Thank you for participating in the Cyrodiil Champions Test!

ZOS_BrianWheeler · April 2

Now that the Cyrodiil Champions test has come to a close, we want to thank everyone who took part. We know you’re eager to learn the results and next steps – so are we! We do need some time to go through the data, analyze it, and extract the findings. When we’re done with that next step, we will share the test results with you. Test participants, please keep an eye out for a post-test survey in the next week. (To ensure you receive it, please make sure you’re opted-in to get emails from us here!)
In the meantime, we’d like to leave you with a summary of some of the incredible history-breaking records we were able to hit during this test, thanks to you, as well as a few screenshots of the fun. (We’d love to see yours, too!)

Most players ever in Cyrodiil at one time, in a single campaign
- We were able to hit triple the amount of players that is currently possible in a single Cyrodiil campaign.

Largest sustained battles we’ve ever had in Cyrodiil
- We hit a new record with the amount of players not only in a single campaign, but also in a single battle. We saw almost double the amount of players that were possible in an entire campaign before the Cyrodiil Champions test in a single sustained battle on the Vengeance campaign.

Best overall game performance we’ve ever seen in Cyrodiil
- We had three times the number of players in a single Cyrodiil campaign with little to no performance problems.

Thank you again for helping us with the Cyrodiil Champions test. Your participation will help us shape the future of Cyrodiil!

Vrienda · April 2

I didn't get to play as much as I would have liked to but it was the most fun I've had in PvP since the beta. It felt good not having to spend days on a build that'll be outdated in a month just to not be oneshot.

G0K4R · April 2

No stuck in combat bug. Performance quite nice.
But anything else was just dull and boring. Not enjoyable in the end.

Hope you are successful with the data you could gain from this.
Thank you for working on a better Cyrodiil experience (which will hopefully never be anything like this horrible Vengeance test campaign

)

Markytous · April 2

Thanks @ZOS_BrianWheeler for the recap and for the opportunity to be a part of this project. It was a blast! Can't wait to see those results and where this leads us into the near future!

Pepegrillos · April 2

It was great. It can be better. Hopefully the next steps are good.

LunaFlora · April 2

that is awesome

Erissime · April 2

Thank YOU for all your efforts for a better Cyrodiil indeed! So thrilled to see the interest and participation! Blood for the Pact! ( ok ... ok... and the Covenant, and the Dominion - cause we are all good sports and such! ) - but beyond joke now - I sure hope for a better Cyrodiil in the future. The lack of "stuck in combat" bug alone made this campaign incredible to play in.

May the future bring both the much desired balance between players, as well as smooth performance!

valenwood_vegan · April 2

Thanks for the test, looking forward to hearing about what's next!

This doesn't capture the true number of people who were actually at this insane bridge fight, but was the best picture I managed to take in all of the chaos lol.

Erickson9610 · April 2

When will we get the rest of the PvP Q&A answered?

Stridig · April 2

I'm glad the test was a success (I think). Hopefully at least some of the data is sharable with the community. I know most information about ESO is top secret nuclear code level stuff that we wouldn't understand, but it would be nice to at least have an idea of what you found.

tinythinker · April 2

Great to hear!

Looking forward to learning what the data suggests and the directions it will push the next round of testing. It was encouraging to have so many people in a campaign without the usual issues.

Even with the limits of the cookie cutter templates, it was nice to see Cyrodiil full of players. And the torchbugs! Unless I missed something, I haven't seen them in Cyro forever.

Octagneh · April 2

Those words like "triple" and "double" and "three times the", don't register any meaning to me. How about some numbers. If you are capable of determining double and triple, you have to be basing that off of some math. Someone on team blue was telling zone chat that there was only 300 people total in all of cyrodiil during Vengence. We asked for clarity "you mean 300 per faction?" He/She was solid on 300 total.That would be 100 for each faction. For a game that supposedly has tens of thousands of people playing it at any given moment, 300 for the pvp side seems low.

So when I read double and triple, is that double and triple from a base of 25....50?...100?!

