Update on Cyrodiil Performance

wraith808

Sallington wrote: »

wraith808 wrote: »

So they give an update on what they're experiencing, what they're doing, and what we can do to help in the meantime until they solve the problem... and these are the responses?

*sigh*

They explicitly said they continue to work on the problem in his post. Or did I misread something?

You missed the part where it's the player's fault and not the fact that the zone doesn't work as advertised.

That's not what I read. I read that players asked what can they do to help in the meantime, and he answered that question.

If it starts lagging, start looking elsewhere- for now.

Vahrokh

I have 3 suggestions that worked for other massive PvP companies:

1) make rewards require capturing multiple well separated locations at once. This would spread people out a bit.

2) Alter buildings so that only an acceptable amount of players are visible at a time. Funnels and stuff.

3) Totally disable abilties / spell graphics for people farter away than NN meters. While it won't help the server, it'll help low end player computers.

After all the lag complaints usually are the sum of server performance plus client performance, end users can't really discern the latter very well.

yodased

The problem with accepting the "for now" argument is "for now" has been months and months of people dealing with the problems.

This information is just given to us 4 days before they go B2P which in all likely hood will increase the population exponentially.

So, now we have significantly more potential players to be in one area and we are supposed to somehow stay away from each other.

Lettigall

You advertise:

Featuring three-sided Player vs. Player (PvP) gameplay, The Elder Scrolls Online supports hundreds of players on screen at once in an open world fight for control of Cyrodiil.

But now you saying that large scale PvP is bad and players shouldn't do it!

Performance drags when there are numerous players in the same place at the same time...
...Actively, we are looking at changing the behavior of the players to remove incentives for large groups to stay in the same area...

Isn't numerous players in same place at the same time your promised large scale PvP??? Should we not support attack/defense of keep simple because for fear of lag??? Should we give away scroll because if we fight there will be lag???

ginoboehm

ZOS_PaulSage wrote: »

Just to clarify. There seemed to be a misunderstanding that I was saying we are "giving up" or "blaming this on players." Absolutely not. We are looking at the issue from many angles. I certainly didn't mean to imply we couldn't or wouldn't change code to improve performance, but rather that the answer wasn't more hardware. (It is often suggested this is the best way to fix problems.) I also wasn't implying you shouldn't play naturally, but unfortunately it is true that more players right now in a smaller area causes the performance problems. I say this not to discourage behavior or try push off the issue, but rather to give completely frank information about the root cause.

@ZOS_PaulSage
I very much respect that answer if you wouldn't give it after 6 month of hushing the topic and ignoring game breaking PvP issues reported on pts(nirnhorned wrong scaling on radiant and meteor fall damage in this release) perhaps you could provide some smaller instanced PvP to mitigate that problem and give players that like the twitched/skill based gameplay something to do we suffer a lot (I hope I speak for my arena guildies) because the game currently feels like a laggy first person shooter

Shrapnelz

I think the game need a structured PvP scene, back when I was playing GW2 both WvWvW and SPVP were really popular and appreciated by the community.

SPVP was a completely split up advancement, your character was auto-leveled to level 80 and giving enough skillpoint to build up your tree. Then came the gear you had access to ALL the gear from the game everything at the highest quality BUT only for SPVP matches. Most of the gear bought from merchant were ugly.. you had to unlock skin by gaining ranks in SPVP just like AvA unlocking skill in ESO. You had various small scaled map to play in each with different objectives.


I think that setting up structured pvp content in ESO would be a gigantic challenge in term of balance of maps and player but it would give an opportunity to MELEE PvP which is extremely lackluster in cyrodiil, let's face it ESO NEEDS SPVP.

With the popularity of MOBA you can't go wrong with this.

