manukartofanu wrote: »@twev May I ask, who are you telling this to? Those who work in this industry know without any statements from anyone that information about what work is being done cannot help any wrongdoers. Yes, not everything can be said. But that's no explanation for complete silence or standard repetitive answers.
P.S. If what you're writing about actually worked that way, we wouldn't be getting any announcements or patch notes.
Simple.
The explanation for the stuff that is silenced is that that is what the mother ship feels is best for their own ends.
Who I'm talking 'to' is the people who have a passing acquaintance with tech, networking and general business without being inside the machinations of big business intrigue and subterfuge.
Lots of things that non-tech people would think are just normal info are guarded as proprietary information, and many things that are in the public domain of information would get a tech worker or dev fired for breaching a non-disclosure clause in their contract, by even just commenting on the record about info that is being discussed in public.
I was just commenting about the constant requests for 'updates', and 'what are you working on?, 'how many people are working on the problem?', What have you tried so far?' and other 'innocent' questions that keep being repeated, with increasing frustration.
Some companies answer questions, other companies ignore many such questions that they feel answering is not in their fiscal interest to address.
Many people here seem to think that the company can be badgered into responding, when, clearly they have little interest in posting such information.
If they wanted us to know, they'd have told us details long ago.
If they were able to fix the issues for what they consider to be a worthwhile expenditure, they would have by now.
They either can't, or won't, do certain things, and they don't feel obligated to inform us of which those things are.
Some people can't or just won't, accept that.
It's like asking your kid 'Who broke the vase??', and they start telling you about their day in school.
Posting patch notes is completely outside the scope of answering many/most of all the tech questions and requests that get posted here.
Players here who work in tech already know what most of those things that can be discussed under company non-disclosure agreements are. A lot of players not in tech don't know how many things aren't for public consumption.
The complete silence you referred to in the penultimate line of your post isn't company incompetence at communication, rather, it's what they feel benefits them the most.
We can ask Kevin 12 times/day for details, and most of the questions will go unanswered because he's not permitted to comment, or he's not given details pertaining to the questions asked.
I was just addressing some of the causes behind the actions that result in forum user's frustrations in a 61 page thread.
In no way am I implying the frustrations are without merit.
thinkaboutit wrote: »manukartofanu wrote: »@twev May I ask, who are you telling this to? Those who work in this industry know without any statements from anyone that information about what work is being done cannot help any wrongdoers. Yes, not everything can be said. But that's no explanation for complete silence or standard repetitive answers.
P.S. If what you're writing about actually worked that way, we wouldn't be getting any announcements or patch notes.
Simple.
The explanation for the stuff that is silenced is that that is what the mother ship feels is best for their own ends.
Who I'm talking 'to' is the people who have a passing acquaintance with tech, networking and general business without being inside the machinations of big business intrigue and subterfuge.
Lots of things that non-tech people would think are just normal info are guarded as proprietary information, and many things that are in the public domain of information would get a tech worker or dev fired for breaching a non-disclosure clause in their contract, by even just commenting on the record about info that is being discussed in public.
I was just commenting about the constant requests for 'updates', and 'what are you working on?, 'how many people are working on the problem?', What have you tried so far?' and other 'innocent' questions that keep being repeated, with increasing frustration.
Some companies answer questions, other companies ignore many such questions that they feel answering is not in their fiscal interest to address.
Many people here seem to think that the company can be badgered into responding, when, clearly they have little interest in posting such information.
If they wanted us to know, they'd have told us details long ago.
If they were able to fix the issues for what they consider to be a worthwhile expenditure, they would have by now.
They either can't, or won't, do certain things, and they don't feel obligated to inform us of which those things are.
Some people can't or just won't, accept that.
It's like asking your kid 'Who broke the vase??', and they start telling you about their day in school.
Posting patch notes is completely outside the scope of answering many/most of all the tech questions and requests that get posted here.
Players here who work in tech already know what most of those things that can be discussed under company non-disclosure agreements are. A lot of players not in tech don't know how many things aren't for public consumption.
The complete silence you referred to in the penultimate line of your post isn't company incompetence at communication, rather, it's what they feel benefits them the most.
We can ask Kevin 12 times/day for details, and most of the questions will go unanswered because he's not permitted to comment, or he's not given details pertaining to the questions asked.
I was just addressing some of the causes behind the actions that result in forum user's frustrations in a 61 page thread.
In no way am I implying the frustrations are without merit.
What is the point of your post? Nice job being condescending with your little "passing acquaintance" comment there.
Here's the bottom line, the issue has been ongoing for months. What would you have us do? Sit in silence?
