In my experience; ball groups tend to want to get in a tri keep which effectively creates a zerg response. Not sure how that gets even mistaken for breaking up zerg play. At most, it just keeps the zergs from pushing but they still exist, and could even be formed if they weren't there before.

Same thing happens with the hammer

OtarTheMad wrote: »

xFocused wrote: »

I'm sorry but how are ball groups the issue when a single alliance can run 80 players deep to take a outpost? Lol. Just tonight it felt like AD had 6 bars (their queue was 144+ even...lol) no matter where EP went. Flag sej? 80 AD players run out, flag a resource? Here comes a server. I get everyone wants to blame ball groups but there's gotta be a counter to the zergs that run the map

Ball groups don't help but neither do faction stacks. It's not the ball group technically it's any group that stays tight together and spams spells in a small area, basically on top of one another, that makes the servers crap themselves. So stuff like that on top of non-player-caused issues make it hard. Heck, a few years ago that was a way to lag the servers so bad they crashed and caused a rollback.

There was 1 particular (PC EU) EP ball group that, up until the server upgrades were done, was extremely notorious for abusing and exploiting this issue, taking it to the absolute extreme (much worse than any faction stack ever did or has done since)...
None of the lag that I have experienced in my time playing ESO, including long ago when pop caps were in the hundreds and crashes were about once every 2-3 mins, even when just riding, ever got as bad as what this particular ball group was capable of inflicting on the servers (and the players unfortunate enough to be logged in when they were on) every time they logged in...

Any time that particular group logged on the servers immediately became horrendous to play on with 10+s skill delay ping often spiking well over 1k and very stuttered movement (this was only when they were logged in, standing in their base, deciding where to go, not yet fighting anyone).
As soon as that group started actively blobbing their way around the map it was non-stop crashes and roll backs for everyone on the same cyrodiil map they were roaming across (even at the other side of the map was unplayable)...

So riddle me this, if ball groups cause such problems, how come they aren't crashing and lagging out themselves?

I didn't play for a while in cyrodiil and I had fun tonight 😊 . There are a lot of players, it was good 👍 .
I am on pc EU, blackreach. And we did kill a 12 players ball group one time (we were 4 player small-scale). Then they crushed us 😂

Aerenthir wrote: »

Four_Fingers wrote: »

So riddle me this, if ball groups cause such problems, how come they aren't crashing and lagging out themselves?

It's very simple, they do, but it's easier mode for them because they just spam AoE skills that rarely need any proper targeting. Those still work, kind of, even if you have to spam the button 2-3 times. When 5-6 DDs just spam an AoE skill stack to damage it goes off and eventually kills someone.

If you play solo it's incredibly difficult to actually fight someone due to this lag because if your burst or heal doesn't go off while the other person does you're dead.

In ball groups case with the multiple healing stack you always have several going off even if it's laggy.

This is also true. It is just that organized groups can cover the losses better. If you are solo and you cannot fire skill or barswap, you are just dead. While in organized groups, you might just be saved.

Four_Fingers wrote: »

So riddle me this, if ball groups cause such problems, how come they aren't crashing and lagging out themselves?

My personal guess is that they fill up the input queue on the server so that when actions are processed and sent back out to the players, a large proportion of those actions belong to the ball group.

Just a guess on my part, based on the way my game starts acting when a ball group is around.

Rhaegar75 wrote: »

Cast_El wrote: »

Keep up the test, it brings people to get double AP 👍

indeed: far from perfect but I had so much fun in some truly large scale battles!!

Definitely. It was pretty fun.

From the chances I got to actually play during this test, it was actually pretty good, the fights were fun and felt closer to the old days of the large scale battles (well at least until everyone from DC/AD logged off and it was pop locked EP against 1 bar of the other 2 factions).

I missed most of the full peak experience (all factions pop locked) when I was logged on (I did see full faction locks, but it was the tail end of it) so I didn't experience the crashes that others seemed to experience (outside of 1 crash when 2 ball groups were fighting (farming) opposing zergs).

Hopefully we can see or hear what these tests were aiming for and if they achieved it or not (would be nice to see the increased pop caps more permanently).