Update on Cyrodiil Performance & Upcoming AOE Tests

synnerman

Im really surprised at the new tests as I participated in all the tests and there was clearly 1 test that improved things and that was Test no 1. I keep seeing people say there were people missing as the IC event was on. On PC EU the first night all 3 factions were locked and there was an Emporer. There were several large fights with no lag and you could visibly see more effects and then we came to the last emporer keep there were 3 factions inside the keep (including 2 so called ball grps) and still there was very little lag.
The same for the 2nd night and then the ball grps dissapeared after that obviously because they were being wiped all the time. I personally thought that test one was easily the winner but thought that ZoS wouldn't have the guts to apply it because of the whiners (even though zos have said that class skills would be adressed if they did) but now we have 2 new tests which are test no1 on steroids so bring it on. I have played since 2014 and 90% of that in PvP and seen it all and the mess its become and I dont care what they change as long as they fix the performance and address the class skills that are affected by the changes.

Karm1cOne

Can we have a test with a strict cutoff on "in combat"? My personal tinfoil theory is the in combat bug is causing lag. When people don't die, its retaining info from that fight for sometimes hours. This would explain the oft cited "ball groups cause lag"... they don't die and are hit by lots of people. All of that data has to be constantly calculated until that group dies.

NotTaylorSwift

ZOS_RichLambert wrote: »

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.

Doesn’t matter what any of us think on here. From the very start they took a “you don’t like it? Just deal with it” approach. We don’t have a say and we never did. The fact that there are 35 pages of overwhelmingly negative replies and not one post to address them from ZoS says it all.

techyeshic

Karm1cOne wrote: »

Can we have a test with a strict cutoff on "in combat"? My personal tinfoil theory is the in combat bug is causing lag. When people don't die, its retaining info from that fight for sometimes hours. This would explain the oft cited "ball groups cause lag"... they don't die and are hit by lots of people. All of that data has to be constantly calculated until that group dies.

This would be a win win. Even if it doesnt help, at least you can mount after being long removed from enemies

Thraben

One should not forget that both AoE healing and AoE damage ought to have opportunity costs to reward skillful play - a which is a principle ESO did ignore in the first place 7 years ago.

That being said, the global cooldowns should not apply to ungrouped players, as this is just unjust. Some classes don't care (Stamblade), some are unplayable (MagTemplar), and those who are op anyways are becoming even more unique, relatively speaking (StamNecro, StamWarden).

TequilaFire

@ZOS_GinaBruno A simple question
Where is the test were server capacity is increased to determine if that improves performance?
I am sure many players would be interested in those results.

Thanos7895

I think what is clear from all these test we have been subjected to is that any changes to the way the skills operate in the game that is selected has made this game NOT FUN to play!

Good luck with the tests hopefully you have a game worth playing when you decide to make changes to the group PVP experience.

On the bright side, you will not need to make another battleground map since Cyro have devolved into this...You may want to just go ahead and remove all the pesky group PVP stuff at the same time since it appears that you only are interested in killing off large scale PVP combat.

Soul_Demon

Thanos7895 wrote: »

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Hi all,

Just posted an update in the main stickied thread, but wanted to cross-post here as well for extra visibility.

As we approach the end of our scheduled tests, we’ve determined that we’d like to run at least two more tests to gather additional data, which are outlined below. Our goal here is to see how a combination of changes from previous tests affect the performance, as we’ve found they have not had a significant impact individually.

• October 19 - 26:
  • Shared global AoE cooldown with a 3 second timer
  • Group size limited to 12 in Cyrodiil
  • Ally-targeted abilities only applied to group members
• October 26 – November 2:
  • Shared global AoE cooldown with a 3 second timer
  • Group size limited to 12 in Cyrodiil
  • Ally-targeted abilities only applied to group members
  • Global ramping cost per successive AoE cast by 50%/100%/150%
  • Regen decrease per successive AoE cast by 33%/66%/99%

Our current plan is to disable all tests and double AP once Update 28 launches for PC on November 2. At that time, we’ll need to take some time to analyze the data collected from all the tests and determine next steps. Once we have a better idea of what that entails, we’ll let everyone know.

Will ZOS be providing refunds for ESO Plus for the 2 months of playtime where Cyro has been under tests? I mean since you are putting the 7 year old game back to a beta state with these tests it seems only fair...

