ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

Hey gang!

As you saw in Matt’s 2017 roadmap, we are making Cyrodiil performance evaluation and fixing a priority this year. We want to make sure that Cyrodiil is a great PvP experience for everyone. Over the last year, we’ve made some good strides towards refining server performance across all campaigns, and we will continue down that path.

When looking into Cyrodiil issues, we definitely see (both in-game and through monitoring) situations where client and server performance degrade significantly when under high load. The small incremental changes we’ve made over the last year have helped, but they alone are not enough. So, we’re going to change our strategy a bit – which is the point of this post.

Simply put, Azura’s Star (the non-Champion Point campaign) runs much better, more efficiently, and is overall a much better PvP experience than the standard campaigns such as Trueflame or Haderus. Now that we’ve had a significant population density in Azura’s Star, we strongly suspect what has been theorized for a long time: Champion Rank passives and abilities are causing too much server load, especially in situations like Keep battles where there are tons of players in one place.

Because of this, we are going to run a series of PvP performance tests, and because it is impossible to simulate PvP load on our internal test servers (or on PTS), we will do this on all live servers on the dates of February 27 – March 6. This is not something we take lightly, and it is important that we evaluate performance when the server is under real-world load situations.

Our first test will be set up as follows:

• For a period of one week, all Champion Points will be disabled on all Campaigns on all platforms and megaservers
• During this time, AP gains in all Campaigns will be doubled, both to compensate for lack of CP and also to incentivize players to PvP so we can record as much data as possible
• Campaign durations and leaderboards will not be adjusted during this week

We encourage all players to continue their PvP activities in their respective Home, Guest, and Friends campaigns – we will be taking feedback and monitoring data on a daily basis during this test, and look forward to reading your constructive posts about server performance during the time of the test.

The results of this test will determine the next course of action for refining Cyrodiil server performance. Thank you for your perseverance and patience – we thoroughly appreciate your time, efforts, and feedback!

Thanks again, and see you in Cyrodiil!

-Wheeler

neferpitou73 wrote: »

Year of performance? I think we're well into the "Half Decade of Performance Improvements"