YandereGirlfriend wrote: »

EdmondDontes wrote: »

neferpitou73 wrote: »

Vizirith wrote: »

neferpitou73 wrote: »

NotTaylorSwift wrote: »

YandereGirlfriend wrote: »

NotTaylorSwift wrote: »

YandereGirlfriend wrote: »

rbfrgsp wrote: »

Faction stacking doesn't impact performance in the way ballgrouping does. Go read some more threads about the various platforms, populations, servers, and game modes. The one constant everyone reports is "gets worse when ball groups appear".

Oh I'm very aware that certain groups intentionally spam abilities (usually AoE CC abilities) that they know will lag the server but that does not describe the entire universe of ball groups. Going off of combat logs and the number of casts/second by members of these groups, it also appears as though some of them are using... not exactly legal means to achieve this as well. That's honestly something that ZOS should investigate and ban said players/groups if they are indeed guilty.

But... grouping 100 random zerglings at Chalman or Alessia will achieve the same results. But there's an odd trend on the forum to romanticize the pugs and the faction-stack playstyle. It deserves no such sentimentality.

Just no to this also? Like.. make it make sense. Why would people want to intentionally cause lag? They are also affected by it. Ballgroups are also affected by lag. The group I play with wipes 9/10 now because of bad game performance. No one is going into cyro with the intention to spam aoes to cause lag. It’s not a conspiracy…

And also what are u talking about casts per second being too high and not legal. No one is cheating. Again, it’s not a conspiracy. I bet you have not even seen the combat logs of a real ballgroup to even get that impression…

But I agree with the last point.

Relax friend, I'm not accusing you of anything. No need to try to flex on me to make your point. I am alluding to one specific group but I'm also not trying to name names on the forum.

Also, about casts per second, yes, I'm sure that we are all completely shocked and scandalized that there are wares available online that can help you cheat in videogames. And here we all thought that ESO was a pure and exploit-free game....

I agree with you that lag is usually the unseen MVP of a group Death Recap. But it's also true that a ball group is insulated from lag to a degree that a random zone pug is decidedly not due to having many layered HoTs, Barriers, full raid buffs, etc. active during combat. That can and will keep a group alive through several GCDs of severe slowdown whereas the zone pug is a complete sitting duck.

I’m not saying you’re accusing anyone. I’m saying it doesn’t make sense what you said. No one is ‘cheating’ and no one is spamming skills with the intention to worsen lag. That is just not happening, it’s crazy to me that people think this is the case.

And yes of course we have more buffs/hots than pugs and there is nothing wrong with the sentiment of this as it only makes sense. But we feel the lag same as everyone else either way. If it takes 5 seconds for a solo player to get a skill out then it also takes 5 seconds for us.

There is software that allows palyers to auto-block, break-free etc. And around people I know who run such stuff the game behaves very funny. In agreement with everything else.

rbfrgsp wrote: »

Karm1cOne wrote: »

rbfrgsp wrote: »

So, to clarify, I posted the two remaining solutions to poor performance (add server cap or start banning ballgroups that exploit gameplay limitations), and you two are so defensive about ballgroups that you're saying I am wrong? Or right? Because your posts don't make a clear argument either way.

Your suggestion is to ban 12 players playing together, in a game mode designed for that, in a group size allowed? Wow.

I don't really have the inclination to argue with borderline thinkers.

There is nothing in my post that lends itself to your interpretation of "he's asking for all groups to be banned".

Ball groups have a very specific play style. That play style has a material impact on service delivery of Zos' commercial product.

Therefore, ZOS has to decide if that playstyle is a legitimate part of the game (buy server cap) or not (police and ban).

Please don't respond to this post if you're just going to troll.

You said:

" begin running zone administrators who can issue official warnings against players and ban those with multiple strikes against their account."

and in this very post you said:

"police and ban"

Which clearly sounds like you want some administrative action against groups. Any distinction between ball groups and "regular" groups is tenuous at best and isn't something an administrator should be touching with a 10-foot pole. How are they supposed to tell the difference between a ball group and a "regular" group. What distinguishes a less skilled ball group from a "regular" group? Is it the skills, the sets? I see nothing wrong with a group running builds that support each other in PvP.