I will say this, what you did with the Champion Template concept definitely made that mode extremely fun. And as I am sure you know, in it's early unmature format it got kinda redundant after a while but, the way it solved so many of the biggest complaints in one swoop was a breath of fresh air. I liked that I could skill-up as a healer and not be killed near instantly and yet still be effective in dps combat.

Stamicka · April 2

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

Most players ever in Cyrodiil at one time, in a single campaign
We were able to hit triple the amount of players that is currently possible in a single Cyrodiil campaign.

Largest sustained battles we’ve ever had in Cyrodiil
We hit a new record with the amount of players not only in a single campaign, but also in a single battle. We saw almost double the amount of players that were possible in an entire campaign before the Cyrodiil Champions test in a single sustained battle on the Vengeance campaign.

Best overall game performance we’ve ever seen in Cyrodiil
We had three times the number of players in a single Cyrodiil campaign with little to no performance problems.

I still don't understand all the secrecy behind Cyrodiil's population caps. It seemed like you guys were more open about it in the past.

I'm also confused as to how a record of the most players in a single campaign was reached when ZOS stated that old population caps were 600v600v600. Wouldn't this suggest that current population caps are around 200 per alliance since Cyrodiil populations were increased by 3 times what they are now? That's really the only way the original 600v600v600 record would be broken and it never seemed to me that 200 players per alliance can fit in Grey Host.

Sparklezz42 · April 2

I may have missed this somewhere, but is Vengeance really not coming to Consoles? Or was this test only on PC...

TheMightyRevan · April 2

Are you honestly proud of your "success" in this cyrodiil test?
Of course the battles and player numbers were bigger, because you increased them.
Of course the performance was better, because you turned everything off.
I'm really excited what your data analysis is going to reveal. I'll have a guess, turning stuff off improves performance, who wouldve thought. Why didnt you analyse this during your previous tests a couple years ago?

Aquatorch · April 2

Vengeance was boring and pointless. Of course the numbers were positive, the game was no longer ESO. It was a 1% husk of what ESO is with everything that makes the game fun disabled.

Minghash · April 2

It was a great test.

Yes, we missed a lot in tweaking and personal playstyle, but the feeling the numbers gave was awesome.

We could Ride with an Army !

ZOS_Kevin · April 2

Erickson9610 wrote: »

When will we get the rest of the PvP Q&A answered?

We're working on answers now and need to get those translated. So it will be a little bit. But these are in progress.

Erickson9610 · April 2

ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

Erickson9610 wrote: »

When will we get the rest of the PvP Q&A answered?

We're working on answers now and need to get those translated. So it will be a little bit. But these are in progress.

Should we expect them sometime after the big April 10 livestream? I know that reveal stream will take up a lot of focus, like the Cyrodiil Champions test did.

Surgee · April 2

If you ever release this as another mode, please make the map pretty like it was. My group and I hate this dark and gloomy look and green, poisonous sky. One of the reasons we don't go to imperial city is because it's so depressing. We'd definitely go there more if it got some more positive visual treatment, like let's say West Weld has.

Joy_Division · April 2

The test was a breath of fresh air.

Thanks for rekindling memories of the days of old.

acastanza_ESO · April 2

I previously posted this in its own thread that was (imo incorrectly) closed by a trigger-happy mod, but I'm going to share it again here because I think it's interesting:

This data was collected from the Vengeance campaign using the PvpAlerts addon over the course of the full week of gameplay.
Limitations: The player account used to collect the data is exclusively Aldmeri Dominion and plays in the pacific timezone on PCNA.

Total class composition across all factions

Class composition by faction:

By comparing to the complete data from GH+Vengeance since U44 with the Vengeance alone data, we can see that Vengeance appears to have encouraged an uptick in the number of players on Templar, Arcanist, and for EP and DC Necromancer (Unfortunately I neglected to save the dataset before it was contaminated with Vengeance data so I can't do a clean comparison).
U44 through Vengeance:

Some additional stats from Vengeance

The majority of players only played 1 character in Vengeance

This was relatively consistent across all factions:

Global distribution of player's alliance ranks at the conclusion of Vengeance (Note that a 0 alliance rank indicates that the character was seen in some data (e.g. the kill feed), but that the player was not directly observed with the reticle causing the data to be missing.)