That is quite a good question.......probably the only game in history to be doing 2 months of beta testing on a 7 year old game while forcing paying customers on a live server to pay for it. The players have lost faith in ZOS over the years of using the test server due to ZOS not using the feedback they worked so hard to provide them....so now you simply break all taboos by forcing participation, for two months on a live server- Not really the kind of thing you would do I think if you want to retain customers.......has anyone there brought up what they think customers may do or what can they do when you force beta testing on them while taking money to provide a fun experience for them? Bottom line here is NONE Of the testing is fun....your game is no longer any fun, and isnt that the whole point of a video game? Fun.

relentless_turnip

I don't know if a shared GCD is your intended solution or simply a metric to see how much you need to reduce aoe by?

If it is only your intention to implement this as a fix, I think many people will be upset. Taking up to 10secs to buff on some characters with the first buff running out before all can be applied is frustrating. If it is simply a benchmark for reducing radius checks that may be a different story.

If skills will be altered to remove radius checks and none to as little cooldowns as possible, this may be salvageable. I would still rather you just reverted the harrowstorm patch. Surely gaining stadia isn't as important as maintaining the other 3 platforms already invested in the game.

Mr_Nobody

relentless_turnip wrote: »

I don't know if a shared GCD is your intended solution or simply a metric to see how much you need to reduce aoe by?

If it is only your intention to implement this as a fix, I think many people will be upset. Taking up to 10secs to buff on some characters with the first buff running out before all can be applied is frustrating. If it is simply a benchmark for reducing radius checks that may be a different story.

If skills will be altered to remove radius checks and none to as little cooldowns as possible, this may be salvageable. I would still rather you just reverted the harrowstorm patch. Surely gaining stadia isn't as important as maintaining the other 3 platforms already invested in the game.

or revert it all to 1.6, when the PvP game was at its best. Probably pve too. I remember 2 or 3 of us back then doing vet dungeons with no healers etc. and all the pve'rs QQing on how hard it is to complete them. Lol.

Oh, and nerf Purge. Clean the Cyrodiil.

Tyvarra

Soul_Demon wrote: »

Thanos7895 wrote: »

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Hi all,

Just posted an update in the main stickied thread, but wanted to cross-post here as well for extra visibility.

As we approach the end of our scheduled tests, we’ve determined that we’d like to run at least two more tests to gather additional data, which are outlined below. Our goal here is to see how a combination of changes from previous tests affect the performance, as we’ve found they have not had a significant impact individually.

• October 19 - 26:
  • Shared global AoE cooldown with a 3 second timer
  • Group size limited to 12 in Cyrodiil
  • Ally-targeted abilities only applied to group members
• October 26 – November 2:
  • Shared global AoE cooldown with a 3 second timer
  • Group size limited to 12 in Cyrodiil
  • Ally-targeted abilities only applied to group members
  • Global ramping cost per successive AoE cast by 50%/100%/150%
  • Regen decrease per successive AoE cast by 33%/66%/99%

Our current plan is to disable all tests and double AP once Update 28 launches for PC on November 2. At that time, we’ll need to take some time to analyze the data collected from all the tests and determine next steps. Once we have a better idea of what that entails, we’ll let everyone know.

Will ZOS be providing refunds for ESO Plus for the 2 months of playtime where Cyro has been under tests? I mean since you are putting the 7 year old game back to a beta state with these tests it seems only fair...

That is quite a good question.......probably the only game in history to be doing 2 months of beta testing on a 7 year old game while forcing paying customers on a live server to pay for it. The players have lost faith in ZOS over the years of using the test server due to ZOS not using the feedback they worked so hard to provide them....so now you simply break all taboos by forcing participation, for two months on a live server- Not really the kind of thing you would do I think if you want to retain customers.......has anyone there brought up what they think customers may do or what can they do when you force beta testing on them while taking money to provide a fun experience for them? Bottom line here is NONE Of the testing is fun....your game is no longer any fun, and isnt that the whole point of a video game? Fun.

Not only that cyro is almost unplayable for over a month, now BG queues are broken again too. Meaning ALL PvP content is not playable at the moment. There should really be a compensation to playtime.

aetherial_heavenn

silvereyes wrote: »

I think you may be missing the forest for the trees here. You are so laser focused on getting your server frame time metrics down that you forgot the entire point of the exercise, which was to make Cyrodiil less frustrating for players.

Personally, I'd almost prefer to just leave things be at this point. I'd much prefer to have the only times my skills don't fire be when two zerg balls collide, rather than enshrine skills not firing as an official gameplay mechanic that affects 100% of my play time in Cyrodiil.

