I'm sure that when they've finished their tests they'll draw their conclusions and announce the resulting plans for the future of PvP in Cyrodiil, but it seems premature to expect a statement before then.

Yes. Absolutely.

We were told numerous times that Vengeance was only a test to make Cyrodiil more performant. They told us not to worry and they weren’t going to take Cyrodiil away.

And now U48 is including “loadouts” and “perks,” all with a custom UI and new icons. No other mode has those. This is obviously no longer a test. It’s crystal clear that this is testing a new game mode. I do think that Grey Host will still exist once permanent Vengeance is released, but I’m fully expecting Icereach and likely Ravenwatch to go away.

But the thing I am livid about is the fact that U48 is dropping with zero balance changes. Subclassing came in like a wrecking ball and now they really are not even going to address balance until March at the earliest?!?! Instead, they’re trying to focus all of their energy on a test mode which is active for all of a week.

The plan has obviously changed. Tell us that officially, don’t play this coy “you’ll see!” game. I fully expect they’re planning U50 in June as a huge free update with “Upgraded Cyrodiil!!” (Vengeance permanently, replacing half of the Campaigns) and “Overland difficulty!!” (A self-nerf slider). I’m betting that they’ll try to sell this as “what the players wanted,” even though that’s not the way people wanted it, and then the lack of new features like a Class will drive even more people away.

I want to be wrong. I hope I am. I desperately want a new Class. But I’m a cynic. And this year has only made me more cynical.

ZOS doesn't seem like the sort of company to take vengeance on anyone.

Wheeler has said Vengeance is developed to be a more performant way of providing build variety. What more clarity is needed? As for it being a 'test', that only ever meant Vengeance is being developed iteratively. That was new and needed to be stressed, or people might mistake it for a finished product. There's no mystery here. Just some people having a hard time coming to terms with this new direction of development and clinging to the word 'test' to salvage their hopes it may all just go away. What stage of grief is that, exactly? Denial?

Voted hard no.
Why?
ZOS statements mean nothing after U46.

Should I copy/paste Carry Day's interview what she said about (fake) subclassing and pure classes?
https://www.elderscrollsonline.com/en-us/news/post/68091
Not only they did opposite of that, they even doubled down in U47 and only after the huge backlash of community and prominent streamers, they backpedaled most of it, but still not everything.

So statements are just empty talk, only deeds count.

And speaking about deeds...
Vengeance 3 definitely has improved performance than V2 test, both FPS and latency wise even with new additions.
So IMO this is definitively a big step forward.

StihlReign wrote: »

Here's the latest statement...

Note that the templatizing of characters is an experiment and does not necessarily mean that these changes will be made to the Alliance War in the future. By introducing templatized characters for this specific test, we can isolate the variables that impact performance, helping us plan future improvements.

Source 09/22/2025

..future improvements to vengeance or to live Cyrodiil? The answer should be obvious at this point. ZOS is all in with vengeance and doing nothing for live Cyrodiil PvP. At least that's how it stands at the time of this post.

No, I'd rather let the devs test and gather the info they need and tell us what they're planning when they're able to make a more accurate statement. Rushing something out now just risks drama because "you said we were getting X and now we just have Y!"

It's fairly obvious to me that making Cyro run really well probably requires a re-do from the ground up. I would have thought it was obvious that we can't fix performance with just a few lines of code! Surely we want a proper effort to be made rather than some superficial tweaks?

I think it's quite insulting to the devs to see all the work they're doing with these tests and assume we'll get something really basic and restrictive at the end. Each iteration of Vengeance has included more stuff, so I'm not sure why this drama is still going on when they're literally unlocking more things with each round. I'm sure we'll get some balancing changes and some players will absolutely cry about things they don't like. But I'm also sure the devs want to give us a full PvP experience that's just like we're used to. Just without the lag.

Muizer wrote: »

The idea is evidently to gradually 'detemplatize' vengeance step by step, while ensuring performance remains good every step of the way. But That definitely means Vengeance is the basis for future PVP development. Not just saying that because everything ZOS say and do seem to confirm this. This is just a common sense approach to development. Never in any development exercise should you code a million lines and only then check it's working. Yet that's kind of what ZOS have been doing in terms of checking the impact on performance. The only way to fix something like that is to start building things up again from simple beginnings, and this time do check the performance every step of the way. IMHO it's a remarkable thing for a game studio to do this. I think most would have shrugged and said 'it is what it is, we can't spent that much time and effort on a feature that we have already sold to our players". Say what you like about Wheeler (if he's behind it) but Vengeance is a victory of commitment to quality over business considerations.

Perhaps. While I don't disagree that this is a good line of thought, the Studio's PTS track record is poor, communication is poor and it's way of communicating is often purposely obtuse. Either the marketing team is being ignored or this can be considered a massive fail on their part - this is a calendar event with 26M players and we can't keep a zone filled 24/7 - make that make sense.

PvE also suffers economically. No one's picking flowers, killing dragons & using gold mats for PvE unless it's vet level content and trials. PvP demands constant resources, drives ingenuity and build diversity to the extreme and demands these resources. It's an underappreciated economic engine.

tomofhyrule wrote: »

Like, there's no world where they could have said something like "holy [snip], that last patch completely upended balance, so we should table this test we're doing temporarily and get all hands on deck for this problem before players get fed up and leave!"?

Perhaps, but you're experienced enough to understand the build cycle and times soooo:

Of course, with a change of this magnitude, there are balance concerns, but the team is prepared for what may come.