Btw there is no better occasion to say it, I love 1.6 good work ZoS

Dreyloch

1) 8-12-24 man PvP with leader boards. Maps with objectives, can last 15 minutes, can last no more than an hour with a timer. Ties are possible.Random, or player created teams going against a random opposing faction. This would draw a huge amount of players off of Cyrodiil. It would have to have a really good match-making system though.This idea IMO is what can bring in more players to the game as a whole, while reducing lag in Cyrodiil.

2) Keep wall decay.(cause, you know,union mason strikes? lol) Many have said it in other terms, but if you have held a keep for too long, then a random outside wall starts to decay. Faster and faster so it will eventually come down even with 100 players trying to repair it. After it comes fully down, it can be repaired as normal again.The other factions will have to have a notification on the map like the crossed swords in order to move to that objective. This takes more people to more random places on the map. "Oh! Look, Farragut has a wall decaying, let's head there!" "But hey, So does Roebeck!"

3) Well, I'd love to see attacking NPC armies from the dolmens head to random Keeps, but I can't see a way to do that without making more lag =/

Gidorick

As someone who has yet to play Cyrodiil the persistent issues have really discouraged me from even trying to go into the faction war.

Would this "zerg" of players be helped if player characters experienced collision With one another?

Ysne58

@ZOS_PaulSage would having a non pvp instance of cyrodiil even make a difference. I'm not the only one in the game who avoids PvP so I have done very little there.

If it might make a difference, you might want to try it.

Sacadon

This is exactly the type of communication that I know I've been starved for, almost to the point at which I was less concerned about resolution of the issue (almost). And it's not because I learned something new, feel entitled or need something to make me feel a certain way. It's simply the right thing to do. Even more so when there's such a significant failure to meet set expectations.

Thank you and please keep the feedback coming, even if it's nothing new.

ThatNeonZebraAgain

Dreyloch wrote: »

2) Keep wall decay.(cause, you know,union mason strikes? lol) Many have said it in other terms, but if you have held a keep for too long, then a random outside wall starts to decay. Faster and faster so it will eventually come down even with 100 players trying to repair it. After it comes fully down, it can be repaired as normal again.The other factions will have to have a notification on the map like the crossed swords in order to move to that objective. This takes more people to more random places on the map. "Oh! Look, Farragut has a wall decaying, let's head there!" "But hey, So does Roebeck!"

I like this idea a lot. However, rather than showing up automatically on the map like fights do, it would be best if this were either integrated into scouting quests, or would update based on a player seeing it. While an autonotification would probably be easiest to implement, this would encourage more scouting and help spread people out even more.

b92303008rwb17_ESO

They must be really desperate or being forthright and giving frank information were rarely their options.

Samadhi

ZOS_PaulSage wrote: »

Hello everyone,

Our Cyrodiil performance is something we are very aware of. Performance drags when there are numerous players in the same place at the same time. This is why performance in Cyrodiil is fine for much of the day, but gets worse during more popular times. We are currently investigating ways in which we can reduce the spike of performance loss. We added in some features for Update 6 which we hoped would help, but ultimately did not. This is not a situation where we can just add more hardware. Player population in a given area hurts the performance and the more people that are in one area, the more performance is going to be hurt.
...

Thank you for taking the time to start this thread and for your continued work on the issue.

Having been in similar shoes before, can appreciate that there is probably a lot of frustration over these issues on your end as there is for players.

Unfortunately (but understandably) your company has continually taken a very conservative approach to changes, which results in seeing the features you hoped would help not helping as desired.

Fortunately, the steps you have taken are already important steps for where you need to go next.

