Feb 15 Cyrodiil Test Details

drzycki_ESO

The lag on Friday night was still really bad but the gameplay was much more fun. It was nice to not see any ball groups. They may have been there but I didn't see any.

Please don't lower the population cap. Having a large population is what makes Cyrodiil wars fun.

Maybe the new servers will help.

Gilvoth

i pray they make it 50 people mAX per alliance.
we need caps lowered, there is way too many people and massive lagg and high ping.
it only makes sence to lower the caps -
fewer people = less lagg and bad high ping.

Ringod123

Gilvoth wrote: »

i pray they make it 50 people mAX per alliance.
we need caps lowered, there is way too many people and massive lagg and high ping.
it only makes sence to lower the caps -
fewer people = less lagg and bad high ping.

Might as well just close it completely and force people into IC or Battlegrounds eh?
Cyro used to be 500v500v500, now its only 125v125v125 and you want them to limit it even further?
Just to, at best, get back some of the performance they took off us when they moved a bunch of calculations server side so they wouldn't have to deal with as many cheaters.
No thanks.

Beaverton

After a week of the test, lag seems pretty eratic to me and the lag changes not just based on the local environment. At it's worst it seems as bad as every but at it's best it actually seems a bit better. I've been in some pretty big fights where skill seemed to work ok and others where nothing works.

However, I love the changes in playstyle. Way more fun. I will be sad when the test ends.

Troll92

drzycki_ESO wrote: »

The lag on Friday night was still really bad but the gameplay was much more fun. It was nice to not see any ball groups. They may have been there but I didn't see any.

Please don't lower the population cap. Having a large population is what makes Cyrodiil wars fun.

Maybe the new servers will help.

Ballgroups are still present, but without procs they're easier to deal with. Groups who specialised in countering ballgroups are having the times of their lives feasting on these weaker forms.

Troll92

Adernath wrote: »

techyeshic wrote: »

Adernath wrote: »

The balance between classes is much better without proc sets and it is really fun. Please consider disabling proc sets in PvP altogether or make a campaign in which these sets are disabled.

They need to do it differently or try something different. Who knows? Maybe their cross healing removal had more effect than they thought? Or someone in a group I run with mentioned; without procs, a certain kind of player feels forced to bunch up more and that healing helps do that.

I really like not having procs, but the lag is really bad.

It would be interesting to see if the proc sets AND the cross-healing (outside of groups) both gets disabled.

If I would decide between both options, I would definitively go for removing proc sets altogether, as they just add so much to the imbalance between classes. Once I entered a BG after cyrodiil and it was just so less fun, where tanky builds run around all the time, not requiring any sort of defensive abilities. I understand that variation is cool, but at this point they just create a too large variety of "non-supervised" setups, some of which are cheesy enough to just spam 2 skills and be effective.

Proc sets are removing a large part of the player skill. Without these sets ALL people actually need to cast a few defensive abiliites here and there and need to think about setting up combos to burst people down.

Regarding lag:

I usually got lag whenever the entire red or blue server shows off at a certain keep (being AD from day 1). But besides of this there are also situations in which I am away of a large battle (3 factions fighting for vole), and still have lag during these times, for example during small scale or fighting resource guards. I guess this is somehow related to the servers and a final solution must also include to improving the code at its core.

The only variety proc sets bring is you have to use x set on y class in order to be a nuissance. Everyone uses the same setup with the same proc set. That's not diversity

Troll92

Galarthor wrote: »

Gilvoth wrote: »

Nordic__Knights wrote: »

Gilvoth wrote: »

BigBearPaw wrote: »

10 pm and PC-eu Grayhost is unplayable just like before the test.. Maybe it's time to assume servers ARE the MAIN problem?

or it could be animation canceling that causing it.
its worth looking into.

