Update on Cyrodiil Performance & Upcoming AOE Tests

renne

Why can't we just have whatever it was we had during MYM? Because Cyrodiil ran the best it ever has then for me. There were times when there'd be a 24 person group from all three alliances in one keep and a number other players as well and there was barely any noticeable lag at all. Even the loading screens - which were almost always when travelling from one location to another - weren't a big deal when you knew when you got where you were going you could still play.

Tannus15

@Winnamine These are not solutions at all. They haven't said these are solutions, they have said this is a data gathering exercise so that they can formulate solutions.

Part of what they are doing is seeing what the players can afford to ignore which won't help at all.
A great example is what is players literally just stack into MOAR REGEN to keep their AOE spam. Then the cost increase is pointless and won't help at all.

I imagine stage 1 is literally to enforce less aoe's and to see if performance is "fixed". It's the sledge hammer to confirm the hypothesis and to set a benchmark for things working properly.

Winnamine

Tannus15 wrote: »

@Winnamine These are not solutions at all. They haven't said these are solutions, they have said this is a data gathering exercise so that they can formulate solutions.

Part of what they are doing is seeing what the players can afford to ignore which won't help at all.
A great example is what is players literally just stack into MOAR REGEN to keep their AOE spam. Then the cost increase is pointless and won't help at all.

I imagine stage 1 is literally to enforce less aoe's and to see if performance is "fixed". It's the sledge hammer to confirm the hypothesis and to set a benchmark for things working properly.

Or. It's a test to see if global cooldowns will improve server performance, and if players will accept it. And if it works and there isn't too much of an uproar, the test becomes permanent.

J18696

Yeah for real any of these changes would delete templars from the game

Tannus15

@Winnamine Tin foil hate territory mate.

To quote:

After we complete the above tests, we may try other combinations of cooldown, cost, and regen values on AOE abilities. However, we need to run these tests first and then assess the data. We will then let everyone know what we found and how we will move forward. We will be very upfront, but please be aware that if these tests confirm our hypothesis, then chain-casting AOE abilities will no longer form the core of the ESO PvP experience in the way it has for the last few years. We would then go through each class and ensure that there are viable builds for each and make adjustments as necessary.

They have literally said they will look at the effect first and then look at creating a solution.

renne

If the goal is to reduce lag, wouldn't giving AoEs a 3 second cool down just enshrining the lag in the game since lag makes skills take that long to go off?

tinythinker

Oh dear. I guess my comment will be lost in an ocean of "this will ruin the trademark flowing style of ESO combat" and "is this just for PvP?" remarks. Not judging those sentiments, but gonna move past that to the "If this is needed and is adopted" scenario...

ZOS_RichLambert wrote: »

Test 1... For example, as a Templar, if I cast Ritual of Retribution, I wouldn’t be able to cast Puncturing Sweep for 3 seconds...

Test 2... For example – as a Templar, if I cast Puncturing Sweep, I wouldn’t be able to cast Puncturing Sweep again for 3 seconds.

Test 3... Similar to how streak or roll dodge works, where when you cast an AOE you receive a debuff for 5 seconds, each stack of the debuff increases the cost of any AOE cast.

...

After we complete the above tests, we may try other combinations of cooldown, cost, and regen values on AOE abilities... please be aware that if these tests confirm our hypothesis, then chain-casting AOE abilities will no longer form the core of the ESO PvP experience in the way it has for the last few years. We would then go through each class and ensure that there are viable builds for each and make adjustments as necessary.

As a mostly Templar main, I can see why losing free access so many of our best abilities to cool-downs would be a nightmare, especially Puncturing Strikes and its morphs which are meant to be spammable. It would take a BIG rework for Templars alone if insta-chaining goes away, and other classes would be effected in many ways.

To keep things simple, if these GCDs on AOE go through let's take the cited example and some options to make it less painful (with similar approaches available for other AoE in the game):

1. Make Puncturing Strikes + morphs a single target skill that fires off an AoE every three seconds. This way, you can still spam it, but the AoE component still remains in a different way. The area check would still be limited to every 3 seconds and the single-target part would work the same as spamming Lava Whip.

• If possible, add a DoT to Puncturing Strikes when it does its AoE check every 3 seconds. Effectively, this DoT would mimic the damage done currently to the targets (and compensate with similar heals for the Puncturing Sweeps morph). So basically activate and immediately hit for AoE that leaves DoTs on targets, then single target damage for three seconds, then another AoE burst with DoTs.

2. Make Puncturing Strikes + morphs an AoE skill that fires off an AoE every three seconds. If the repeating of the animation as well as the constant area checks are a problem, then the bulleted idea immediately above could be applied when the ability is activated (add DoTs) and then go into the 3 second CD without spam. In terms of damage (and possibly healing), this would keep thing as they are now, but it also raises another issue: no real Templar spammable.