I agree completely. Fighting ball groups maybe frustrating but enshrining skills not firing and the whole approach to aoe's seems to be cutting off the players' noses just to spite them. My magplar healer hasn't enjoyed much of these tests and is feeling very picked on, I'll admit. I would like to see successful changes, though. Just not at the expense of fast (but not left clicky twitch) combat and I'd like skill in game to keep mattering more than gear/proc sets.


I'd like to see a couple of things tested alone that would /could help performance without affecting how the skills work.
1. Limit group size to 6 or 8.
2. Limit heal and buff to self or allies in group only. So heal and buff checks are only checking 6/8 players not the entire 28 metre radius.



ALSO LAG/PING IN CYRODIL IS SITTING AROUND 450ms FOR ME IN LAST WEEK with every few second spikes to 550 ms. It is only this bad since this last week's round of tests.

Normally it sits around 360 with no VPN and 280-300 with VPN even in first rounds of testing. (I'm in Australia). Changing nodes/routes and even my VPN has made no difference this last week. My connection shows 280ms to US Central. My in-game has been minimum 400ms with big spikes and packet loss. COULD YOU CHECK THIS OVERSEAS LAG AS PART OF SERVER PERFORMANCE, PLEASE. (last time it was like this it was Akamai's scrubber causing awful routing. This time it looks like your server is choking us.)

DUTCH_REAPER

if the AOE cooldowns are present does that mean we may see a possibility of longer durations on buffs without having to recast? example instead of major resolve lasting 20 secs it will last for 60 secs?

csparks1

*** this these tests suck, either pay for new servers in the farm like you did during the events, or just tell us that you are not willing to spend the money.

Ragnarock41

Thraben wrote: »

One should not forget that both AoE healing and AoE damage ought to have opportunity costs to reward skillful play - a which is a principle ESO did ignore in the first place 7 years ago.

That being said, the global cooldowns should not apply to ungrouped players, as this is just unjust. Some classes don't care (Stamblade), some are unplayable (MagTemplar), and those who are op anyways are becoming even more unique, relatively speaking (StamNecro, StamWarden).

I'm afraid your warnings will fall of deaf ears as they seem to be focused only on ticking a box that says ''performance fixes''. Since the dev team handles each problem in separate bubbles the damage to everything else seems irrelevant to them. Fix the performance at the cost of killing the game? No problems. All that matters is ticking that box.

Svenja

Could anyone suggest some viable builds I could switch to for the next two weeks? I play a Magplar healer and have exactly 1 skill (LA shield) on my bar that is not considered AoE.

Sanguinor2

Svenja wrote: »

Could anyone suggest some viable builds I could switch to for the next two weeks? I play a Magplar healer and have exactly 1 skill (LA shield) on my bar that is not considered AoE.

Stamblade snipe ganker is good without AoEs

StShoot

Svenja wrote: »

Could anyone suggest some viable builds I could switch to for the next two weeks? I play a Magplar healer and have exactly 1 skill (LA shield) on my bar that is not considered AoE.

I can, its called the lfg [snip] (burry your plar[RIP]). So all you have to is get yourself a bow, eqip poison injection/snipe and find yourself 2 procsets. Than you go to cyro and spam lfg into the zonechat, no need to thank me. Enjoy rewarding pvp gameplay.

Back to the topic:
1. We had 2 events during these tests so all tests which gathered data during those events should not be trusted !
2. Your tests are poorly invented, advertised and thought out:
-> global aoe punishment on all aoes without considering what kind of aoe that produces lag is the most shortsided change
ever done to the game (if jabs/cauterize/hardend ward/brawler/execute/spiked amor/obsidian shield etc. causes your
server to struggle, consider buying a new one)
-> you are not advertising the "test" at all. Ad very least give players a notification every time they port to cyro. You wouldnt
believe me if i told you how many of my friends asked me why their aoes wouldnt go of or why their sustain was so poor
-> The first tests didnt had the disired outcome so you start mixing them all together ? do you understand that at some
point, the penaltys for players (even if you are not using real "aoes") get so bad that they dont want to play ?
3. Communication (once again) you seem to give nothing on the "feedback" we provide about your "tests" you have 36 pages
of mostly bad feedback maybe its time to communicate with you playerbase ? Because it seems that most of the players
dont want any of these tests go live/stay.