AC is an big factor but no one well say it because then they have to fix the longest running bug in the game that became skill lol

well said.
thank you for the honesty.
it has been my belief all along that it is the servers and also the animation canceling that causes lagg.
(or maybe the 2 combined)
but that does not mean im right, is just my theory, and i could very well be wrong.
it would have to be tested and examined to tell if true or not.

Your theory has a major whole though:
There is usually less animation canceling going on in ball groups than in solo / small scale gameplay. Yet severe lags only occur when ball groups are around and thus less animation canceling going on.
In addition lag reduces the potential for animation canceling, so if your theory was true the problem would fix itself automatically and then the cycle should start again. Yet the problem persists as long as the ball groups are around. And disappears with the ball groups dissolving.

Except it doesn't. This doesn't only apply to ballgroups. It also applies when one particular faction only holds 3 keeps during the day (to nightcap later) and sends their whole full pop faction to defend one of said keeps. 50-100 players fighting it out in one place is the same if not worse than ballgroups so the theory stands.

techyeshic

So; all arguing asside about the merits of the test, or who is to blame for lag, who needs a carry, etc.

@ZOS_GinaBruno Are there going to be any changes leading up to Update 29 go live? Or server maintenance? I see the update is 2 weeks away and I know you only like to do maintenance every 2 weeks, and there were none today.

TwinLamps

New map, smaller one with 50v50v50 would be ok. But not limiting cyro to such numbers.

Mionikoi

Pardon, I don't want to be a bother. I was still curious if the stealth sets were turned off, at least with their meter detection redux due to their sneak cost %. I noticed at least that the sets themselves were not turned off all the way...

Flangdoodle

Turning off proc sets has made no difference whatsoever- and might have somehow actually made the lag/crashes worse. We crash every time we get to a keep where a large scale battle is happening. When we arrive at the outer walls half the group is kicked offline.

I'd like to see a test where they turn off all add-ons.

VirtualElizabeth

Flangdoodle wrote: »

Turning off proc sets has made no difference whatsoever- and might have somehow actually made the lag/crashes worse. We crash every time we get to a keep where a large scale battle is happening. When we arrive at the outer walls half the group is kicked offline.

I'd like to see a test where they turn off all add-ons.

Aren't add ons more of a client side thing, allegedly? Might be a good idea though.

techyeshic

They have a permanent sample of zero addons. Its called consoles. And I have heard they are worse than PC.

techyeshic

Ok so hear me out on this. You have 2 CP Campaigns. How about you turn off double AP. Make one of those no-proc, the other proc. See if the community goes naturally to the one they want and have a side by side comparison.

You have double AP; which I feel is necessary for some to compel them to participate, but may compel more stress than normal. I think we have enough people that like no-procs that would just do it. Give us a more natural like for like comparison.

Joy_Division

I'm guessing the folks at ZOS are thinking what to do for the next round of testing.

I think this approach of devising various means of limiting server calculations is a mistake. We already have done this numerous times.

About 4 years ago, ZOS already ran a no CP test on all Cyordiil campaigns for a couple of weeks. We already saw first-hand what the removal of a huge amount of calculations has on PvP. It didn;t do much; ZOS said so on ESO Live.

Back in November we were also subject to tests with numerous restrictions, the last entailed max group size 6 (!), no cross healing, cooldowns from any AOE ability that was cast, and ramping costs for AoE skills, at the same time! If that didn;t make the sort of difference that ZOs is looking for, it's not going to happen on the next test either.

Every night since 2016 or whenever ZOS opened up a no CP campaign, we know how a Cyrodiil plays with significantly reduced calculations. This isn't a mystery. On PC NA on weeknights it;s not too bad, but on a weekend night when the organized groups log on and it's pop-locked there are all the familiar performance issues, albeit to a lesser scale than the main CP campaign.

I don't mind this particular test that's being run because I dislike proc dominated gameplay, but I don;t have any desire to again be subject to the sorts of tests that were implemented last November that are predicated on either significant restrictions of what we can do with our characters or the removal of the open world, Alliance centered mechanics that make Cyrodiil fun to play in the first place. Things might be different if I had some confidence in the testing. I don't. I already have played in environments with significantly less calculations and the gameplay performance is what it is and has always been what it has been.