You need to add modifiers to Siege damage and the PvP Assault skill Magicka Detonation. These two sources of damage need to scale dramatically as the number of targets increase.
The Nightblade skill Sap Essence is a good template for what you need to do -- this skill provides a heal that increases in effect based on the amount of targets hit.
For each target hit by either Siege or Magicka Detonation, the damage needs to double.
If it hits 1 player for 5000 damage, it needs to hit 2 players for 10 000 damage each, 3 players for 15 000 damage each.
You need to be more heavy-handed in punishing players for stacking up; there will be complaints about one or two players or siege weapons being able to wipe whole raids at first, but this will be a necessary step to pass through as players relearn that they cannot be in close proximity.
Adding this slight tweak to just these two sources of damage will dramatically impact the spread and skill spam of players in Cyrodiil; presently it is highly beneficial to stack up in a small area. You have acknowledged the intense issues that this behaviour causes, now you need to take a strong stance to counter it. Make ESO a game where stacking up is not rewarded and is actually detrimental, and the behaviour will change.

Beyond that
It is important to get on to the PvP servers for a while and monitor exactly what is going on.
Not trying to point fingers as who is doing it is not as important as what, but if you go on Thornblade NA in primetime you may notice that players actually know when and where game-breaking lag is going to happen based on which groups of people are performing which tasks.
You need to follow said groups and observe their behaviour to decode what is causing the issue specifically. Not suggesting in any way to ban the players, but it is important to figure out what is going on.
It is possible to be in large scale battles on Chillrend with all 3 factions population locked with little-to-no lag issues; however, trying to participate in the exact same situations on Thornblade ends up with massive lag -- why is this, and why does it mysteriously follow select groups around the map?

Darklord_Tiberius

To add to this thread, I cannot help but point out that it is partly the players fault. This games PvP has turned into Blob on Blob. As soon as something is being attacked all players on that faction zerg upon it like it was a bottle of skooma.

Wabbajack cycle one and even Wabbajack cycle two (when everyone from AB came over), had far less lag and it really had to do with the fact battles were taking place all over the map. On average back then, you had 8-12 large 25 v 25 battles happening consistently around the map. Now in any given server you have maybe 3-5 huge battles of 50 v 50 or 50 v 50 v 50. For this I blame the players, so many mediocre and bad players prefer to zerg around rather than play organized or with a good guild. I honestly miss the times Wabbajack had 5-6 organized guilds fighting each other on every side. Now we get maybe 2-3 and the rest of the players zerg, pathetic.

PainfulFAFA

ZOS_PaulSage wrote: »

Hello everyone,

Actively, we are looking at changing the behavior of the players to remove incentives for large groups to stay in the same area. We want to do this by providing larger incentives for Alliances to split up and take on multiple-challenges in Cyrodiil. We’ll continue to work on this. We are also asked by players if there is anything they can do to help. In this situation, the best thing you can do is split off to different objectives when you notice performance going down. Cyrodiil is a big place with lots of different things to do. And thank you for asking.

I don't understand....if Alessia is the last keep for Emp and knowing that an entire RED Zerg train is approaching are we supposed to abandon it and go somewhere else instead? lol -_-

Sacadon

Suggestions (unordered except first one):

• **Adjust all marketing fluff material to be in closer approximation of the true Cyrodiil experience
• Use justice system and existing leader board tech to implement small-scale PvP (1v1, 4v4 up to a max size)
• Show more key information regarding active areas on the map
• Increase AP for "grouped" players of 20+ more that accomplish tasks separately/distanced (use same code for auto-grouping AP gains to detect when separate)
• Reduce AP for "grouped" players that conglomerate for a period of time > XX and with XX number of players or more
• Increase number of ownable/siegable resources
  
  @tinythinker: http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/comment/1627450/#Comment_1627450
• Make taking and holding enemy strongholds progressively harder so that an Alliance that is dominating has to spend more time on defense. This might aid in lessening the whole "one faction dominating a campaign" trend and force players to decide what is worth holding. Alliances would be spread more thinly the more they captured.
• Add content that may be unique to particular campaign or campaign cycle, such as a special rules/special event campaign (cycle). This might aid in getting people onto different campaigns.
• Add achievements that encourage players to spread out and try different things within a campaign. Some that I've suggested in the past might help a little with this but if the goal is to get people to disperse I am sure other achievements could be thought of to help with this.
• Introduce more abilities to discourage zerging/bunching.
• More instanced/partitioned content (like PoW camps). I am guessing there will be such separation with Imperial City.
• Make Cyrodiil bigger to have room for more content and to make controlling strategic locations more of a challenge.

