Update on Cyrodiil Performance

Vahrokh

I hope @ZOS_PaulSage won't get "scared" by some harsh responses (I am guilty like everybody else, here).

We massively appreciate the rare times a relevant ZoS person speaks and tells the truth, even if it's bitter for us.

Actually, by having spoken, you probably are going to retain some players that were already with their feet through the exit door.

However I hope you understand we got advertised "the new DAoC". Sadly for ZOS marketeers, we DID play the real DAoC / Warhammer Online so we know what "being like DAoC" really means.

I can also understand that - like for other games like Horizons - there has to be had some massive "personnel related" issue at the root of ESO issues. In that game it was massive infigthing between stakeholders and various "mid levels" in that company.
In ZOS I can't exactly imagine what happened, but it's clear that ESO would have had to:

- not have VR zones, something ugly happened that stalled development a lot so you had to put in this "feature".
- gradually implement more and more regions / game mechanics / end game content. Something ugly happened that stalled that too.
- functional PvP. The fact you had to deeply rework the whole system (leading to the current PVP zones etc.) means it was not tested in a realistic manner, not by competent people.

These 3 factors alone (plus many more everyone knows, useless to write them again and again) decreted ESO's partial failure.

I hope one day we'll get to know the whole story. You knew ESO was not going the right direction so it's not an incident. Spending months to implement the various B2P mechanics means you knew the game would tank.

Just another "could've been awesome" AAA MMO ruined by who knows what external human / money factors.

NadiusMaximus

Another thing,

He says spread out. .. Yet in the pics of the upcoming Imperial city, all the fighting looks like it is in close quarters, sewer pipes, and rooms the size of keeps. How's that gonna work?

tomiffseb17_ESO

NadiusMaximus wrote: »

Another thing,

He says spread out. .. Yet in the pics of the upcoming Imperial city, all the fighting looks like it is in close quarters, sewer pipes, and rooms the size of keeps. How's that gonna work?

Also have you seen the new trailer? All i see there is zergs fighting zergs.

Tyvarra

Spread out...thats never going to work. If our scroll is in enemy hands the only way to get it back is to move there with a whole bunch of people.

The only other way would be to lock pick the keep doors and steal the scroll...lol. Please DON'T consider this! xD

Listen to the players and look at what you did since 1.2. I can remember that the performance got really bad after the "lighting" update.

kenpachi480

@ZOS_PaulSage. I love the game, 80 days in and plan to play 1000 more,. but you say you added stuff to 1.6 to improve PVP

and I see you mention trying to look for ideas. that spread out people some more

i am running with a guild raid before 1.6 with 20 people we could take on 60-80 players at any time, be it field battle, be it siege defence (siege offensive in general we had more resistance) since patch 1.6 sir Paul, made it for us impossible to even take on double our numbers, therefore my guild has been sighted in Thornblade 3 times this week already, while we didnt go there as guild in the past 5 months

the new changes, are in the Zerg mentality favour is what i am trying to say

also certain skills have been abandoned at 1.6 release,. and hole new MAX DPS builds are out there,.

a Templar is a loser when he doesn't use his radiant destruction (SPECIAL BEAM CANON)
a bowmen is a loser if he doesn't use his lethal arrow (which is still bugged)

certain things you want out of PVP has already predetermined course to take if you wanna compete.

(sorry for the messed up English,. truth be told, you could do many things wrong i still love ESO thank you for what you realized for us)

TheBull

Arenas will help ease the server lag in Cyrodiil.

Suntzu1414

Few suggestions:

1 Fix Horse Riding
2. initial load screens (after you arrive to Cyro --your frist time)
3. when system crashes. during keep battle. if your side wins...you still receive AP
4. when system crashes..during battle... and you return. you are give 5 sec (similar to resurrect =pve), where you are ghost form. So you can find safe location (if needed)


Kill Well
ST

Darlgon

ThinkerOfThings wrote: »

Perhaps a massive armored troll or a giant can come by large groups and swat them across the map. Just a thought...

Whoot.. the twin trolls of Isengurd on BRk..

OH, wait.. cross genre.

Skjoldur

sc_prabhu1986rwb17_ESO wrote: »

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.

I have read this many times now. What does a lighting patch, that, if I understand it correctly, is a client side change, have to do with server side problems?

AbraXuSeXile

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.

You got rid of camps which gave players an incentive to go do different objectives, infact blood porting was GOOD for this game. No one wants to ride for 15 mins then get steamrolled off a zerg.

AbraXuSeXile

Skjoldur wrote: »

sc_prabhu1986rwb17_ESO wrote: »

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.

I have read this many times now. What does a lighting patch, that, if I understand it correctly, is a client side change, have to do with server side problems?

Whatever they did that patch (which they didnt fix for at least 2 weeks of hell) messed up this game, There was absolutely no issues before then and the game ran like a dream.

Sausage

How about if they put somekind of delay on how many or often players can use transport. It should give raids better chances to capture keeps alone too.