Another thing that makes me skeptical was the announcement during the reveal that ZOs is getting new servers - FINALLY - but somehow this is not expected to have an impact on performance. Wut? Is the equipment being downgraded? Does this mean the brunt of our complaints - the server - has been misdirected all this time? Is it the coding/programming that is the issue here? If so, how exactly is it even possible to address that without reprograming the entire game? If new servers aren't expected to fix the lag, and we already know all these restricted tests didn't either, that doesn't inspire confidence.

Since it doesn;t look like the capacity for increase server calculations is never going to happen (I dunno why; when ESO launched I had a flip phone and Youtube restricted me to 10 minute videos that took hours to upload), I think it would be better served to try and spread out the calculations we do put on the server, that is, not have everyone at the same spot during the same time. Again we have 7 years of player behavior as a guide: we stood in ques of over 100+ people just to join the laggiest default CP campaign even though the game played reasonably well in the other campaigns that had openings. Let's not kid ourselves, our behavior is not going to change as long as the map, rewards system, AvAvA routines stay as they were in 2014. There has to be interesting and engaging reasons to use the 85% of the map we ignore and there aren't any. We need permanent compelling reasons to go off the beaten path, that have fights, potential rewards, and just have interesting things to do. This way, at least the calculations are spread out with regard to distance and time, and thus the potential to avoid imposing restrictive gameplay features we don;t like and no need to redesign entire classes just so they can function in PvP setting that's going to be very different from what these classes were originally designed for.

p4l4mu7

ZOS doesn't realize how their nonsense test system damage this game's pvp even more. There is a reason test servers exist but they keep ruining the pvp experience on live servers by trying pointless tests. If you can't reach enough participants in tests servers for these tests maybe it's because nobody wants this limitations ZOS.
ZOS is trying so hard to prevent themselves from spending money and upgrading servers. PvP cooldowns didn't change anything, then this proc set removal also didn't change anything, but instead of upgrading they are still thinking more ways to remove things from game and hope it will suddenly solve every issue in Cyrodiil.
ZOS keep it in mind people are playing this game for what it offers, when you constantly try removing features how will that effect playercount.
Even though this proc set removal didn't solve a single issue, let's say it was succesful do you guys really think people would be ok with just having 10 sets to use. Stop killing pvp with these pointless tests while lag is already ruining all the fun and instead of testing stuff on live servers start using the money we pay and try actual solutions.

Jaraal

techyeshic wrote: »

Ok so hear me out on this. You have 2 CP Campaigns. How about you turn off double AP. Make one of those no-proc, the other proc. See if the community goes naturally to the one they want and have a side by side comparison.

This has nothing to do with whether the players like proc sets or not. The first post in this thread says they are removing procs to see if it has any effect on performance. Adding another campaign would lessen the server load, and I think that would not be in line with their current goals.

Lots of people talking about whether procs should be in PvP or not. But I assure you that they are not interested how the players feel about that, and will do whatever they were going to do anyway. And you can be certain that there is no profit in limiting players to 19 old sets that don't help sell DLC.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news..... but proc sets are here to stay.

relentless_turnip

p4l4mu7 wrote: »

ZOS doesn't realize how their nonsense test system damage this game's pvp even more. There is a reason test servers exist but they keep ruining the pvp experience on live servers by trying pointless tests. If you can't reach enough participants in tests servers for these tests maybe it's because nobody wants this limitations ZOS.
ZOS is trying so hard to prevent themselves from spending money and upgrading servers. PvP cooldowns didn't change anything, then this proc set removal also didn't change anything, but instead of upgrading they are still thinking more ways to remove things from game and hope it will suddenly solve every issue in Cyrodiil.
ZOS keep it in mind people are playing this game for what it offers, when you constantly try removing features how will that effect playercount.
Even though this proc set removal didn't solve a single issue, let's say it was succesful do you guys really think people would be ok with just having 10 sets to use. Stop killing pvp with these pointless tests while lag is already ruining all the fun and instead of testing stuff on live servers start using the money we pay and try actual solutions.