Darlgon

PainfulFAFA wrote: »

ZOS_PaulSage wrote: »

Hello everyone,

Actively, we are looking at changing the behavior of the players to remove incentives for large groups to stay in the same area. We want to do this by providing larger incentives for Alliances to split up and take on multiple-challenges in Cyrodiil. We’ll continue to work on this. We are also asked by players if there is anything they can do to help. In this situation, the best thing you can do is split off to different objectives when you notice performance going down. Cyrodiil is a big place with lots of different things to do. And thank you for asking.

I don't understand....if Alessia is the last keep for Emp and knowing that an entire RED Zerg train is approaching are we supposed to abandon it and go somewhere else instead? lol -_-

One of the most disappointing battles I was in during an emp push was when we spent 30 min taking over Alessia from the bees, only to find the smurfs had retaken Ales. Yeah. sometimes it is better to go fight somewhere where the battle isnt. However, that requires sacrificing the AP you could get for the nebulous "faction points".

onlinegamer1

ZOS_PaulSage wrote: »

Hello everyone,

Our Cyrodiil performance is something we are very aware of. Performance drags when there are numerous players in the same place at the same time. This is why performance in Cyrodiil is fine for much of the day, but gets worse during more popular times. We are currently investigating ways in which we can reduce the spike of performance loss. We added in some features for Update 6 which we hoped would help, but ultimately did not. This is not a situation where we can just add more hardware. Player population in a given area hurts the performance and the more people that are in one area, the more performance is going to be hurt.

Actively, we are looking at changing the behavior of the players to remove incentives for large groups to stay in the same area. We want to do this by providing larger incentives for Alliances to split up and take on multiple-challenges in Cyrodiil. We’ll continue to work on this. We are also asked by players if there is anything they can do to help. In this situation, the best thing you can do is split off to different objectives when you notice performance going down. Cyrodiil is a big place with lots of different things to do. And thank you for asking.

No offense, but this is ridiculous.

What are we supposed to do when an enemy pushes for a scroll? Go run a dolmen?
What are we supposed to do when an enemy pushes for Emperor? Fish in the central lake?

Its not PvP, its AvAvA. The entire point is large scale battle. If we wanted small scale battles, we'd ask for Arena's and Battlegrounds. Which, FYI, would kill off participation in Cyrodiil 100%.

Lord_Bidr

I blame it all on the lighting patch, that's where it all began for me. Remove it from Cyrodiil, we PvPers don't need no fancy lights. What we need is a stable place to smash each other's heads with wood and metal.

You can keep the fancy lights for places outside of Cyrodiil.

See if that works.

technohic

So I heard you wanted your PvP to run smoothly. Here is what you do. If you see another player, maybe go somewhere else. Less lag that way. Thanks for helping us out.

HeroOfNone

And if you don't like the idea of Arenas & battlegrounds maybe it would be a good time to consider a hardcore campaign where folks get kicked back to spawn when they die and possible team damage. A bit extreme, but it would be a strong reason not to group up spamming impulse.

ThatNeonZebraAgain

heroofnoneb14_ESO wrote: »

And if you don't like the idea of Arenas & battlegrounds maybe it would be a good time to consider a hardcore campaign where folks get kicked back to spawn when they die and possible team damage. A bit extreme, but it would be a strong reason not to group up spamming impulse.

This sounds awesome. Enabling friendly fire and actual death penalties would make things very interesting.

Lord_Bidr

Darklord_Tiberius wrote: »

Guessing you never played swtor, so you obviously do not understand my reference.