Marcus_Aurelius wrote: »

NotTaylorSwift wrote: »

And yes of course we have more buffs/hots than pugs and there is nothing wrong with the sentiment of this as it only makes sense. But we feel the lag same as everyone else either way. If it takes 5 seconds for a solo player to get a skill out then it also takes 5 seconds for us.

One thing is spamming AoE like ball group do (look at death recap and you will see: Sap Essence, Wirlig Blade, Sub Assault, ...) where you are not targetting a specific player but just saturating the space with AoE damage, another is to try to use a single target skill.

Who do you think is affected more by lag? And what do you think affect more lag, a single target skill or a constant spamming of AoEs?

ZOS tested AOE skills last fall. Didn't have an effect (granted I don't know how many people were playing during those tests)

They definitely did have an effect, it just wasn't as much as they wanted. It was way too drastic to be realistically implemented and so they were hoping for just as drastic a difference in performance, they didn't get it. Fundamentally the use of aoe effects has to have more of an effect on server performance than single target abilities. There really is no way around that.

Most of the arguments against ball groups for their server performance is not that without them everything will be perfect without issue. Rather that minimizing their impact would arguably have the greatest effect for the littlest overall gameplay impact.

For example if they reduce server pop to 20, would performance get better? Of course but it would have a major impact on the average player's experience. So while it would have a great positive, it has a bigger negative. Same with the global aoe cooldown. They tried to make less impactful changes like reducing group size to 6 with no outside healing, and again while it did have a decent impact it did not have the "significant impact on performance" they wanted. It's all perspective. If lag can sit at 300 in a fight, but you do something with very little player experience impact and reduce the lag from 300 to 250, is it good? Yes it is, but they want something small to have a much better performance impact and it just isn't there.

So when people rail against ball groups it's usually hoping for a decent reduction in lag not a perfect fix. A ball group does tend to have a large performance impact for what amounts to 12 people. If a change can be made that inconveniences 12 people while making it better for the other 80? Or should it be what can be made that inconveniences the other 80 while making it better for the other 12?

I dismiss the idea that ball groups cause more lag than zergs. But we're likely not going to agree on that so I'll drop it.

My general point though is that this is a ZOS problem, not a player problem. ZOS could fix this problem today by allocating more servers to Cyrodiil, which they do every MYM, which generally results in higher (or at least similar) performance despite the fact that there are generally more people in Cyrodiil.

I cringe when I see people proposing heavy-handed solutions to what are really game mechanics issues. It's far easier, and more fun for players to adapt mechanics to incentivize the kind of gameplay you want and de-incentivize the kind of gameplay you don't want. Instead of implementing some ban-happy system that seeks to punish players for using viable tactics.



For instance, placing a lot of area of effect abilities in a small area? That's just the most optimal way to eliminate enemies. If you don't want people spamming abilities like that you need to find provide them with a more efficient way to eliminate groups of enemies. Because if there's a more optimal way to do so, the ball groups are going to adopt that.

I'd argue that there current approach to dealing with ball groups (providing sets that deal massive AOE damage) actually works against what they want to achieve. Since the ball groups just take those sets and stack that massive AOE damage set on every person in their group (which is what people warned them would happen with DC and indeed is exactly what happened) a far better way to deal with this issue would paradoxically be to make AOE damage less effective against groups, because then the ball group would be forced to use single-target abilities to take down enemies which (again if we concede that AOE abilities are the problem) would put less strain on the server. This would also give pugs a bit of a better shot, since the game's no longer about stacking AOE, but stacking single target.

In fact, my group has actually adopted this single target strategy because we're dealing more with zergs than ball groups lately, and single target damage is a better way to deal with enemies that are not stacked.

TLDR; If they want to change people's behavior they should provide incentives for people to play a different way. This way to problem fixes itself instead of relying on some new administrative system they'd have to work out.

Great post!


Limiting cross healing in some way would help too I think.

I was a big fan of the group-only healing changes but then all of the faction-stackers swooped in to bully ZOS into rescinding it.

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