They have said they are upgrading servers this year, but don't think it will help performance.

They just have too much server side and aren't willing to move it back to the client. I think this has been especially apparent since the release of stadia as since changes in u25 it has been much worse.

techyeshic

Jaraal wrote: »

techyeshic wrote: »

Ok so hear me out on this. You have 2 CP Campaigns. How about you turn off double AP. Make one of those no-proc, the other proc. See if the community goes naturally to the one they want and have a side by side comparison.

This has nothing to do with whether the players like proc sets or not. The first post in this thread says they are removing procs to see if it has any effect on performance. Adding another campaign would lessen the server load, and I think that would not be in line with their current goals.

Lots of people talking about whether procs should be in PvP or not. But I assure you that they are not interested how the players feel about that, and will do whatever they were going to do anyway. And you can be certain that there is no profit in limiting players to 19 old sets that don't help sell DLC.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news..... but proc sets are here to stay.

That has nothing to do with what I was saying. All I was trying to say is double AP incentivises more people than normal to be on so.i question how much performance is impacted by that. There seems to be enough players that say they like the combat of no proc to where the double AP may not be necessary.

Of course; I wonder how much we all would really like it if the proc dependent players weren't there to beat up on.

Izanagi.Xiiib16_ESO

@ZOS_GinaBruno

Just wanted to check if there are any planned changes for the ongoing tests. So far from a player perspective the performance seems a lot poorer (at least at the times I play - normally EST primetime).

Its hard to tell if this is due to the re-introduction of the cross healing or player behaviour changes due to it. ( It could also be the increased time to kill causing more player density or simply the server instrumentation. - I would be interested to see the dev feedback on this in more detail if you are planning a post mortem post)

3 weeks seems a little long for more of the same without any planned changes.

I would suggest the following changes:

1) A week (or at least weekend) of no cross healing to compare the performance.
2) A week of no soul gem resurrections in Cyrodiil. (also if the camps could act inversely for that test that would be perfect too - i.e. no resurrections within the radius of the camp but you can resurrect from far away, if that was done then making the camps have an increased radius would need to be done too.) The Aim would be to make players 'run back' to fights once they died.

Note the 'run back' test obviously will have a lot of negativity associated with it but I think it would be beneficial for investigation purposes.

Jaraal

techyeshic wrote: »

Jaraal wrote: »

techyeshic wrote: »

Ok so hear me out on this. You have 2 CP Campaigns. How about you turn off double AP. Make one of those no-proc, the other proc. See if the community goes naturally to the one they want and have a side by side comparison.

This has nothing to do with whether the players like proc sets or not. The first post in this thread says they are removing procs to see if it has any effect on performance. Adding another campaign would lessen the server load, and I think that would not be in line with their current goals.

Lots of people talking about whether procs should be in PvP or not. But I assure you that they are not interested how the players feel about that, and will do whatever they were going to do anyway. And you can be certain that there is no profit in limiting players to 19 old sets that don't help sell DLC.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news..... but proc sets are here to stay.

That has nothing to do with what I was saying. All I was trying to say is double AP incentivises more people than normal to be on so.i question how much performance is impacted by that. There seems to be enough players that say they like the combat of no proc to where the double AP may not be necessary.

Of course; I wonder how much we all would really like it if the proc dependent players weren't there to beat up on.

Gray Host on PC/NA has been pop locked every day of the month so far, test or no test. I think they simply offered the double AP as some sort of consolation for people going to the trouble of changing up gear and loadouts to meet their criteria.

Considering that the test has brought a lot of the old PvPers back to try stat only game play, I feel certain the servers would be busy even if there was only regular AP granted.