• On the one hand, this means Templars would have time and opportunity to use other abilities while Puncturing Strikes is on CD (meaning the DoTs applied would be lower than for Option #1). But on the other hand, the few options for spammables that make sense in the current skill lines are also AoE, have AoE morphs, or are don't operate in a spammable way. Plus the whole change to Burning Light (hitting a target four times in rapid succession) would make even less sense than it does now, as the only Aedric Spear ability people spam that fast is... Puncturing Strikes + morphs. So it would need to be redefined.

In a broader sense beyond one class or one skill:

• Ground AoEs for damage will be largely unaffected; same for healing AoEs except your more likely to want to move it. Like above you could apply a HoT for those passing through.
• DoTs applied directly to targets at a distance (such as reflective light) will be mostly unaffected unless you want to switch targets within 3 seconds
• Cleave AoEs based on the caster are most affected, which is why I led with one as an example

If the AoE CDs do come in, they may be different. Some with the recast cost increased, some with a flat 3 second delay. But there are ways to make up the lost damage and healing, a few of which are described above. Such changes to AoE would still cause a difference in some aspects of game play, but many can be minimized, so it won't be as if the game becomes unrecognizable. ZOS could even spice some of them up to make them more interesting to use.

We won't know how they will make the changes, and I have no interest in trying to "sell" the idea of AoE CDs, but when I considered how ZOS could get around some of the limitations it didn't sound as bad as when I first read about the idea. Games evolve, and if they do AoE changes cleverly we could still see the same damage and healing with better performance.

Temeraire507

So based on the PTS Patch Notes v6.1.2 and these lines stated there:

These tests will ultimately make it more difficult for AOE abilities to be the only abilities used, and we’ll be adjusting cooldown, cost and regen values of all AOEs (damage and healing).

Abilities which meet the following criteria have been flagged for being subject to this test:
The ability’s initial cast requires a radius to function. This includes abilities like Breath of Life that require a radius check to fire its heal at the appropriate target.
If an ability is a single target ability that has an area component and has no cast time.


I have made a little list of abilities targeted by the tests and planned changes based on that information, of course we will only know for sure when the tests are held but the notes were relatively clear in their wording. I thought this could still add something to the ongoing discussions. This took a little time so my apologies if someone else was faster and this is not necessary anymore.

Class

Dragonknight

Ardent Flame

Dragonknight Standard and Morph
Fiery Breath and Morphs
Inferno and Morphs

Draconic Power

Dragon Leap and Morphs
Volatile Armor Morph
Dark Talons and Morphs
Inhale and Morphs

Earthen Heart

Magma Arnor and Morphs
Stonefist and Morphs
Molten Weapons and Morphs
Obsidian Shield and Morphs
Ash Cloud and Morphs

Necromancer

Bone Tyrant

Pummeling Goliath Morph and Ravenous Goliath Morph
Death Scythe and Morphs
Bitter Harvest and Morphs
Bone Totem and Morphs
Grave Grasp and Morphs

Grave Lord

Frozen Colossus and Morphs
Riccochet Skull Morph
Blastbones and Morphs
Boneyard and Morphs
Skeletal Mage and Morphs - requires a scan if you don't direct the target to attack but is a pet so I'm not sure
Shocking Syphon and Morphs

Living Death

Reanimate and Morphs
Render Flesh and Morphs
Life amid Death and Morphs
Spirit Mender and Morphs - requires a scan for sure but is a pet so I'm not sure
Restoring Tether and Morphs

Nightblade

Assassination

Lotus Fan Morph

Shadow

Consuming Darkness and Morphs
Path of Darkness and Morphs
Aspect of Terror and Morphs
Summon Shade and Morphs - requires a scan if you don't direct the target to attack but is a pet so I'm not sure

Siphoning

Soul Shred and Morphs
Strife and Funnel Health Morph
Malevolent Offering and Morphs
Drain Power and Morphs

Sorcerer

Daedric Summoning

Summon Storm Atronach and Morphs
Summon Unstable Familiar and Morphs - maybe, it is a semi-permanent Pet but obviously requires scan and the Ability (save for Clannfear) is definitely an AoE effect not sure if this counts but it might count if they really go all out on these criteria
Daedric Curse and Morphs
Summon Winged Twilight and Morphs - maybe, same as Summon Unstable Familiar safe for its activateable Ability

Dark Magic

Negate Magic and Morphs
Encase and Morphs
Daedric Mines and Morphs

Storm Calling

Overload and Morphs
Mages Fury and Morphs
Lightning Form and Morphs
Lightning Splash and Morphs
Power Surge Morph
Bolt Escape and Morphs - Ball of Lightning is debateable, the ball it places might count as secondary area component though