Alliance ranks broken down by faction:

Compared to GH+Vengeance since U44 (below), we can see that the overall distribution of alliance ranks is pretty similar, however, it does appear that there might be a slight downward shift in the distribution of ranks particularly in the range >15, this appears to me to be an indication that either players were taking advantage of the double AP to player newer/lower ranked characters or that mid-high alliance ranked players were slightly more likely to sit out the vengeance test. This is most apparent in the relative proportion of alliance ranked 50 characters, which is much lower in Vengeance than I would've expected based on the overall distribution.

Finally, and estimate of total character population across the test (recognize that the add-on detection is biased towards your own faction and under counts enemy factions), note that a fair percentage of players participated on multiple characters, but that's still over 7,000 accounts participating on PCNA alone.

Vengeance:

U44+Vengeance Total:

I don't really have any hard conclusions to draw from this, I mostly just thought it was an interesting window into the bigger picture of how people participated in the Vengeance test. Be very interested to know how ZOS's data compares though.

(P.S. Hit me up if you're hiring data scientists @ZOS_BrianWheeler :P )

BetweenMidgets · April 2

I liked the large groups.
I liked how I never got stuck in combat.
I liked the skybox / lighting change. Was a nice variant but I could see it getting old if it were permenant.

I'm also very surprised by @acastanza_ESO 's graphs.... how did that many people find playing sorc enjoyable? It felt beyond miserable IMO! Lol! But no surprise with the NB's being top dog. Always the teacher's pet. Always OP.

BUT... The actual fighting loop got SO stale, SO fast.
In my opinion, it was so utterly boring that if this is what PVP were boiled down to, I'd just never log in again.

It was fun to be there to say I was there, but I am not one of the folks who was enamoured with the Vengeance campaign. I know lots of people like to PvDoor, but this was just miserable, IMO.

Netherscorn · April 2

I went into this wanting to hate it. And while the Vengeance tests ARE NOT A SOLUTION, it's absolutely worth iterating upon. A solid first step in some 'right' direction. Here's the takeaway in point form...

PROS
-Standardized stats were nice, a lot of fairness all around. While stats should not be *exactly* the same, universally; keeping everyone's 'on paper' stats much closer together like that is better for pvp in general and effectively removes some ridiculous outliers (one shot ganking, permablock tanks, etc)

-Time to kill was MUCH better/slower. However, it was still possible to make a mistake(s) and get killed. Fights neither ended in one or two globals, not did they last longer than thirty seconds or so (in my experience). This was nice.

-As a proof of concept, this test worked. Now you know: optimization is needed and has a huge effect on latency - both server and client side.

CONS
-Lack of gameplay choices: this should be obvious. I found myself simply out of luck in many situations because my toolkit was so limited. For a first step, the vengeance skills got the job done mostly; but the outcome of a fight usually just went in favour or who shot first and/or who had more people. In short: disabling 90% of the game isn't a solution and just leaves a lot of us with no reason to play because it's not ESO anymore.

-Base movement speed was annoying. Way too slow. And with no gear/build choices to improve mobility, it really just felt awful.

-This one is very general: as much as I want to be excited about all this, I just don't trust The Company to move forward with this in an intuitive and informed manner. Please prove me wrong. Seriously. Historically though, these kind of massive changes make me nervous. The managing developers have consistently pushed updates including changes to things no one asked to be changed, they've ignored community consensus even when players have done all the work for them, provided vast and well-researched evidence to support [our] contentions, and just in general gone in really strange directions so many times.

I hope this works out.

acastanza_ESO · April 2

BetweenMidgets wrote: »

I liked the large groups.
I liked how I never got stuck in combat.
I liked the skybox / lighting change. Was a nice variant but I could see it getting old if it were permenant.

I'm also very surprised by @acastanza_ESO 's graphs.... how did that many people find playing sorc enjoyable? It felt beyond miserable IMO! Lol! But no surprise with the NB's being top dog. Always the teacher's pet. Always OP.

BUT... The actual fighting loop got SO stale, SO fast.
In my opinion, it was so utterly boring that if this is what PVP were boiled down to, I'd just never log in again.