React

Zos is skewing their results by allowing cross healing to return simultaneously to the start of this test. You should really consider running the test for a week with cross healing disabled as well.

There is almost no noticeable performance increase in any of the campaigns during the times that it matters. This really is amazing given the number of "calculations" that they've reduced with almost every set disabled. It's almost as if the calculations aren't the main issue, and we're just being led to believe that they are.

People with a better understanding of the code and server tech seem to think that a huge amount of the issue is because of calculations zos moved to the server instead of the client to prevent cheating. If this is true, the question I would ask is as follows:

Is preventing small numbers of people from cheating by making PVP completley unplayable for everyone worth it?

I want performance to improve so badly, but it just seems impossible with the way zos is approaching it. We've actually been on a downward spiral for at least 3 years with consistent degradation of performance every patch, and we've yet to see any noticeable improvement from ANYTHING the development team has tried. At this point so much time has passed since the game was in a genuinely enjoyable state that most pvp COMBAT oriented players would take literally anything. A smaller zone with a different format for pvp, pvp enabled housing systems (see my thread for info), a rework of IC, etc. ANYTHING to improve the pvp aspect of the game that was marketed so heavily back around launch.

VirtualElizabeth

Okay so....I was in Ravenwatch over the weekend and things seemed pretty grand performance wise. My skills worked when I pressed the button, I didn't crash and generally had fun.

Are these performance complaints coming from players mainly in big boy campaigns AKA Grayhost NA? FYI, I have traditionally run in CP campaigns since, well, they were a thing. But the guild I have aligned myself with have chosen to move to Ravenwatch this month.

Greasytengu

If they are still looking into potential tests to do in the future then I would like to point out that performance is always better after the server has been down for maintenance and there have been times when the server has rolled back and the performance is generally better for a few hours afterwards.

Maybe having a scheduled reset every day would make an impact.

Starshadw

Joy_Division wrote: »

Another thing that makes me skeptical was the announcement during the reveal that ZOs is getting new servers - FINALLY - but somehow this is not expected to have an impact on performance. Wut? Is the equipment being downgraded? Does this mean the brunt of our complaints - the server - has been misdirected all this time? Is it the coding/programming that is the issue here? If so, how exactly is it even possible to address that without reprograming the entire game? If new servers aren't expected to fix the lag, and we already know all these restricted tests didn't either, that doesn't inspire confidence.

Since it doesn;t look like the capacity for increase server calculations is never going to happen (I dunno why; when ESO launched I had a flip phone and Youtube restricted me to 10 minute videos that took hours to upload), I think it would be better served to try and spread out the calculations we do put on the server, that is, not have everyone at the same spot during the same time. Again we have 7 years of player behavior as a guide: we stood in ques of over 100+ people just to join the laggiest default CP campaign even though the game played reasonably well in the other campaigns that had openings. Let's not kid ourselves, our behavior is not going to change as long as the map, rewards system, AvAvA routines stay as they were in 2014. There has to be interesting and engaging reasons to use the 85% of the map we ignore and there aren't any. We need permanent compelling reasons to go off the beaten path, that have fights, potential rewards, and just have interesting things to do. This way, at least the calculations are spread out with regard to distance and time, and thus the potential to avoid imposing restrictive gameplay features we don;t like and no need to redesign entire classes just so they can function in PvP setting that's going to be very different from what these classes were originally designed for.

First, I agree with all of the first part of your post - those of us who have been around from the beginning remember all of the many things that have been tried over the years. We had AOE caps, then no AOE caps, we've had new skills introduced that were supposed to be ball-group busters to discourage ball groups because of the performance hit they cause (and which every single time, simply turned into something the ball groups themselves used). I think at this point, we've gone through just about every iteration possible.