“In general, with more options comes more combinations, which can lead to different capabilities beyond what players had prior to the Subclassing system,” Wheeler explains. “That’s something we’ll monitor while also looking for outlier combinations of abilities and item sets, so the game’s content isn’t suddenly a lot easier to complete. We will be looking at feedback as always, and we plan to make adjustments as needed after we go live.”

Source 05/28/2025

That places us maybe 8-10 months ago? I'd guess they have a pretty good idea of where they intend to be once they're on the other side of test 4. I say that within the context of the massive threads related to PvP, ping and connection issues, QoL, and content release schedules. These are huge recurring topics.

tomofhyrule wrote: »

So... it's not insulting to the players for the devs to:

1. Release a patch which is specifically designed to destroy balance in the name of adding more options, but realistically condenses everything to one OP option and thousands of memetically underpowered ones.
2. Admit that the balance would be an issue, but take basically no steps to address it.
3. Spend the next two patch cycles exclusively working on a test mode that will be active for one single week while the lack of balance in the game causes the playerbase to bleed out quickly.
4. Allow the balance issue to linger until March at the absolute earliest.

Like, there's no world where they could have said something like "holy [snip], that last patch completely upended balance, so we should table this test we're doing temporarily and get all hands on deck for this problem before players get fed up and leave!"?

We're talking about two separate things though. Just because I support the effort being made with PvP, doesn't mean I agree with every change that gets made. I utterly despise subclassing, but I can still appreciate that someone gives a toss about making PvP better. I'm fully expecting to like and dislike some of what we get in Cyro, but that's the same with any update.

As for the fall in players/time in game, someone will notice the stats at some point. Whether they interpret them correctly and try to reverse any decline, who knows? It depends who they're wanting as the target audience.

How can anyone vote no lol

JustLovely wrote: »

exiars10 wrote: »

Voted hard no.
Why?
ZOS statements mean nothing after U46.

Should I copy/paste Carry Day's interview what she said about (fake) subclassing and pure classes?
https://www.elderscrollsonline.com/en-us/news/post/68091
Not only they did opposite of that, they even doubled down in U47 and only after the huge backlash of community and prominent streamers, they backpedaled most of it, but still not everything.

So statements are just empty talk, only deeds count.

And speaking about deeds...
Vengeance 3 definitely has improved performance than V2 test, both FPS and latency wise even with new additions.
So IMO this is definitively a big step forward.

I'd a agree but go with U35. You know, the update that changed the jabs animation. Look how responsive ZOS has been to the nearly 100% who want the change reverted.

But I do understand your point. You don't put a convicted perjurer on the stand in court for a reason.j

But you're wrong about performance being better this test. It's about the same performance as live Cyrodiil performance wise, even with the ultra dumbed down vengeance 3.

I didn't play game between summer 2018 and March 2025 except daily log in, but I know about U35 disaster.
I can only comment what I experienced after come back.

I compared V2 test and the current V3 test performance and for me V3 on PC EU is evidently better.
I have no clue about regular Cyrodiil performance as I don't play it, but I was regular Cyrodiil player in 2017-18 as you can check my post history, and I left game after Summerset as Cyrodill had horrible performance, and my favorite PvP class - Warden was unplayable and broken which I extensively documented on forum.
So yea, I was hard core Cyrodiil player in the past and left game because of the state of Cyrodiil after Summerset release.

I think we can glean some of the devs' intent by looking at what happened in BGs. In that case, the devs genuinely thought they had a new and better version of BGs but never properly tested it themselves, never ran a proper beta so see what would have happened. A more strategic approach would have been to run it as an event, see the effect and then decide whether or not to make it the new normal.

I believe that the devs have picked up this from the BGs but learned the wrong lesson, which is why they keep running Vegeance testing events. Unfortunately, they also do not understand PvP or the players well enough to really give them what they need. Just as Subclassing is a worse version of hybridisation homogenisation for class diversity, Vengeance is going to be a worse form of no-proc Cyrodiil.

The better option would have been to start making separate tooltips for all the skills so that they could balance the game for PvP and PvE independently of each other e.g allow heal stacking in PvE but not in PvP. Change or limit some of the sets which were fine in PvE but overpowered in PvP. Just focusing on this would have calmed a lot of disgruntled players and given hope for the future.

The current map of Cyrodiil is too large for the current (non-Vengeance) population so ZOS could have split it into two or three smaller maps (a la Guild Wards 2) belonging to the same campaign. This would significantly reduce the performance issue the game is having.

Sadly, the more I see the devs attempt new things, the more they expose their lack of understand of the game and the players. I dearly hope I'm wrong about Vengeance.

moderatelyfatman wrote: »

AngryPenguin wrote: »

If ZOS fails to provide an official statement on this matter it is fair for all of us to assume whatever we want. Another failure by ZOS to provide requested feedback on this issue also proves that ZOS' plan is, in fact. to replace live Cyrodiil with vengeance at some point.

Vengeance feels a lot like subclassing: someone has shuffled around the deck chairs and then claimed it is new content but we're still on the same Titanic post iceberg.

New features are great as long as they bring people to play the game and are popular. Subclassing is in my opinion one of those things.

More options is what the game is about and how it stands out among the competition.

Honestly it's personally hard for me to try to play other mmorpgs after playing ESO because of all of its options.

They will most likely respond after the test is finished.
I would be surprised if they respond in this thread before hand.

It would be nice if things weren’t so corporate and the devs could just casually communicate with their player base.
Like just make posts; topics or post gameplay videos of what they’re working on, or just anything really. *sigh*