By all means, no, don't sit in silence.
One of the best things about an open forum is players sharing the stuff in this thread, so we aren't feeling 'alone'.
Just look at how many players post here that they are relieved to know it's not just them, and the diversity of locations and connections/equipment/platforms lets us know that it's not our fault when half of a group all freeze or disconnect at the same time.
Some of the problems probably stem from jamming all the new stuff, locations, flashy effects into an old old engine that wasn't designed for it.
Some of it probably stems from the number of DLCs and locations the engine is trying to keep knitted together.
Some of it is the servers keeping track of the population density in game, especially in a map, or specific area.
Some of it is the increasing number of items, collectibles, in inventory, and banks as more players log in on the servers.
[Notice how logging into a guild bank at random times shows the 'I'm thinking about it' icon forEVAR, or until you close the attempt and try again, maybe a few times.]
Some of it is probably even due to a dodgy circuit board or two/many in the servers thats doing the countdown to eventual failure. (we had that one a few months before the server rebuild, where they found a few boards that were going bad.) Some IC boards just drift further out of spec over time.
Lets not discuss the issues with Akamai. That's it's own black hole of info.
But to the point, this thread alone has allowed us to compare notes and see just how pervasive the issues are for many of us, outside of our own sphere's, regardless of the number of blessed players who chime in with 'Working for me, never had a problem'...
And the forum population is small compared to the number of game licenses.
I'll bet the majority of players with issues don't even know about the forum, deal with issues for a while, and then just delete the realm from their drives and move on to other games without ever being heard.
We're lucky that as many of the players with issues even came here and voiced their concerns, hoping to keep the game not only alive, but make the game a better experience for everyone else.
About all we can do is point out the issues, and try to convince the Mother ship that we're here, we care, and we're worth being heard, so the game doesn't circle the drain before problems get fixed.
And I'm about as cynical as they come.
[edit to add:]
I'm sorry if you thought I was being condescending.
It was not my intent.
I was merely pointing out that of the roughly 20 million licensed copies of the game in circulation - you can count on a rather large population of players who have never worked in tech, for some of them this is even their first game on their first computer.
There are a lot of people here who have never assembled a computer, configured a network, or can diagnose which addons might be causing a problem with the game.
Many people here have looked at error msgs and tried to figure out what they were referring to, and can't understand why they didn't have a particular problem last week, or last month, but now it's a problem that happens several times a day.
I got out of tech years ago when I realized that there were too many times when management made it harder to fix a problem than it could/should have been.
And as an aside, I've been in on many guild conversations, and group conversations over the years in this game alone where it was revealed that half the guild or group was made up of retired people, people who had worked the trades for their careers, and half the tech they learned was from gaming forums like this one.
it's not condescending to recognize those players as people who haven't had the benefit of inside experience hands-on with tech companies while they're just trying to figure out why their game doesn't work right.
But I appreciate you pointing out the opportunity to clarify the wording in my original responses.
Like they could ask us to create a ticket, and share the ticket # with them, so it can be escalated directly to an engineer, and we can provide the time and information more quickly to them, and they can give us instructions on anything they want us to do.thinkaboutit wrote: »manukartofanu wrote: »@twev May I ask, who are you telling this to? Those who work in this industry know without any statements from anyone that information about what work is being done cannot help any wrongdoers. Yes, not everything can be said. But that's no explanation for complete silence or standard repetitive answers.
P.S. If what you're writing about actually worked that way, we wouldn't be getting any announcements or patch notes.
Simple.
The explanation for the stuff that is silenced is that that is what the mother ship feels is best for their own ends.
Who I'm talking 'to' is the people who have a passing acquaintance with tech, networking and general business without being inside the machinations of big business intrigue and subterfuge.
Lots of things that non-tech people would think are just normal info are guarded as proprietary information, and many things that are in the public domain of information would get a tech worker or dev fired for breaching a non-disclosure clause in their contract, by even just commenting on the record about info that is being discussed in public.
I was just commenting about the constant requests for 'updates', and 'what are you working on?, 'how many people are working on the problem?', What have you tried so far?' and other 'innocent' questions that keep being repeated, with increasing frustration.
Some companies answer questions, other companies ignore many such questions that they feel answering is not in their fiscal interest to address.
Many people here seem to think that the company can be badgered into responding, when, clearly they have little interest in posting such information.
If they wanted us to know, they'd have told us details long ago.
If they were able to fix the issues for what they consider to be a worthwhile expenditure, they would have by now.
They either can't, or won't, do certain things, and they don't feel obligated to inform us of which those things are.