But in terms of the argument of "we need reasons to not pile up in one place and ignore the rest of the map and that would help" - they've already done that. Multiple times. It hasn't helped. The now-destroyable milegates and bridges, the three capturable towns, the addition of the extra outposts - again and again, they've added other locations intended to draw players out to other objectives. And it's never drawn enough folks away. Yes, solo folks and small groups will go off and capture towns or outposts, resources, etc. But most players still pile up at one or two objectives.

No one's gonna like what I'm about to say - but one of the big reasons a lot of folks stay where the big fights are is... AP. AP and the desire to earn it is part of what's killing Cyrodiil. Folks want to stay where the big AP gains are. Second? Folks want to be where the fights are. PvDooring is looked down upon and laughed at - and it doesn't earn anyone anywhere near the amount of AP a good fight does,. which goes back to the AP gain motivation.

Faded

Starshadw wrote: »

But in terms of the argument of "we need reasons to not pile up in one place and ignore the rest of the map and that would help" - they've already done that. Multiple times. It hasn't helped. The now-destroyable milegates and bridges, the three capturable towns, the addition of the extra outposts - again and again, they've added other locations intended to draw players out to other objectives. And it's never drawn enough folks away. Yes, solo folks and small groups will go off and capture towns or outposts, resources, etc. But most players still pile up at one or two objectives.

No one's gonna like what I'm about to say - but one of the big reasons a lot of folks stay where the big fights are is... AP. AP and the desire to earn it is part of what's killing Cyrodiil. Folks want to stay where the big AP gains are. Second? Folks want to be where the fights are. PvDooring is looked down upon and laughed at - and it doesn't earn anyone anywhere near the amount of AP a good fight does,. which goes back to the AP gain motivation.

Meh. The big fights are fun. Win or lose, they've always been fun. Devs can do whatever they want with AP rewards, people are going where the fun is. They're also the most easily accessible kind of fight, you look at the map and head for the action. You don't need a guild, a group leader, or even a common language, just go fight.

In typical ZOS fashion they'll intentionally make fun things less fun to "create interesting choices" but when they remove that essential and unique bit of the Cyro experience, they kill the thing they're trying to save. I hope they'll take care to avoid that. It's already pretty bad with the population cap so low.

Gameplay didn't break Cyrodiil and changes to gameplay won't fix it. It's depressing to see the game get so warped trying to work around technical failures.

mook-eb16_ESO

surely if you could capture and an hours worth of input data when the server is at high load they could send the data back through a test server without the need for live tests like this one? or you would think that would be the smart thing to do.

mook-eb16_ESO

I also wondered how this game plays on stadia, at high load?I mean on stadia you could dump so many client side checks that are needed to stop cheating when the game is running locally on a pc.

mook-eb16_ESO

Am right in saying that after you dodge roll a check message is sent back to the client to tell it its been completed, or mitigated certain attacks .. at high server load afters I dodge roll my skills go out and some times they don't light back up for up to 4 seconds at extremes. or is something else going on ??

Starshadw

Faded wrote: »

Meh. The big fights are fun. Win or lose, they've always been fun. Devs can do whatever they want with AP rewards, people are going where the fun is. They're also the most easily accessible kind of fight, you look at the map and head for the action. You don't need a guild, a group leader, or even a common language, just go fight.

In typical ZOS fashion they'll intentionally make fun things less fun to "create interesting choices" but when they remove that essential and unique bit of the Cyro experience, they kill the thing they're trying to save. I hope they'll take care to avoid that. It's already pretty bad with the population cap so low.

Gameplay didn't break Cyrodiil and changes to gameplay won't fix it. It's depressing to see the game get so warped trying to work around technical failures.

Sure, the big fights are fun - but there's a reason that you'll find people just staying at Sej or Nikel, despite the fact that another alliance is running around taking most of the rest of their territory - and it's not just because "big fights are fun." Going to counter the ones taking keeps would give one a "big fight," but it would mean leaving the one location (and potentially losing a juicy d-tick), and losing AP during the time spent traveling, etc. So no, I don't believe it's just the fun aspect that keep people hanging around one or two locations instead of moving around more on the map.