. Flat stats sets encourage skilled gameplay and do not need to calculate when they take effect.

ZarkingFrued

bigdavid11b16_ESO wrote: »

If anybody remembers. the day that nobody could group. is the day that cyrodiil had zero lag. Maybe you all should have a little ponder as to why. The reasoning is that there were no people spamming abilities that were linked to group utility
example : PURGE

Why can we not just start at once place. Group size. Lower it to a max of 12 and go from there.

Best performance to date

Tannus15

@StShoot not if you can't spam it indefinitely.
anyone who has been spammed down by a templar knows that just keep hammering away until it's done. If the cost is increasing every jabs then they will instead change their attack into a burst. like, charge, jabs, jabs, javalin, beam instead of charge, jabs, jabs, jabs, jabs, jabs, jabs, jabs

Honestly, everyone calm down. The point of this exercise is to gather data to confirm their hypothesis and then they will change skills etc to match the new paradigm.
The real thing people need to come to grips with is their favourite build is going to be changed or killed off in the future patch where they change skills to match. Jabs is on the chopping block for sure, but it'll be replaced with something else. Something single target. Would you give up your jabsplar build for a smoothly running Cyrodiil? I would.

itscompton

If the real issue is people stacking in ball groups, which allows them to endlessly spam AOE's why not just go all in on ball group busting sets/abilities to strongly discourage that type of play? The buff to VD is a nice start but how about increasing the potential damage of Proxy/Inevitable Det by significantly raising the multiplier (and maybe even range)? Put a long cooldown and or incredibly large cost increase on consecutive casting to keep it from being abused while making it a strong enough burst to truly wipe a ball group if you manage to hit more than 5 with it.

TequilaFire

ZarkingFrued wrote: »

bigdavid11b16_ESO wrote: »

If anybody remembers. the day that nobody could group. is the day that cyrodiil had zero lag. Maybe you all should have a little ponder as to why. The reasoning is that there were no people spamming abilities that were linked to group utility
example : PURGE

Why can we not just start at once place. Group size. Lower it to a max of 12 and go from there.

Best performance to date

I can go for that because on guild nights we can just form multiple 12 man groups and use guild voice chat.

twitch_zero

Why not simply increase the cost of aoe abilities? And/or reduce aoe stacking?

Also ZOS are still not addressing the fact that something specifically happened in the last February performance update that drastically reduced performance.

Winnamine

Let me rephrase:

These solutions are low effort and put the burden of correcting performance issues onto the players rather than ZoS.

All groups in Cyrodiil are operating within the parameters allowed by the game, as developed by ZoS. If these parameters are now leading to performance issues, i can't help but think that is due to a lack of foresight.

The large resource pools and resulting ability to spam skills are a direct and perfectly predictable result of the CP system.
This was brought up by a lot of players when CP was introduced. We were told that the way CP scaled would mean it wasn't
a problem. Apparently, that was incorrect.

AoE skills are the most effective damage against multiple players, they're also typically the only skills that work in Cyrodiil. Single target abilities are highly unreliable when server performance is bad, which is often. Players will use the most effective tools available, ZoS gave us these tools, of course they will be used.

The large groups are due to the max group size being set at 24.

The concentration of players in one place on the map is a result of objective based gameplay and the map feature that allows everyone to see where there are fights going on, so they can go join them.

ESO was advertised to PvPers as supporting massive, large-scale PvP. If ZoS can't deliver on that, then scale down group sizes and add more smaller servers. Or, upgrade your servers so they can handle the PvP environment that you created.