Need to fix performance somehow.

cbro72 · September 2019

Dear ZOS,
How can I put this delicately.
Fix your *** game.
Or the minute something better comes along , people will abandon this game like cockroaches fleeing a burning building.

InvictusApollo · September 2019

I am downloading Conqueror's Blade right now. It should be finished in 7 minutes.
Also there will be Ashes of Creation soon.
But the best candidate to replace ESOs PvP for me seems to be Spellbound.

Galarthor · September 2019

cbro72 wrote: »

Dear ZOS,
How can I put this delicately.
Fix your *** game.
Or the minute something better comes along , people will abandon this game like cockroaches fleeing a burning building.

That time when another game comes along will be the time they (might) do something about performance. I don't recall the name of the game, but maybe 2 years back some new game launched and was hyped within the ESO PVP community. And all of a sudden, after years of neglect, around launch of that game we received attention from ZOS and a (somewhat) PvP oriented Update for the game with performance improvements ...

xaraan · September 2019

cryo is still crashing constantly to desktop, whatever they fixed didn't get fixed.

zos should be embarrassed about this performance

ChefZero · September 2019

InvictusApollo wrote: »

I am downloading Conqueror's Blade right now. It should be finished in 7 minutes.
Also there will be Ashes of Creation soon.
But the best candidate to replace ESOs PvP for me seems to be Spellbound.

What about Crowfall?

InvictusApollo · September 2019

ChefZero wrote: »

InvictusApollo wrote: »

I am downloading Conqueror's Blade right now. It should be finished in 7 minutes.
Also there will be Ashes of Creation soon.
But the best candidate to replace ESOs PvP for me seems to be Spellbound.

What about Crowfall?

Looks too cartoony to me but I'll add it to my watchlist. Thanks.
Also I have played some Conqueror's Blade today and it was great. However I did miss having many abilities and my weapon of choice turned out to be too slow (glaive). I'll try naginata and maybe if I unlock more active skills I will have much more fun. As for now the idea of directly commanding your own troops on the battlefield is awesome. I felt like a real medieval commander.

Edit: I forgot to add that ping is awesome in Conqueror's Blade. I get less lag than in Overwatch. 56ms! Comparing that to 100ms jumping up to 200ms randomly is like comparing... a game that works to a game that doesn't work

josh.lackey_ESO · September 2019

The performance has been bad for years. The lag comes from the server not being able to keep up with all the calculations in realtime.

One would think eventually hardware upgrades would help. CPU performance has come a long way since 2014.

I don't know what kind of hardware they're on now, but AMD just put out 64 core server CPU's. It's hard to imagine that wouldn't be a substantial performance uplift. Even if their server engine isn't threaded well, single-thread performance is probably 40% higher than in CPU's from 2014.

There is a dollar amount that would definitively fix the lag. I guess it's just not worth it financially. And I can't say I blame them. I doubt Cyrodiil is pulling in a lot of revenue. A bit of a chicken and egg situation, but even if they put out and upgrade tomorrow that totally resolved all the server lag, the game PvP-wise would probably still be in a slow decline. Not even sure if another PvP DLC would turn it around. Their internal numbers are probably telling them no.

Delimber · September 2019

josh.lackey_ESO wrote: »

The performance has been bad for years. The lag comes from the server not being able to keep up with all the calculations in realtime.

One would think eventually hardware upgrades would help. CPU performance has come a long way since 2014.

I don't know what kind of hardware they're on now, but AMD just put out 64 core server CPU's. It's hard to imagine that wouldn't be a substantial performance uplift. Even if their server engine isn't threaded well, single-thread performance is probably 40% higher than in CPU's from 2014.

There is a dollar amount that would definitively fix the lag. I guess it's just not worth it financially. And I can't say I blame them. I doubt Cyrodiil is pulling in a lot of revenue. A bit of a chicken and egg situation, but even if they put out and upgrade tomorrow that totally resolved all the server lag, the game PvP-wise would probably still be in a slow decline. Not even sure if another PvP DLC would turn it around. Their internal numbers are probably telling them no.

Spot on about how much "value" pvp is to ESO. PvE is the money maker so that is who they will support most of the time. And given how the last pvp dlc turned out, not sure I want to see what else they could turn out.

antihero727 · September 2019

Delimber wrote: »

josh.lackey_ESO wrote: »

The performance has been bad for years. The lag comes from the server not being able to keep up with all the calculations in realtime.