You posted,

"I think that engineers spent more than enough time to try to figure out the way to fix the performance issues in Cyrodiil. It is now time to accept that it isn't going to get better and try to focus on different aspects of PvP that could bring alot of customers / subscribers back."

That all but screams abandon Cyrodiil and focus on Instance PvP. If that was not your intention, may I suggest word choice next time.

To further clarify, the connection with SWTOR is that it too had a zone which was supposed to be Cyrodiil-like in nature (not completely, but similar), where people from differing alliances could come and compete each other for zone control. It was called Ilum.

It failed big time. But instead of trying to fix it (maybe they couldn't fix it, I don't know), the devs instead decided to create more instanced-based pvp maps that were small-scaled (aka arenas/battlegrounds).

Recremen

Satiar wrote: »

Can't help but wonder if it is aoe caps. Too much calculation.

I don't think that's it. You have to figure that the server was already determining possible AOE recipients from the set of those "hit" by the abilities, so at that point it's probably just allowing a higher number of already-queued messages to go through.

NukeAllTheThings

Darklord_Tiberius wrote: »

To add to this thread, I cannot help but point out that it is partly the players fault. This games PvP has turned into Blob on Blob. As soon as something is being attacked all players on that faction zerg upon it like it was a bottle of skooma.

Wabbajack cycle one and even Wabbajack cycle two (when everyone from AB came over), had far less lag and it really had to do with the fact battles were taking place all over the map. On average back then, you had 8-12 large 25 v 25 battles happening consistently around the map. Now in any given server you have maybe 3-5 huge battles of 50 v 50 or 50 v 50 v 50. For this I blame the players, so many mediocre and bad players prefer to zerg around rather than play organized or with a good guild. I honestly miss the times Wabbajack had 5-6 organized guilds fighting each other on every side. Now we get maybe 2-3 and the rest of the players zerg, pathetic.

And why were battles happening all over the map? Because you had forward camps being placed so that you could go deep into enemy territory and attack. Do that now and you spawn back to the "blob" as you put it. To add to that, you will have gank groups in transit lines that get a few kills that forces the enemy in transit to respawn and..."blob" for protection.

These days it is rare to see many attacks that are more than 1 enemy keep away from that particular alliance's keep. Why? Transit time and a wipe sends you back across the map and back to the blob. Blood porting to FC's was a stupid design but that should not have been the complete elimination of FC's

technohic

ThatNeonZebraAgain wrote: »

heroofnoneb14_ESO wrote: »

And if you don't like the idea of Arenas & battlegrounds maybe it would be a good time to consider a hardcore campaign where folks get kicked back to spawn when they die and possible team damage. A bit extreme, but it would be a strong reason not to group up spamming impulse.

This sounds awesome. Enabling friendly fire and actual death penalties would make things very interesting.

Would be a gankers paradise as they are all spread out and making runs via horseback. Not that I would have a problem with that. Would very much love to build around single target fighting and that just doesn't work much now. Problem would be, when eventually we all are sneaking around waiting for a target, who doesn't come because they are doing the same.

Vahrokh

sc_prabhu1986rwb17_ESO wrote: »

To further clarify, the connection with SWTOR is that it too had a zone which was supposed to be Cyrodiil-like in nature (not completely, but similar), where people from differing alliances could come and compete each other for zone control. It was called Ilum.

It failed big time. But instead of trying to fix it (maybe they couldn't fix it, I don't know), the devs instead decided to create more instanced-based pvp maps that were small-scaled (aka arenas/battlegrounds).

In SWTOR Ilum case, they managed to have an additional issue over ESO: people found out ways to cheat and farm massive PvP points. Since SWTOR is entirely gear-grind-monkey-based: "grind PvP set NN this PvP season, start again to get set NN+1", EA Bioware would get a lot people short-cutting that grind, get bored and stop earning revenue with their cash shop.

Inactive Account

Well, for a start you need to change the print on you retail boxes and your web articles that are selling ESO; remove what it says about PvP battles in Cyrodiil. Mr. Sage you have now stated that this is FALSE ADVERTISING. I'm pretty sure it's against the law in most countries now.