Templar

Aedric Spear

Radial Sweep and Morphs
Puncturing Strikes and Morphs
Explosive Charge Morph
Spear Shards and Morphs
Sun Shield and Morphs

Dawn's Wrath

Nova and Morphs
Reflective Light Morph
Solar Barrage Morph
Purifying Light Morph
Unstable Core Morph

Restoring Light

Rite of Passage and Morphs
Rushed Ceremony and Morphs
Healing Ritual and Morphs
Restoring Aura and Morphs
Cleansing Ritual and Morphs
Rune Focus and Morphs

Warden

Animal Companions

Feral Guardian and Morphs - maybe, this is a semi-permanent pet but it probably needs to scan an area for its targeting if you don't command it
Scorch and Morphs
Growing Swarm Morph

Green Balance

Secluded Grove and Morphs
Fungal Growth and Morphs
Healing Seed and Morphs
Living Vines and Morphs
Lotus Flower and Morphs

Winter's Embrace

Sleet Storm and Morphs
Frost Cloak and Morphs
Impaling Shards and Morphs
Arctic Wind and Morphs
Frozen Gate and Morphs

Weapon

Two Handed

Stampede Morph
Cleave and Morphs
Reverse Slice Morph

One Hand and Shield

Deep Slash Morph

Dual Wield

Lacerate and Morphs
Whirlwind and Morphs
Blade Cloak
Shrouded Daggers Morph

Bow

Volley and Morphs
Arrow Spray and Morphs

Destruction Staff

Elemental Storm and Morphs
Force pulse Morph
Wall of Elements and Morphs
Shock Clench Morph
Impulse and Morphs

Restoration Staff

Panacea and Morphs
Grand Healing and Morphs
Regeneration and Morphs
Blessing of Protection and Morphs
Steadfast Ward and Morphs

World

Soul Magic

Shatter Soul Morph
Soul Splitting Trap Morph

Werewolf

Pack Leader Morph and Werwolf Berserker Morph - maybe, since the Direwolfs require area scan and the berserker heavy attacks are technically an area component
Brutal Pounce Morph
Roar and Morphs
Infectious Claws and Morphs

Vampire

Swarming Scion Morph
Mesmerize and Morphs
Blood Mist Morph

Guild

Fighters Guild

Dawnbreaker and Morphs
Silver Shards Morph
Circle of Protection and Morphs
Expert Hunter and Morphs
Trap beast and Morphs

Mages Guild

Meteor and Morphs
Magelight and Morphs
Fire Rune and Morphs

Psijic Order

Time Stop and Morphs

Undaunted

Blood Altar and Morphs
Trapping Webs and Morphs
Necrotic Orb and Morphs

Alliance War

Assault

War Horn and Morphs
Vigor and Echoing Vigor Morph
Rapid Maneuver and Morphs
Caltrops and Morphs
Magicka Detonation and Morphs

Support

Barrier and Morphs
Siege Shield and Morphs
Purge and Morphs
Revealing Flare

Volendrung - probably also a target as it would be odd if it bypassed the rules for AoE's

Ruinous Cyclone
Rourken's Rebuke
Pariah's Resolve

As you can see this does hit everyone not only or mostly templars as many seem to believe probably based on Punncturing Sweep being used as an example in the original post. We will have to see the implications of this during and after testing even if I have to say these changes for all these abilities sound pretty harsh for some playstyles and especially with redesigns it will be hard to keep this only inside cyrodiil as intended.

ecru

Dottzgaming wrote: »

This unfortunately will probably get a "positive" performance result. Combat is going to slow down to a grinding hault, so performance will improve since people will be playing the game at a significantly slower speed.

ESO's hallmark feature is it's combat speed and fluidity, especially for PvP. Cooldowns shouldn't be introduced into a system that was fundamentally designed to not have them. Period.

I mean, it's pretty clear that not having cooldowns for anything (besides ults) has created balance and performance issues far beyond what ZOS is capable of handling. Abilities that are out of step with what other classes have available have their balance issues exacerbated by the fact that they don't have a cooldown.

Streak is a good example of this, since in any other game an ability that ports a good distance and has an unblockable stun would absolutely be on a cooldown, balancing the fact that it works both as a hard CC, gap closer, and escape. In ESO it has no cooldown, so it provides players with a tremendous advantage over players who have no movement skills available to their class. Due to it having no cooldown, there is no direct counterplay aside from slotting a gap closer, but this requires a sacrifice due to the 10 ability limit.