Some people can't or just won't, accept that.
It's like asking your kid 'Who broke the vase??', and they start telling you about their day in school.
Posting patch notes is completely outside the scope of answering many/most of all the tech questions and requests that get posted here.
Players here who work in tech already know what most of those things that can be discussed under company non-disclosure agreements are. A lot of players not in tech don't know how many things aren't for public consumption.
The complete silence you referred to in the penultimate line of your post isn't company incompetence at communication, rather, it's what they feel benefits them the most.
We can ask Kevin 12 times/day for details, and most of the questions will go unanswered because he's not permitted to comment, or he's not given details pertaining to the questions asked.
I was just addressing some of the causes behind the actions that result in forum user's frustrations in a 61 page thread.
In no way am I implying the frustrations are without merit.
What is the point of your post? Nice job being condescending with your little "passing acquaintance" comment there.
Here's the bottom line, the issue has been ongoing for months. What would you have us do? Sit in silence?
By all means, no, don't sit in silence.
One of the best things about an open forum is players sharing the stuff in this thread, so we aren't feeling 'alone'.
Just look at how many players post here that they are relieved to know it's not just them, and the diversity of locations and connections/equipment/platforms lets us know that it's not our fault when half of a group all freeze or disconnect at the same time.
Some of the problems probably stem from jamming all the new stuff, locations, flashy effects into an old old engine that wasn't designed for it.
Some of it probably stems from the number of DLCs and locations the engine is trying to keep knitted together.
Some of it is the servers keeping track of the population density in game, especially in a map, or specific area.
Some of it is the increasing number of items, collectibles, in inventory, and banks as more players log in on the servers.
[Notice how logging into a guild bank at random times shows the 'I'm thinking about it' icon forEVAR, or until you close the attempt and try again, maybe a few times.]
Some of it is probably even due to a dodgy circuit board or two/many in the servers thats doing the countdown to eventual failure. (we had that one a few months before the server rebuild, where they found a few boards that were going bad.) Some IC boards just drift further out of spec over time.
Lets not discuss the issues with Akamai. That's it's own black hole of info.
But to the point, this thread alone has allowed us to compare notes and see just how pervasive the issues are for many of us, outside of our own sphere's, regardless of the number of blessed players who chime in with 'Working for me, never had a problem'...
And the forum population is small compared to the number of game licenses.
I'll bet the majority of players with issues don't even know about the forum, deal with issues for a while, and then just delete the realm from their drives and move on to other games without ever being heard.
We're lucky that as many of the players with issues even came here and voiced their concerns, hoping to keep the game not only alive, but make the game a better experience for everyone else.
About all we can do is point out the issues, and try to convince the Mother ship that we're here, we care, and we're worth being heard, so the game doesn't circle the drain before problems get fixed.
And I'm about as cynical as they come.
[edit to add:]
I'm sorry if you thought I was being condescending.
It was not my intent.
I was merely pointing out that of the roughly 20 million licensed copies of the game in circulation - you can count on a rather large population of players who have never worked in tech, for some of them this is even their first game on their first computer.
There are a lot of people here who have never assembled a computer, configured a network, or can diagnose which addons might be causing a problem with the game.
Many people here have looked at error msgs and tried to figure out what they were referring to, and can't understand why they didn't have a particular problem last week, or last month, but now it's a problem that happens several times a day.
I got out of tech years ago when I realized that there were too many times when management made it harder to fix a problem than it could/should have been.
And as an aside, I've been in on many guild conversations, and group conversations over the years in this game alone where it was revealed that half the guild or group was made up of retired people, people who had worked the trades for their careers, and half the tech they learned was from gaming forums like this one.
it's not condescending to recognize those players as people who haven't had the benefit of inside experience hands-on with tech companies while they're just trying to figure out why their game doesn't work right.
But I appreciate you pointing out the opportunity to clarify the wording in my original responses.
SaintJohnHM wrote: »I agree with BaconAura above. The lack of communication and urgency from ZOS about a game-breaking issue like this makes us feel disrespected. How should we plan our time if we don't know if the game is going to work or not?
We continue to have huge lag spikes and simultaneous multiplayer disconnects in trials. We had a player disconnect at the last few seconds of a 36/36 KA trifecta last week.
thinkaboutit wrote: »Anyone have details on today's maintenance?