One would think eventually hardware upgrades would help. CPU performance has come a long way since 2014.

I don't know what kind of hardware they're on now, but AMD just put out 64 core server CPU's. It's hard to imagine that wouldn't be a substantial performance uplift. Even if their server engine isn't threaded well, single-thread performance is probably 40% higher than in CPU's from 2014.

There is a dollar amount that would definitively fix the lag. I guess it's just not worth it financially. And I can't say I blame them. I doubt Cyrodiil is pulling in a lot of revenue. A bit of a chicken and egg situation, but even if they put out and upgrade tomorrow that totally resolved all the server lag, the game PvP-wise would probably still be in a slow decline. Not even sure if another PvP DLC would turn it around. Their internal numbers are probably telling them no.

Spot on about how much "value" pvp is to ESO. PvE is the money maker so that is who they will support most of the time. And given how the last pvp dlc turned out, not sure I want to see what else they could turn out.

PvE isn’t the money maker house and mount simulator are the real money. I have been down this numbers game before but think even at prime time weekend PC/NA has less than 1k players in Cyrodiil. With those numbers why should they care?

zyk · September 2019

josh.lackey_ESO wrote: »

One would think eventually hardware upgrades would help. CPU performance has come a long way since 2014.

It's unlikely they're using the same hardware they were using in 2014 and it's possible that throwing hardware at the problem won't solve it. In fact, Brian Wheeler has specifically said that's the case.

There's a key feature of their server tech that appears to be broken. I recall ZOS describing how it should work in the past. Zones are divided into subzones and lag in one subzone isn't supposed to affect others. But for whatever reason, this is not the case. There are zone-wide bottlenecks. It's impossible for us to accurately speculate what the problems might be. My guess is that they just never finished the server tech. The game launched late and unfinished. The code is probably full of poorly documented unoptimized placeholder functions. But again, that's just a guess from someone who has been forced by his employer to produce bad code in a crunch.

Beyond that, I have doubts that any server tech or combination of hardware could handle a 100v100v100 fight in the same subzone based on how the game is currently designed. There are potentially too many things happening at the same time. Abilities, passives and (proc) sets are designed and profiled for 12 player instances.

What AvA needs is its own ruleset. A competent design team could design a good game around the current server tech if they adhered to its limitations. That's not the case here because AvA is an afterthought most of the time.

All servers have limits. The best database hardware and software can be brought to their knees by bad designers. The problem here, ultimately, is that ZOS designed gameplay the server is not capable of handling. So this is, first and foremost, a gameplay design issue.

This is why my dream has long been for ZOS to spin Cyrodiil off as its own f2p game with a small design team who is enabled to optimize 100% for AvA.

antihero727 · September 2019

zyk wrote: »

josh.lackey_ESO wrote: »

One would think eventually hardware upgrades would help. CPU performance has come a long way since 2014.

It's unlikely they're using the same hardware they were using in 2014 and it's possible that throwing hardware at the problem won't solve it. In fact, Brian Wheeler has specifically said that's the case.

There's a key feature of their server tech that appears to be broken. I recall ZOS describing how it should work in the past. Zones are divided into subzones and lag in one subzone isn't supposed to affect others. But for whatever reason, this is not the case. There are zone-wide bottlenecks. It's impossible for us to accurately speculate what the problems might be. My guess is that they just never finished the server tech. The game launched late and unfinished. The code is probably full of poorly documented unoptimized placeholder functions. But again, that's just a guess from someone who has been forced by his employer to produce bad code in a crunch.

Beyond that, I have doubts that any server tech or combination of hardware could handle a 100v100v100 fight in the same subzone based on how the game is currently designed. There are potentially too many things happening at the same time. Abilities, passives and (proc) sets are designed and profiled for 12 player instances.

What AvA needs is its own ruleset. A competent design team could design a good game around the current server tech if they adhered to its limitations. That's not the case here because AvA is an afterthought most of the time.

All servers have limits. The best database hardware and software can be brought to their knees by bad designers. The problem here, ultimately, is that ZOS designed gameplay the server is not capable of handling. So this is, first and foremost, a gameplay design issue.

This is why my dream has long been for ZOS to spin Cyrodiil off as its own f2p game with a small design team who is enabled to optimize 100% for AvA.