Purge is another obvious one, as spamming purges on a large group can easily mitigate much more damage than simple heals, and only a few people using the ability frequently can negate 99% of negative status effects and damage over time effects on your group. In the case of Purge, not having a cooldown on an ability that removes dots and debuffs off of your group allows you to essentially make your group immune to those effects. Obviously ramping cost is a good solution to this, but not a perfect one as the penalties are not high enough to prevent these abilities from being used just about as often as the player would want/need. In this case there is no counterplay to Purge spam, and instead players just make the assumption that debuffs and dots will not be effective against these groups, and instead only rely on ground casted dots or direct damaging abilities.

These aren't the only outliers so I don't want it to seem like I'm singling out any specific class (Blighted Blastbones comes to mind, I could list a few more), just a few examples that come to mind right away.

ESO's "hallmark feature" of no cooldowns could be great, but it requires careful balance that ZOS doesn't seem to want to implement. You can't have overtuned abilities that have little/no counterplay sprinkled in with abilities of a few classes and expect things to just work, either everyone gets them, or no one does, and right now balance is stuck in the middle of some classes getting them, and others getting the shaft.

Too many ESO players have never played any other MMO (console players in particular), so their perspective on class balance is extremely warped by how out of whack things have been in ESO for years, which has allowed ZOS to get by with some ridiculous implementations of abilities (see above about purge, the old rapids is another example). This has lead to only a small percentage of the playerbase trying to hold the developerss accountable and be critical of them for their decisions, with the majority of the playerbase just accepting or supporting the way things are, because that's all they know.

imno007b14_ESO

Yeah, have to say, along with a lot of others, that if the solution is putting long cast times on aoe abilities and/or cranking up resource costs, along with almost certainly requiring YET MORE set replacements, I'm not sure I'll be continuing with the game. When you're a company evaluated at over four billion dollars, this isn't the answer, unless the code itself is really just such a scrambled mess that no amount of hardware upgrades can help the problem.

Sugaroverdose

itscompton wrote: »

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 damage and range of Proxy/Inevitable Det explosions significantly? 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.

it's not working, bombblades here for a decade and the only thing they achieved - records of AP gain.
To make zergs struggle whole PvP balance should be dramatically reworked(mostly-returned to almost 1.6-1.7 state):
1. Remove stacking of similar dots+hots+other negative effects on single player(hello mr wrobel)
2. Hard limit of execute bonus per target player
3. Cost of blocking, dodge roll, shields should be significantly reduced(all those boosts of price only made zergs stronger while in small scale and duels changed literally nothing)
4. Add per target player cooldown for procsets
5. Stacking in big numbers in 50 meters radius should significantly increase cost of abilities and damage done by other players(so it's literally tell you to not stack), lets say, more than 16 ppl gives 5% of each of negative effect per additional player(yeah it's hard to achieve since it's not clear whether you should calculate this per player or find center of zerg, but it still doable)
5.1 Since it's a huge thing which can be exploited, alliance lock per Campaign should be reintroduced
5.2 Debuff should have TTL, something like 2 minutes, so it cannot be bypassed by spreading exactly in radius
6. Reduce max group size to 8 and force ground targeted+selfcasted AoE to work only inside group via Battle Spirit

there's hell a lot ways to actually make zerging less beneficial and make them a lot less efficient to wipe smaller groups (still two zergs could fight each other in a pretty balanced manner)

Prax3des

Why can't one of the tests be limiting group sizes to 12?

Seems to me that would be less invasive and wouldn't nuke a ton of play styles that don't require a hive of players spamming AoEs, but instead we get these so-called tests, which other posters have already pointed out the myriad flaws behind. The trajectory of PVP in this game feels slipperier than ever, with it changing with the winds every three months, throwing darts and praying something sticks.

I have 5 templars and PVP on all of them in different campaigns in some form or fashion, so this, uh, feels terrible? lmao.

OtarTheMad

These are just tests and we don't know what the end result will be. They could go with Test 3 being the one that works best but only apply that to certain abilities that the tests showed messed with performance more, even tying it into Battle Spirit or a new PvP-only thing.

Also limiting to groups of 12 might solve some minor things but let's see face it that won't solve major issues because the two groups of 12 can just ride together and we'd have the same problem.

If we want PvP to be better then we should help them with this

Skullstachio

Really if the tests confirm otherwise, they should tie the AOE cooldown to battle spirit, that way people can still spam the crap out of any AOE’s outside of PVP, because if they don’t, can you imagine how it is going to affect the elitists at the top of the trial leaderboards.

rprice1819_ESO

Why not make it a turn based game and eliminate all server side lag. Each player can have up to an hour to decide what ability to use and where, then after the hour all abilities go off. Everyone can use up to 24 abilities per day

erio

Jabs is such ezmode for pvp, just make it a single target ability please

renne

rprice1819_ESO wrote: »

Why not make it a turn based game and eliminate all server side lag. Each player can have up to an hour to decide what ability to use and where, then after the hour all abilities go off. Everyone can use up to 24 abilities per day

Can we make it text based?