Regarding the recent freezing and rubberbanding, if they are finished some investigations, they should atleast give us some updates, and rule out things that are being speculated on. Like if they have investigated akamai latency, and concluded that its not an issue, they should just communicate that after they have done extensive testing and analysis of network log data, and have not found anything conclusive to point to akamai as the source of the lag spikes.
haleysarahw wrote: »Forgot to turn on my VPN yesterday and experienced significant ping spikes standing in the Galen bank trying to remove gear. Turned on my VPN and everything seemed fine.
thinkaboutit wrote: »
Called this one out a bunch of pages back lol..
With Thrones and Liberty coming out tomorrow and little to no update of substance thus far... and this issue going on for 5 months...
Consider this one of my last posts regarding this issue. My days with ESO are numbered at this point. As someone who has been with this game since beta I really hate to say it but ZoS has lost their way and IMO got complacent.
thinkaboutit wrote: »
Called this one out a bunch of pages back lol..
And this is just ONE of 650+ and growing sets that have to be calculated by the server. And as time goes on, the calculations are becoming more and more complex, with so many different conditions that have to be kept track of. Add to that the ever increasing particle density of the flashy new mounts, armor packs, polymorphs, and whatnot, and the scribing variations, expanding pool of player achievements.... all on data hard capped servers.... and it's easy to see how performance can suffer.
thinkaboutit wrote: »
Called this one out a bunch of pages back lol..
And this is just ONE of 650+ and growing sets that have to be calculated by the server. And as time goes on, the calculations are becoming more and more complex, with so many different conditions that have to be kept track of. Add to that the ever increasing particle density of the flashy new mounts, armor packs, polymorphs, and whatnot, and the scribing variations, expanding pool of player achievements.... all on data hard capped servers.... and it's easy to see how performance can suffer.
thinkaboutit wrote: »
Called this one out a bunch of pages back lol..
And this is just ONE of 650+ and growing sets that have to be calculated by the server. And as time goes on, the calculations are becoming more and more complex, with so many different conditions that have to be kept track of. Add to that the ever increasing particle density of the flashy new mounts, armor packs, polymorphs, and whatnot, and the scribing variations, expanding pool of player achievements.... all on data hard capped servers.... and it's easy to see how performance can suffer.
UI stuff like mount effects, particles, armor/weapons and even the azure blightseed explosion particle effects isnt done by the server. its done by the client with the assets stored and processed locally.
The issues we are having is network/serverside. Calculations maybe. but like i said a few pages back, they need to reinvest some of that $15m/month into upgrading servers over time. And lets be honest, 650+ sets, but i would wager less than 50 are probably seeing any use. half of them are flat stats without proc conditions. Even doing Infinite Archive solo or 4 man rnd dungeons, we are seeing this performance degradation. so its not limited to cyrodiil or 12man trials with everyone popping azure in vLC.
And computer hardware is many times faster than what eso started out with(2012 era hardware), and even from the upgraded stuff in 2022, its a few generations after now.
To be honest, if i were them, i would use some of that $15m/month and ask for help from their parent company microsoft to migrate more of their infrastructure into Azure. So they don't have to deal with the underlying infrastructure and can scale up easier/faster as new hardware becomes available, and focus on writing code, and let the Azure devops team manage the network infrastructure and service reliability.
Like at my work, we use AWS, which allows us to scale up in instance sizes, and horizontally via autoscaling based on load patterns. This allows us to focus more on the code/service itself, and worry less about the infrastructure. Sure we could host it ourselves, in a datacenter that isnt cloud like the old way(~2010 era), but its just so much more difficult to scale efficiently, and it would use up so much more time to manage and maintain.
KaironBlackbard wrote: »thinkaboutit wrote: »
Called this one out a bunch of pages back lol..
And this is just ONE of 650+ and growing sets that have to be calculated by the server. And as time goes on, the calculations are becoming more and more complex, with so many different conditions that have to be kept track of. Add to that the ever increasing particle density of the flashy new mounts, armor packs, polymorphs, and whatnot, and the scribing variations, expanding pool of player achievements.... all on data hard capped servers.... and it's easy to see how performance can suffer.
UI stuff like mount effects, particles, armor/weapons and even the azure blightseed explosion particle effects isnt done by the server. its done by the client with the assets stored and processed locally.
The issues we are having is network/serverside. Calculations maybe. but like i said a few pages back, they need to reinvest some of that $15m/month into upgrading servers over time. And lets be honest, 650+ sets, but i would wager less than 50 are probably seeing any use. half of them are flat stats without proc conditions. Even doing Infinite Archive solo or 4 man rnd dungeons, we are seeing this performance degradation. so its not limited to cyrodiil or 12man trials with everyone popping azure in vLC.
And computer hardware is many times faster than what eso started out with(2012 era hardware), and even from the upgraded stuff in 2022, its a few generations after now.
