Group only hides the real issues

badmojo · November 2020

I believe the spread of 'Group only' abilities and sets has drastically hurt Cyrodiil gameplay over the years.

I also believe that the motivation for changing so many things to 'group only' was an attempt to make performance better. While I appreciate that motivation, I honestly believe this 'group only' tactic is just hiding the real problems that exist with the skills and sets.

If a healing skill causes a giant algorithm to be calculated every time the skill is cast, and having a bunch of players stacked in the area causes even more strain on the server, then why not make the skill more basic in its functionality? Limiting the number of possible targets doesn't actually address the intense calculations that still happen, it just makes the issue less common at first. But, over the years as players have adapted to needing to be in a group, more and more groups are running around constantly causing these calculations, and the performance problem is back to where it was before the group only agenda started.

I honestly believe that no meaningful improvements can be made to the performance until they revert these group only nerfs and make everything work with allies.

If a skill or set bonus applying something to more than 12 or 24 players is an issue causing lag, then why is the skill or set still designed like that? For example, if using purge on 24 players is okay while in a group, why did they not simply limit purge to 24 allies? I imagine that doing that still causes lag, which means groups spamming purge on themselves are causing lag, but not everyone is grouped up, so it's less lag overall? That's simply not a sustainable way to combat performance issues. We can not rely on players doing the wrong thing (not being grouped, casting things only on themselves) in order to maintain smooth gameplay. Eventually you'll get too many players acting intelligently and the server flops on its face.

Am I wrong?

alterfenixeb17_ESO · November 2020

Regarding this purge example this may be (depending on how database is organized) indeed less impactful as returning list of player within a single group (one entity in database) and then ruling out people out of range from that list only is most likely much simpler than trying to determine who is in range but using list of all players in the zone - it is 23 checks against i.e. 200.

As for the rest it is mostly true. Mostly because taking i.e. heal group based may indeed help (again 23 range checks against 200) however of course there is still question by how much and if overall it is worth of investment (development effort vs actual performance gain).

Joy_Division · November 2020

The "group only" mechanic I think was more motivated because people in groups would rather have their buffs/skills go off on group-mates rather than random pugs.

ZoS may have tried to sell this with the whole "reduced calculations" spiel they have been harping on for years, but as you point out, that's still a ton of calculations and quite frankly I'm sick and tired of hearing ZOS talk about server calculations since they've been reducing these for years and performance still sucks.

oXI_Viper_IXo · November 2020

Joy_Division wrote: »

ZoS may have tried to sell this with the whole "reduced calculations" spiel they have been harping on for years, but as you point out, that's still a ton of calculations and quite frankly I'm sick and tired of hearing ZOS talk about server calculations since they've been reducing these for years and performance still sucks.

Yep, all these little adjustments that were supposed to reduce calculations and improve server performance and yet the game has managed to get worse and worse over the years. It's embarrassing.