> go west
> siege keep
> cast jabs

Elsonso

renne wrote: »

rprice1819_ESO wrote: »

Why not make it a turn based game and eliminate all server side lag. Each player can have up to an hour to decide what ability to use and where, then after the hour all abilities go off. Everyone can use up to 24 abilities per day

Can we make it text based?

> go west
> siege keep
> cast jabs

"You are standing next to a large rock. You see a Nightblade to the east."
> go east
"You are standing in a large field. There is a Nightblade here."
"NIghtblade attacks you for 23,930 damage."
"You are dead."

FangOfTheTwoMoons

Be careful. Balancing AoE skills around any of these new changes could mess stuff up in PVE. Slippery slope right here.

silky_soft

ZOS_RichLambert wrote: »

As part of our ongoing performance optimizations, we have been spending a lot of time analyzing and addressing problems in Cyrodiil. I'm going to give a summary of what has happened over the years, what we have been doing to alleviate the problems, and our future plans.

When talking about ESO server performance, it is important to understand that all abilities in the game (with some exceptions) have a "soft" limit on the number of times they can be executed. An example of a "hard" limit on an ability is an ability that can be executed one time every two seconds, enforced by the server. ESO doesn't have many of those. Instead, we designed the game to have soft limits, which mean you can execute as many abilities as you want as long as you have the resources - Stamina or Magicka - to cast them. There is a global "cool down" timer on all abilities, which is set to 1000 milliseconds.

The design goal of soft limits in any game is to allow players to create builds that let them execute abilities more often depending on build choices made, and not to have hard ceilings on damage or healing per second. This gives a lot of control to the player, which makes for a really fun and interesting system, but it can lead to situations where players cast too many abilities too quickly (and continuously) if strict limits on resources are not enforced.

Over the years, player power has grown considerably. With the addition of the Champion System, various armor/weapons sets, and changes to abilities, we have reached the stage where players - with the right build - can cast near-infinite numbers of abilities. If you add in a properly managed group, with some focused on damage and some focused on healing and regen boosts, you have a perpetually running never-ending stream of abilities.

With that in mind, consider how Area of Effect (AOE) abilities work: when cast, they look at a specific target area - almost always the area directly around the caster - find targets, and perform the ability. Each of those steps requires server calculations.

At launch, Cyrodiil’s processes were able to keep up with the number of AOEs cast, because most players couldn’t cast that many of them: they ran out of Magicka or Stamina, so they had to use AOEs judiciously. Over time, as player knowledge grew and regen builds grew in power, more players could cast more and more AOEs before running out of resources.

During these years, we found and fixed many performance issues in Cyrodiil, and we continue to do so. We've fixed significant issues, uncovered more, and continue to find and fix with every Update.

However, one foundational issue remains. 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.

This is not what we intended, but part of the fun of Elder Scrolls games is designing a build that has unexpected and powerful results, and we allowed it. However, as this behavior grew more prevalent, we reached a point where casting so many continuous AOE abilities in such a small area started to overwhelm the server process for that area, leading to situations where the "lag meter" spikes and the server becomes unresponsive for a period of time.

Our initial response to this problem – starting with Update 22 – was to find (and fix) more than a few problems with AOE ability calculations and make them more performant - and we stayed (mostly) ahead of the problem. But as more players reached maximum Champion Level and more players started utilizing this particular method of "AOE spamming", we have reached the point where we cannot fix this issue around the edges: we need to address the core problem, which we will be starting with Update 27.

To do this, we will need to first do some analysis, and we can only do this on the live servers. As much as we try to avoid running tests on live servers, they are the only place where the combination of player behavior, specific builds, and mass battles happen. So, starting the week of August 24, we will be running a series of tests on the live PC servers – both NA & EU, only in Cyrodiil. Please note that we will not be running these tests on any Console servers. Each test should take about a week, but if needed, we will extend the testing time.

The first round of tests we are planning will focus on Area of Effect (AOE) abilities in Cyrodiil and will make it more difficult for AOE abilities to be the only abilities used, adjusting cooldown, cost and regen values of all AOEs (damage and healing).