The game was designed originally to have a lot more of the footwork done on the client side. Because of a few programs most of that was moved back to server side. That’s when the downhill slide started to happen in performance

zyk · September 2019

antihero727 wrote: »

The game was designed originally to have a lot more of the footwork done on the client side. Because of a few programs most of that was moved back to server side. That’s when the downhill slide started to happen in performance

Which, for the record, ZOS disputes. Their explanation is that players leveled and learned to play which exposed the inherent weaknesses of the game. The game performed well, as shown in videos, when few players were max level and almost no one knew how to play.

Everyone points to a patch in 2014 as an example of things being moved server side, but Zazeergate happened 2 years later -- and every so often we're reminded that the client still does far too much for a game with no cheat mitigation.

antihero727 · September 2019

zyk wrote: »

antihero727 wrote: »

The game was designed originally to have a lot more of the footwork done on the client side. Because of a few programs most of that was moved back to server side. That’s when the downhill slide started to happen in performance

Which, for the record, ZOS disputes. Their explanation is that players leveled and learned to play which exposed the inherent weaknesses of the game. The game performed well, as shown in videos, when few players were max level and almost no one knew how to play.

Everyone points to a patch in 2014 as an example of things being moved server side, but Zazeergate happened 2 years later -- and every so often we're reminded that the client still does far too much for a game with no cheat mitigation.

We both have been around long enough to not believe the ZOS Fake News

zyk · September 2019

antihero727 wrote: »

We both have been around long enough to not believe the ZOS Fake News

They're not gaining anything by allegedly lying about it. If they wanted a cop out, blaming their performance issues on cheaters sounds a lot better than admitting their server can't handle gameplay as they designed it 2 months after launching. The latter is MUCH more damning.

But again, cheaters weren't known to be an issue in 2014. Memory hacking wasn't exposed in ESO until 2016, after years of performance issues. Bots were an issue then and remain so today. So whatever was client-side in 2014 was cl=ient-side in 2016 -- because in 2016, the client was proven to be trusted in every way imaginable.

Please show me any game server that can handle everything that ESO throws at it when there are multiple ball groups and 150+ players in close proximity of each other, trusted clients or not. I don't think it's possible as ESO gameplay is currently designed.

This is likely why when ZOS revisited PVP with Battlegrounds, they capped it at an underwhelming 12 players. That's worse than Quakeworld in the mid-90s. The game is just too calculation heavy for large scale combat to be smooth.

Palidon · September 2019

Cyrodiil has had pathetic performance issues for years. And just think this Thursday they kick off the IC event. Need to change the name to Crash City event.

josh.lackey_ESO · September 2019

zyk wrote: »

josh.lackey_ESO wrote: »

One would think eventually hardware upgrades would help. CPU performance has come a long way since 2014.

It's unlikely they're using the same hardware they were using in 2014 and it's possible that throwing hardware at the problem won't solve it. In fact, Brian Wheeler has specifically said that's the case..

I don't believe it.

We should have seen performance gets at least modestly better due to hardware improvements. But it's not gotten any better at all. It might even have gotten worse. At one point I wondered if they didn't actually downgrade their hardware.

I can believe the server engine is bad. But as I said, it could be fixed. It's not trivial, but it's not the kind of thing only a few people in the world could ever work on. They could probably contract someone to rewrite it if they don't have the manpower or expertise internally. It's just about cost. It's probably not worth doing.

Performance is just not going to get any better. It's been this way for years. The populations in PvP are steadily declining. Maybe when primetime is two bars across the board, it will be hit a sweet spot and stabilize.

Morgul667 · September 2019

Performance is getting worse and worse as days go

zyk · September 2019

josh.lackey_ESO wrote: »

We should have seen performance gets at least modestly better due to hardware improvements. But it's not gotten any better at all. It might even have gotten worse. At one point I wondered if they didn't actually downgrade their hardware.

We can't see the forest from the trees. Players don't play the same way they used to and the gameplay has changed. It's very likely server performance has improved significantly, but the improvements have been completely offset by poor gameplay design (CP system, proc sets, unlimited sustain, etc) and playerbase as a whole understanding the game better. We saw this on consoles. Before players learned the game and reached max level, console AvA performance was great. But after a year or so, they had exactly the same issues.

Hardware is the cheapest part of this equation. It's inconceivable that ZOS has not upgraded hardware over the years. But, as they've admitted, their infrastructure has not scaled well.