[snip]

[Edit for Baiting and Bashing.]

badmojo

Can you imagine the developers of a first person shooter saying they're looking at modifying how automatic guns work to prevent people from holding down the trigger, because that unintended behavior is causing lag.

People have spammed AOE since beta. In the early days DKs would spam talons with bat swarm. Later on impulse ball groups were all the rage, when that got nerfed players moved to steel tornado. Not to mention, there are a lot of AOEs in this game that do the spamming for the player, lightning form, blade cloak and similar abilities are literally designed to keep an AOE firing constantly. But that somehow wasn't intentional? You guys designed the system, don't blame us for using the best abilities in an environment with so many targets.

if you kill off AOE spamming, Cyrodiil will go from a modern battlefield to an old fashioned firing line of troops with single fire muskets. What we've been enjoying for the past 6 years will be destroyed. At least give us one untouched campaign with lag, let the players decide if your tinkering is worth the improved performance.

Machete

Have you guys yet to see these tests aren't helping the server performance? Yeah, no one wants to play, so performance is up.

I will be honest, I was gonna try to avoid getting involved in this but as much heat as you guys are feeling? It's well deserved! This is an outrage and frankly, what tests need to be a week long each? Let alone for 2 months? This, to us and what we see, is a way of saying, "We don't care you're not having fun. We don't care about your pleas. We let our engineers write some fancy s*** on a forum, and it meant it was up by 25% for the first test!" Guess what, everyone was in IC for the event avoiding this... pardon me, dumpster fire.

What's more disheartening is the lack of communication that has come through with this. I hope you all read the forums, especially your developers and combat team up at Zenimax Online Studio. Because in the dark for us? You want one of these radical changes to go live, regardless of your player base. I don't wanna believe you guys wanna do that, but what else are we to believe?

Mark my words here. If any of these tests go live, you won't have a PvP community. AoE cooldowns kill multiple classes, 12 man caps kill new player experience, ramp up costs kill diversity. Even the vets, who have been weathering this storm, are starting to buckle.

As someone else put it: I'd rather play in lag. Because no one is having fun, Zenimax. No one.

blktauna

Karm1cOne wrote: »

Can we have a test with a strict cutoff on "in combat"? My personal tinfoil theory is the in combat bug is causing lag. When people don't die, its retaining info from that fight for sometimes hours. This would explain the oft cited "ball groups cause lag"... they don't die and are hit by lots of people. All of that data has to be constantly calculated until that group dies.

I would agree here. I am constantly unable to mount or change skill as I'm 'in combat' but am in a field in the middle of nowhere and have been for several minutes.

I use my NBs in cyrodil and they don't particularly use AOE but I do have a concern about how Vicious Death and bombing would be affected. I'm kinda enjoying that, even though I don't have it down yet, so I'm hoping it doesn't get altered too much by the aoe changes. But if it does, well I'll try something else.

silentxthreat

another week of tests and the lag is still real and its not even prime time yet...My class feels gutted compared to snipe spam. I enjoy eso because there is no other game like it it but if this keeps up you will kill the game we enjoy. lag or no lag. I know that during the midyear mayhem event zos used more resources for pvp land and it was so much fun. No tests needed just do what ever you did to replicate that. If your servers are that bad its time for hardware upgrades, but that probably wont happen until microsoft is calling the shots

silky_soft

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Hi all,

Just posted an update in the main stickied thread, but wanted to cross-post here as well for extra visibility.

As we approach the end of our scheduled tests, we’ve determined that we’d like to run at least two more tests to gather additional data, which are outlined below. Our goal here is to see how a combination of changes from previous tests affect the performance, as we’ve found they have not had a significant impact individually.

• October 19 - 26:
  • Shared global AoE cooldown with a 3 second timer
  • Group size limited to 12 in Cyrodiil
  • Ally-targeted abilities only applied to group members
• October 26 – November 2:
  • Shared global AoE cooldown with a 3 second timer
  • Group size limited to 12 in Cyrodiil
  • Ally-targeted abilities only applied to group members
  • Global ramping cost per successive AoE cast by 50%/100%/150%
  • Regen decrease per successive AoE cast by 33%/66%/99%

Our current plan is to disable all tests and double AP once Update 28 launches for PC on November 2. At that time, we’ll need to take some time to analyze the data collected from all the tests and determine next steps. Once we have a better idea of what that entails, we’ll let everyone know.