Specific details on the tests we will be running in Cyrodiil are as follows:

• Test 1 – Shared global AOE cooldown - 3 second timer. This test adds a global 3 second shared cooldown to any AOE ability. This means that when you cast an AOE, you will not be able to cast another for 3 seconds. For example, as a Templar, if I cast Ritual of Retribution, I wouldn’t be able to cast Puncturing Sweep for 3 seconds.
• Test 2 – Individual AOE cooldown - 3 second timer. This test adds an individual AOE cooldown to each AOE ability. This means that when you cast an AOE, you will not be able to cast that same AOE ability for 3 seconds. For example – as a Templar, if I cast Puncturing Sweep, I wouldn’t be able to cast Puncturing Sweep again for 3 seconds.
• Test 3 – No cooldown, global ramping AOE cost. This test adds a global ramping AOE cost for each AOE cast. Similar to how streak or roll dodge works, where when you cast an AOE you receive a debuff for 5 seconds, each stack of the debuff increases the cost of any AOE cast.
• Test 4 – Individual AOE cooldown – 3 second timer, global ramping AOE cost. This test adds an individual AOE cooldown to each ability as in test 2, but also combines that with a global ramping cost from test 3.

During the times that any of these tests are active, we will be awarding double Alliance Points for anyone active in Cyrodiil.

After we complete the above tests, we may try other combinations of cooldown, cost, and regen values on AOE abilities. However, we need to run these tests first and then assess the data. We will then let everyone know what we found and how we will move forward. We will be very upfront, but please be aware that if these tests confirm our hypothesis, then chain-casting AOE abilities will no longer form the core of the ESO PvP experience in the way it has for the last few years. We would then go through each class and ensure that there are viable builds for each and make adjustments as necessary.

The code for these changes will be going into today’s PTS patch, and we will be running some basic tests throughout the day on Tuesday in Cyrodiil to ensure we’re able to make the above changes without requiring any maintenance or downtime. Once we launch Update 27 for PC on August 24, we will announce when one of the tests are beginning through an in-game announcement and will have a forum thread detailing which test is currently being performed. Remember, these tests will be limited to Cyrodiil, so AOE abilities in other PVP spaces (Imperial City and Battlegrounds) and will remain unchanged for now. We will evaluate how these tests go, and let everyone know next steps.

Thanks for being patient and understanding with these tests. They are extremely important for the team and will help us work towards improving Cyrodiil performance.

Upgrade your servers, drop those 6 year old xeon golds and get some rome going with decent thread count. Drop some things on the crownstore for the whales to buy then you can afford it.

Sugaroverdose

silky_soft wrote: »

ZOS_RichLambert wrote: »

As part of our ongoing performance optimizations, we have been spending a lot of time analyzing and addressing problems in Cyrodiil. I'm going to give a summary of what has happened over the years, what we have been doing to alleviate the problems, and our future plans.

When talking about ESO server performance, it is important to understand that all abilities in the game (with some exceptions) have a "soft" limit on the number of times they can be executed. An example of a "hard" limit on an ability is an ability that can be executed one time every two seconds, enforced by the server. ESO doesn't have many of those. Instead, we designed the game to have soft limits, which mean you can execute as many abilities as you want as long as you have the resources - Stamina or Magicka - to cast them. There is a global "cool down" timer on all abilities, which is set to 1000 milliseconds.

The design goal of soft limits in any game is to allow players to create builds that let them execute abilities more often depending on build choices made, and not to have hard ceilings on damage or healing per second. This gives a lot of control to the player, which makes for a really fun and interesting system, but it can lead to situations where players cast too many abilities too quickly (and continuously) if strict limits on resources are not enforced.

Over the years, player power has grown considerably. With the addition of the Champion System, various armor/weapons sets, and changes to abilities, we have reached the stage where players - with the right build - can cast near-infinite numbers of abilities. If you add in a properly managed group, with some focused on damage and some focused on healing and regen boosts, you have a perpetually running never-ending stream of abilities.

With that in mind, consider how Area of Effect (AOE) abilities work: when cast, they look at a specific target area - almost always the area directly around the caster - find targets, and perform the ability. Each of those steps requires server calculations.

At launch, Cyrodiil’s processes were able to keep up with the number of AOEs cast, because most players couldn’t cast that many of them: they ran out of Magicka or Stamina, so they had to use AOEs judiciously. Over time, as player knowledge grew and regen builds grew in power, more players could cast more and more AOEs before running out of resources.

During these years, we found and fixed many performance issues in Cyrodiil, and we continue to do so. We've fixed significant issues, uncovered more, and continue to find and fix with every Update.

However, one foundational issue remains. 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.

This is not what we intended, but part of the fun of Elder Scrolls games is designing a build that has unexpected and powerful results, and we allowed it. However, as this behavior grew more prevalent, we reached a point where casting so many continuous AOE abilities in such a small area started to overwhelm the server process for that area, leading to situations where the "lag meter" spikes and the server becomes unresponsive for a period of time.