It was fun to be there to say I was there, but I am not one of the folks who was enamoured with the Vengeance campaign. I know lots of people like to PvDoor, but this was just miserable, IMO.

My assumption from looking at this data is that, with some exceptions, people generally just played the class they normally play. Personally, I am one of the very few (at least from this data) people that played 6 different classes over the course of Vengeance. My main is a Sorc, which I did not find particularly enjoyable in Vengeance either, so after trying everything except Templar (which I don't have), spent most of my time on a new Necromancer. I would note that it is impossible for my data to show how much any given character was played, this data is simply "was this character ever seen in Cyrodiil by my account".

Savagejack · April 2

I liked vengeance for what it didn't have. No damage procs, excessive cross-healing, ball groups, bombers or pull sets. The campaign just needs some morphs and reasons to build and explore. It was good performance, just a stale play loop. Stay fiery

Kikazaru · April 2

This is probably the closest thing to reliving the 2014 pvp experience, aside the bare bones combat mechanics, it was a nice getaway from the usual meta trash we have been dealing with for years now.

KiltMaster · April 2

It was alright. I was glad that performance was decent, tho I did crash 5x when I don't typically crash during PVP. Though, Performance is of course going to be better since everything was turned off. That sort of seems like a no-brainer.

It felt boring after a while since everything was 'whoever has the biggest zerg wins', and not just one player could have an affect on the battles. Grinned and beared it for the AP and to say I tried it, but wasn't fun IMO.

Final Thoughts:
Why does Cyrodill have to have everyone on a level playing field? Why should I be able to walk in there with zero experience and be able to be competitive against folks that put real effort into their gear and builds? There should be a learning curve to everything. I don't expect to walk into a trifecta trial core and do decently without experience and prep work.

tomofhyrule · April 2

KiltMaster wrote: »

There should be a learning curve to everything. I don't expect to walk into a trifecta trial core and do decently without experience and prep work.

A lot of people make the “I can’t just bring anything to a trial trifecta! PvP should have a learning curve!” argument, which is completely valid. Yes, a player who has spent more time in PvP should do better.

But…
PvE also doesn’t just start with trifectas. There’s actually a pretty clear buildup from overland -> delves -> public dungeons -> basegame group dungeons -> vet basegame group dungeons -> DLC normal dungeons -> DLC vet dungeons -> DLC HM dungeons -> DLC trifectas. (And for trials, you can also take a similar route).

In PvP though, the progression is just PvE against computer mobs -> PvP against pros.

If we want to compare PvP to a vet trifecta, then there really isn’t an equivalent of everything leading up to it. Sure you shouldn’t walk into a trifecta without prep. But where do you get that prep for the PvP world? Where do you practice? We cant queue for duels to test builds, so that’s just waiting at wayshrines and hoping someone accepts a duel request and can PvP and is in PvP gear. We can’t expect that the U50 campaigns are all newbies instead of pros who cycle gold Lv 40 gear between a series of alts.

That was in my opinion one of the benefits of Vengeance in that it could serve as that much-needed step between overland PvE and PvP. Obviously I would never want to get rid of Grey Host, but a templated and no-CP and no sets and no stats and no Voldendrung foolishness arena could really help bring new people into PvP, where they may be able to find guilds and then make the jump into “real” Cyrodiil.

tsaescishoeshiner · April 2

I would love if Vengeance came back! I was excited to introduce a new friend to ESO PvP, and the fact that they could jump in and play without gearing up, leveling up, making a build, etc. was amazing.

Obviously there could be many improvements to it, but even if it returned as-is, especially with good AP rewards like there were, I would be excited. It would be cool for a free trial week, so the new/potential players can check out PvP.

Izanagi.Xiiib16_ESO · April 2

@ZOS_BrianWheeler There were a lot of encouraging points which can be used to learn from I'm sure however please also consider that players starved of content and changes will always react more positively to 'anything' new.
I think you need to very carefully consider what sort of environment you want Cyrodiil to be because if these changes go in (albeit with more skills etc) a lot of players will quit from an already player starved core group.