To be honest, if i were them, i would use some of that $15m/month and ask for help from their parent company microsoft to migrate more of their infrastructure into Azure. So they don't have to deal with the underlying infrastructure and can scale up easier/faster as new hardware becomes available, and focus on writing code, and let the Azure devops team manage the network infrastructure and service reliability.
Like at my work, we use AWS, which allows us to scale up in instance sizes, and horizontally via autoscaling based on load patterns. This allows us to focus more on the code/service itself, and worry less about the infrastructure. Sure we could host it ourselves, in a datacenter that isnt cloud like the old way(~2010 era), but its just so much more difficult to scale efficiently, and it would use up so much more time to manage and maintain.
good points
I don't think merging with azure would be a good idea though.
This company is rich enough to harbor its own servers. It doesn't need to spend 1000 times more being harbored on cloud servers that they can't maintain for peak effectiveness.
They could swap ISPs though, if they're using Akamai as their ISP.
If they swap, we should see better performance.
KaironBlackbard wrote: »thinkaboutit wrote: »
Called this one out a bunch of pages back lol..
And this is just ONE of 650+ and growing sets that have to be calculated by the server. And as time goes on, the calculations are becoming more and more complex, with so many different conditions that have to be kept track of. Add to that the ever increasing particle density of the flashy new mounts, armor packs, polymorphs, and whatnot, and the scribing variations, expanding pool of player achievements.... all on data hard capped servers.... and it's easy to see how performance can suffer.
UI stuff like mount effects, particles, armor/weapons and even the azure blightseed explosion particle effects isnt done by the server. its done by the client with the assets stored and processed locally.
The issues we are having is network/serverside. Calculations maybe. but like i said a few pages back, they need to reinvest some of that $15m/month into upgrading servers over time. And lets be honest, 650+ sets, but i would wager less than 50 are probably seeing any use. half of them are flat stats without proc conditions. Even doing Infinite Archive solo or 4 man rnd dungeons, we are seeing this performance degradation. so its not limited to cyrodiil or 12man trials with everyone popping azure in vLC.
And computer hardware is many times faster than what eso started out with(2012 era hardware), and even from the upgraded stuff in 2022, its a few generations after now.
To be honest, if i were them, i would use some of that $15m/month and ask for help from their parent company microsoft to migrate more of their infrastructure into Azure. So they don't have to deal with the underlying infrastructure and can scale up easier/faster as new hardware becomes available, and focus on writing code, and let the Azure devops team manage the network infrastructure and service reliability.
Like at my work, we use AWS, which allows us to scale up in instance sizes, and horizontally via autoscaling based on load patterns. This allows us to focus more on the code/service itself, and worry less about the infrastructure. Sure we could host it ourselves, in a datacenter that isnt cloud like the old way(~2010 era), but its just so much more difficult to scale efficiently, and it would use up so much more time to manage and maintain.
good points
I don't think merging with azure would be a good idea though.
This company is rich enough to harbor its own servers. It doesn't need to spend 1000 times more being harbored on cloud servers that they can't maintain for peak effectiveness.
They could swap ISPs though, if they're using Akamai as their ISP.
If they swap, we should see better performance.
yeah, but it feels like they cant even maintain their own infrastructure right now. scaling and upgrading hardware is way more complex and expensive in a non cloud environment. Atleast if its managed by Azure, they have their dedicated devops taking care of it. Like it's all owned by Microsoft at the end of the day, which owns Bethesda/ZOS. They could probably gain some efficiency there, and focus more on the service/code.
Mentioned this in the Azure blight thread (that got closed) that the calculations were causing massive stress on the servers and you could literally feel the server chug along as the blight chain was going off and basically got told to sit down I'm dumb.
Glad to see I was right here.
thinkaboutit wrote: »Wh
Mentioned this in the Azure blight thread (that got closed) that the calculations were causing massive stress on the servers and you could literally feel the server chug along as the blight chain was going off and basically got told to sit down I'm dumb.
Glad to see I was right here.
where's that azure thread? I can't find it
thinkaboutit wrote: »Wh
Mentioned this in the Azure blight thread (that got closed) that the calculations were causing massive stress on the servers and you could literally feel the server chug along as the blight chain was going off and basically got told to sit down I'm dumb.
Glad to see I was right here.
where's that azure thread? I can't find it
its in PTS section.
Mentioned this in the Azure blight thread (that got closed) that the calculations were causing massive stress on the servers and you could literally feel the server chug along as the blight chain was going off and basically got told to sit down I'm dumb.
Glad to see I was right here.