Our initial response to this problem – starting with Update 22 – was to find (and fix) more than a few problems with AOE ability calculations and make them more performant - and we stayed (mostly) ahead of the problem. But as more players reached maximum Champion Level and more players started utilizing this particular method of "AOE spamming", we have reached the point where we cannot fix this issue around the edges: we need to address the core problem, which we will be starting with Update 27.

To do this, we will need to first do some analysis, and we can only do this on the live servers. As much as we try to avoid running tests on live servers, they are the only place where the combination of player behavior, specific builds, and mass battles happen. So, starting the week of August 24, we will be running a series of tests on the live PC servers – both NA & EU, only in Cyrodiil. Please note that we will not be running these tests on any Console servers. Each test should take about a week, but if needed, we will extend the testing time.

The first round of tests we are planning will focus on Area of Effect (AOE) abilities in Cyrodiil and will make it more difficult for AOE abilities to be the only abilities used, adjusting cooldown, cost and regen values of all AOEs (damage and healing).

Specific details on the tests we will be running in Cyrodiil are as follows:

• Test 1 – Shared global AOE cooldown - 3 second timer. This test adds a global 3 second shared cooldown to any AOE ability. This means that when you cast an AOE, you will not be able to cast another for 3 seconds. For example, as a Templar, if I cast Ritual of Retribution, I wouldn’t be able to cast Puncturing Sweep for 3 seconds.
• Test 2 – Individual AOE cooldown - 3 second timer. This test adds an individual AOE cooldown to each AOE ability. This means that when you cast an AOE, you will not be able to cast that same AOE ability for 3 seconds. For example – as a Templar, if I cast Puncturing Sweep, I wouldn’t be able to cast Puncturing Sweep again for 3 seconds.
• Test 3 – No cooldown, global ramping AOE cost. This test adds a global ramping AOE cost for each AOE cast. Similar to how streak or roll dodge works, where when you cast an AOE you receive a debuff for 5 seconds, each stack of the debuff increases the cost of any AOE cast.
• Test 4 – Individual AOE cooldown – 3 second timer, global ramping AOE cost. This test adds an individual AOE cooldown to each ability as in test 2, but also combines that with a global ramping cost from test 3.

During the times that any of these tests are active, we will be awarding double Alliance Points for anyone active in Cyrodiil.

After we complete the above tests, we may try other combinations of cooldown, cost, and regen values on AOE abilities. However, we need to run these tests first and then assess the data. We will then let everyone know what we found and how we will move forward. We will be very upfront, but please be aware that if these tests confirm our hypothesis, then chain-casting AOE abilities will no longer form the core of the ESO PvP experience in the way it has for the last few years. We would then go through each class and ensure that there are viable builds for each and make adjustments as necessary.

The code for these changes will be going into today’s PTS patch, and we will be running some basic tests throughout the day on Tuesday in Cyrodiil to ensure we’re able to make the above changes without requiring any maintenance or downtime. Once we launch Update 27 for PC on August 24, we will announce when one of the tests are beginning through an in-game announcement and will have a forum thread detailing which test is currently being performed. Remember, these tests will be limited to Cyrodiil, so AOE abilities in other PVP spaces (Imperial City and Battlegrounds) and will remain unchanged for now. We will evaluate how these tests go, and let everyone know next steps.

Thanks for being patient and understanding with these tests. They are extremely important for the team and will help us work towards improving Cyrodiil performance.

Upgrade your servers, drop those 6 year old xeon golds and get some rome going with decent thread count. Drop some things on the crownstore for the whales to buy then you can afford it.

There was no Xeon Scalable in 2014, it was Xeon E3/5/7v3 but eso most definetly runs on E5v2 if ZoS does hold their own hardware

renne

Elsonso wrote: »

renne wrote: »

rprice1819_ESO wrote: »

Why not make it a turn based game and eliminate all server side lag. Each player can have up to an hour to decide what ability to use and where, then after the hour all abilities go off. Everyone can use up to 24 abilities per day

Can we make it text based?

> go west
> siege keep
> cast jabs

"You are standing next to a large rock. You see a Nightblade to the east."
> go east
"You are standing in a large field. There is a Nightblade here."
"NIghtblade attacks you for 23,930 damage."
"You are dead."

Lol with Nightblades more like "You are standing in a large, empty field. There is no one else around." then you die.

TimeDazzler

Hey I have an idea... how about we limit group sizes in PvP to 12? It was only suggested by hundreds of people in the past few months.

Ostonoha

So the idea is to change combat entirely and have to in the future rework entire classes, skills, and gear sets for everyone instead of say just nerfing or changing the skills that allow ball groups to work?...........