You need to stop promoting a particular part of this game that no longer is available.

For those out there that wanted Battle grounds... if things keep going the way they are going, your requests will come to fruition. If Cyrodiil game play can only handle a small hand full of players at a time, I guess some form of battle ground matches are the only aulternative.
Too many people in one area, at one time, interacting with each other. Uhm-m, isn't that what Cyrodiil was supposed to be?

Rylana

ZOS_PaulSage wrote: »

Just to clarify. There seemed to be a misunderstanding that I was saying we are "giving up" or "blaming this on players." Absolutely not. We are looking at the issue from many angles. I certainly didn't mean to imply we couldn't or wouldn't change code to improve performance, but rather that the answer wasn't more hardware. (It is often suggested this is the best way to fix problems.) I also wasn't implying you shouldn't play naturally, but unfortunately it is true that more players right now in a smaller area causes the performance problems. I say this not to discourage behavior or try push off the issue, but rather to give completely frank information about the root cause.

And here is the frank rebuttal.

1. Return the flip cap on flags to six players only. Only six players present count towards the flag flip. no more will affect it in any way shape or form. Currently all factions literally stack 100 people on the flags to "force flip" or "force defend" a flag via sheer number of bodies. This is also enhanced by the AOE cap protection, and contributes heavily to performance in the whole zone when it occurs.

2. Increase magicka detonations damage in such a way that it scales based on the number of people surrounding the target. (10 meter radius). 2x for 10, 3x for 20, 5x for 40. And so on. You will see people get the hell out of the way. Remove the AOE cap for the inevitable morph of this ability, and deal damage to self for the "kamikaze" version of the ability.

3. Increase the incentive to defend multiple locations, make "useless" keeps matter on the map. Currently people just let things go because things are so easy to get back.

4. Address directly the population imbalance issues on Chillrend, Thornblade, and Haderus. Especially thornblade. There are literally double the number of EP players on your most populated server on a 24 hour basis, while there is virtually no red presence on either haderus or chillrend. Same is true for the other factions, just replace the word thorn with chill for blue or haderus for yellow. You need to even out your populations to prevent "everyone in the faction blobbing up and just running the map in a 100 man zerg"

5. Increase siege damage by a factor of five, make it unpurgeable/cleanseable for both offense AND defense. No one should be able to run under 10 oils dumping on their heads just because they have purge + a barrier. By the same token, no one should be able to stand in a hail of fire ballista fire and just shrug it off like it tickles. FORCE THEM to use siege to clear the upper floor/walls first. At the same time, increase wall health to 600k base, 800k max at rank 5. And FIX THE WALL REPAIR ABOVE 95 PERCENT BUG.

You do these five things, and the days of zergballing and 100 players in one place at the same time are over.

Grraauuggh

Ok, so maybe this is a dumb question, but why not just make cyrodiil larger, with more stuff to lose? The more spread-out the map is, with more objectives to take that are also harder to travel to, the less likely it is that everyone would simply stack up on choke points for AP, assuming you combined this with a change to mechanics that would allow people to gain similar AP/XP gains in Cyrodiil from smaller encounters. This would also eliminate lag from simply being "near" a large battle, since you'd be more likely to be further away from it.

This seems like evidence of a larger issue to me, which is that there have been little to no new enhancements to PvP content since launch, aside from the combat balancing issues. While I am certainly appreciative of everything Zenimax has done to balance the combat, it certainly is striking that we don't even have the Imperial City unlocked yet. Imagine if each alliance had twice the number of keeps to defend!

I recognize that adding content is not a simple, easy undertaking, but given how big of a problem the lag issue is, it seems like adding more potential encounters, more diversity to the types of encounters, and just a larger map in general would be worth the effort in order to eliminate the lag issues. Am I missing something here?

G