Can you put global cooldown on proc sets? 10s should do. Would reduce calculations to mainly just the user. Only 1 proc to find conditions for instead of 3.

novemberhhh

Gotta love when things that are actually single target (looking at you rapid regen) are treated like aoes for some reason.
Doesn't inspire my confidence in this dev team.

aetherial_heavenn

My healplar is basically unplayable. I can still just about heal my group in our normal small group fights but it feels like wading through molasses; it is slower and clunkier than any class in any game I've played including D&D online and LOTRO and is barely effective in any set/skill combo I've tried. (I've been healing in PvP for a few years. I'm not great but i do know my class pretty well by now.)

My bars have every skill greyed out after using a shield/rune, a breath, and a cc/cleanse/w/e the situation requires. 3 skills on a healer who is always focused first in any fight and I may as well be stun locked every second for a second. And none of my counters work.

But stam bow poison proctard builds can spam poison & venom incessantly. Stam meta can Roll dodge forever. Stam meta can Permablock. Stam meta can break free as often as they choose. Stam can build as tanky as they like and still do massive damage with the correct set combos. The harbinger and the hunters venom metas are just a disgusting bi-product of this woeful experiment.

The fact that on a magplar I should be in the best position of all classes to deal with the poison/ venom meta...well i wonder how other mag classes are doing with it because for me it sucks.

Annoyingly as a solo healer I now can't help other soloers being ganked or heal someone in siege at all because outside group healing has been hit so hard.

I understand that all of this is the accepted price for 'nerf heals will improve performance' mantra by streamers but it doesn't make me happy.

#I'dRatherKeepTheLag.

EDIT: My ping has improved today it's down to 280-300 with a vpn and stable. So w/e was happening for the last week until 2 days ago has stopped. Thanks if it was fixed at your end.

DarcyMardin

Not fun. We aren’t testers. Pay a bunch of people to test instead of inflicting this misery on players week after week after week. This has turned into a bad joke.

visionality

In german we have a saying: "pouring out the toddler with the bath". This is exactly what those two additional weeks (and the reasoning for it) look like.

Lets assume you are successful and manage to reach the server FPS numbers you desire. Then what? Install those setups permanently for PVP? Whole classes will just disappear from Cyrodiil, groups will give up, guilds will disperse. Al that remains will be gankers, ubertanks and proctards, all for them running solo because that will guarantee the best (spare) healing for them.

Is this your vision for Cyrodiil? Ganker searching for other gankers to gank? Ubertanks permabatteling another ubertank on a ressource flag that will never turn?

Another german saying: "dear god, have mercy and throw down some brains!"

techyeshic

visionality wrote: »

In german we have a saying: "pouring out the toddler with the bath". This is exactly what those two additional weeks (and the reasoning for it) look like.

Lets assume you are successful and manage to reach the server FPS numbers you desire. Then what? Install those setups permanently for PVP? Whole classes will just disappear from Cyrodiil, groups will give up, guilds will disperse. Al that remains will be gankers, ubertanks and proctards, all for them running solo because that will guarantee the best (spare) healing for them.

Is this your vision for Cyrodiil? Ganker searching for other gankers to gank? Ubertanks permabatteling another ubertank on a ressource flag that will never turn?

Another german saying: "dear god, have mercy and throw down some brains!"

The first saying we have here as "throwing out the baby with the bath water."

It is funny though, how you mention everyone trying to gank each other. I started running a NB brawler which I play mostly the same as I would any other brawler class, just using cloak for a buff, dot suppression, and defensive like I would Warden shields. I slotted mark so if we come across NBs, I keep it on them. Its really amazing how many die to just LA weaving mark, maybe much in a bombard or the bow proc if it feels like lag will allow it without being unable to reapply mark in 3 seconds. A lot just sit there mashing cloak.

Anyway; my kill counter report bares out what you are saying is out there right now.

Nordic__Knights

im having an lil trouble understanding how this is working but if i place my wall my BOL gos on CD but if i BOL my wall doesn't and both are AOE and when placed wall>BOL it is dealt with as so but when placed BOL>walll its not dealt with as so because wall never gets the delay of 3s

Crash427

Nordic__Knights wrote: »

im having an lil trouble understanding how this is working but if i place my wall my BOL gos on CD but if i BOL my wall doesn't and both are AOE and when placed wall>BOL it is dealt with as so but when placed BOL>walll its not dealt with as so because wall never gets the delay of 3s

The cooldowns work about as well as anything else in Cyro. Try spamming rapid regen a few times and see what happens.