Jayroo

Tattooo wrote: »

There we go....

Meme of the month Love it, had a good laugh.. almost as good as the changes they wanted to implement with heavy/light attacks.

ZOS finally decided to remove the only good thing going for them(their dynamic and intuitive combat) .. and made their game turn based, to "fix" performance .. what a joke.

I guess their PUBLIC TEST SERVER can't hadle these kind of TESTS, so they have to put it on live.

And they dare to say that they fixed many performance issues in cyrodiil, while that may be true ... they might've fixed 2problems, but added another 10..

Removed animation canceling to fix dsyncs, which didn't happen .. just made performance worse .. but no instead of reverting these changes they keep the trainwreck going, making combat even slower..

Say bye bye to your endgame community, dead game.. let's move on.

Actual 2Heads working at ZOS.

After reviewing what I said ..
I actually hope that ZOS will get some good data from the testing, actually fixing some of the performance issues..

Also these changes will surely not go trough like this in the future, it's just a matter of gathering data on what specifically is causing the lag when using aoe abilities.

see you next month

Dusk_Coven

ecru wrote: »

ESO's "hallmark feature" of no cooldowns could be great, but it requires careful balance that ZOS doesn't seem to want to implement. You can't have overtuned abilities that have little/no counterplay sprinkled in with abilities of a few classes and expect things to just work, either everyone gets them, or no one does, and right now balance is stuck in the middle of some classes getting them, and others getting the shaft.

This is the real groundwork that needed to be done before PvP was ever launched.
Now that they have for too long allowed everything from PvE to go into PvP, people will complain when anything is taken away.

They are trying not to take away too many things and so this AoE investigation will be another duct tape to avoid the proper groundwork and design.
Yet they are clearly intending to take something away, something that has too long been allowed.
And that -- taking away what you gave or allowed -- always draws complaints.

Instead of foresight or even proactive action, they let things crash and burn before trying to turn it around.
Too little too late.

Rich Lambert even identified the real problem:

ZOS_RichLambert wrote: »

Over the years, player power has grown considerably. With the addition of the Champion System, various armor/weapons sets, and changes to abilities, we have reached the stage where players - with the right build - can cast near-infinite numbers of abilities. If you add in a properly managed group, with some focused on damage and some focused on healing and regen boosts, you have a perpetually running never-ending stream of abilities.

The unrestricted builds is at the root of a lot of issues in PvP, not simply performance.
So start restricting builds -- restrict skill lines, restrict sets, restrict CP. Narrow down what's possible until you have what is reasonable.
If they want to focus specifically on the ability to bypass the soft cap of resources limiting skill use, then target that instead of AoEs -- target the cause, not the symptom.

But it's far too late for that since they let everyone in PvP have everything from PvE when it was clearly inappropriate.

Even if they do improve performance with all these AoE changes, it won't change the fact that PvP is inherently not fun for a lot of people due to the exploitation an unrestricted menu of skills and gear for unrestricted builds. Builds will just adapt around whatever the new situation is.

zECHO

Wow so you’re basically just getting rid of Templar by making them absolutely useless sounds like a plan

Elsonso

Sugaroverdose wrote: »

There was no Xeon Scalable in 2014, it was Xeon E3/5/7v3 but eso most definetly runs on E5v2 if ZoS does hold their own hardware

In an interview several years ago, Firor commented that one mistake that they made with DAoC was that they could not get financing to lease servers, so they had to buy the servers. Based on this, it is reasonable to assume that ESO servers are leased, not owned.

Given that the AoE problem that Lambert described sounds heavy on CPU, it is likely that at least some of the older CPU blades have been upgraded to ones that use the newer CPUs. Obviously, they are never going to tell us cores and number of threads.

NinchiTV

So they finally found out all these AOE spamming crub zergs are the one responsible for the lag, do what ever you have to do to bring a stable cyrodiil. The single target mega is coming.

Recremen

Recremen wrote: »

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!! 🍺🍺🍺

And adding some more in case the general idea wasn't clear, some item set redesigns would go a long way for this too. How often does Hircine's Veneer have to check who's in range? Every one second? Every two? Every half second? Sure, it's at least limited to group members I hope so the list of potential targets is smaller, but if you just had it pulse every 6 seconds with a 6-second buff instead of constantly checking, then do that for other similar item sets that have computationally-expensive, often/always-up AoE components, you might see yet more bang for your buck, especially since those are the kinds of sets being run by these highly-coordinated AoE spam groups. Anything with a persistent AoE check could use a revisit. And again, while you'd no doubt still have some complainers, this would all be much more palatable than "Mandatory 3 second AoE GCD", so long as it does in fact actually reduce the number and frequency of computations, even during high-stakes fights.