EnOeZ

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.

Hi paul, thanks for taking this seriously. I am also considering performance the n°1 issue for this game. Made me quit the game for months as an hardcore competitive PVPer.


I see two kinds of solutions :

1/ Technical solutions

1. Zerg mechanic : resurrection by players should be on a 5 min cooldown on the dead player (not everyone rezzable) to help lessen the numbers at a particular point.
2. Ability spam : I think this plays a big role in lag. One solution could be to change the ways buffs run out. My proposal if a buff has a 30s duration for exemple, make the cooldown start at first damage done or received. This would prevent players to endlessly spam abilities.
3. Block Mechanic : this is a kind of ability spam to me and I still do not like the way it works. Either block or cast and move survivability away from block mechanism (and give more raw survivability to Heavy and/or Sword and Board and more avoidance to medium ; light has already the shield spam mechanic for n°1 survivability still). This would lessen endless (and mindless) ability spam
4. Remove AOE caps : this is a burden on server side with exponential computations. Put in AOE heal debuffs allow disease and poison weapon enchants to work on every target AOE wise and to debuff heal and health regen (change to poison mechanic).
5. Bubbles spam and stacking : allow only one ability bubble + one ultimate bubble cast by self, on self at a time + one ability bubble + one ultimate bubble cast by other on self. LIFO (Last In, First Out) management. Coherent with the new major/minor buff mechanism.
6. (Self)Buffs recasts : Forbid recasts before wear-offs, this has the added benefit to offer counter-windows to endless spam of shields for exemple and other survival abilities.
7. Inferno and Mage light endless recasts : allow them to stay even when switching weapons, even if it requires you to adjust the numbers. A small improvement but will help alleviate the "Denial of Service" syndrome the server suffers.
8. Sound and Lightning : without the data, difficult to confirm this but I have also the feeling that quality improvements made to the game had lessen its performance, especially if there is a server-side computation for this.

2/ Design solutions

1. Playing "solo" in Cyrodil : Remove all AP bonus to groups in Cyrodil. We are all on the same alliance, playing for the same objective. I see no point at all to give the PVE bonus for grouping to PVPers. It's counter productive and counter intuitive. Even when I play solo, I bring a lot, if not more to the faction by intercepting, giving infos, making decoy actions, taking resources, cutting castle to castles links, etc... There is no "solo play" in Cyrodil, every individual action is of considerable help to the whole alliance.
2. AOEs design : I feel like AOE should be much more significant deal more damage, but be much more expensive (by cutting down resource regeneration in half proportionally to it's radius : 10s for 10m radius for exemple). This to counter AOE abilities spam that are among the most resource-heavy combat mechanisms in Cyrodil
3. Weapon enchants : allow them to work on all targets in AOEs especially AOE debuff heal with disease. Still in the idea to make AOEs more powerfull and more expensive (...) and targets less durable (AOE heal debuff)
4. Siege : needs to be more deadly but let armor mitigate it again. Heavy does not feel like heavy in other games still. Most of us can just stand still and out heal/out bubble the damage.
5. Anti Zerg Abilities : 2H Brawler, DK reflective Scales and DK Inhale, Corrosive armor (should ignore the damage from dots to work against zergs), Vampire Batswarm (was good to me), Templar Sunshield, etc.. are all good anti zerg abilities. Un-nerf/fix them (yes I am serious) : 2H brawler should be 360° and provide root immunity, DK reflective scale should be countered by melee (but the current PVP design is anti-melee, coming to this issue), DK Inhale should not be restricted to 3 targets (heal part), Batswarm was good, the counters were underwhelming (warrior guild abilities), etc...
6. Anti Zerg Mechanisms : AP Points for kills and capture points should be split (logarithmically) not shared, only Ticks should be shared for number of castles/resources owned. Premium AP on 1vX kills
7. "Solo" and small group objectives : sabotage (bridges, gates), setting up tunnels, allow silent castle infiltration and be able to open main gate door from inside.
8. Healer NPCs : they should also heal players (n°1 IA priority) so that defending a resource as solo/small group vs a Zerg becomes more realistic, rewarding, challenging. Additional incentive to split and protect.
9. "Solo" and Alliance-wide information and intelligence : the urge to group also comes from the lack of info when playing solo : where the groups are going ? Where are the battles, what is their scale ? What are the objectives ? Where are the ganks (to join them and/or avoid them). This is currently done by chats and third parties programs like teamspeak. However "ping" systems would work much better like in most MOBAS (join me, help me, avoid, attack/capture...). Position of group leaders when group > 4 (or customizable on client side) should be visible to all the alliance. Same for way points.
10. AOE friendly fire : to help lessen AOE spam again while still making them more significant, more powerful and more expensive (no spam of these, they eat way too much computing resources anyway). However they could/should do 1/2 less to friends. Healing friendly fire damage does not give ultimate.
11. Self buff ultimates should give CC immunity for their duration the way Templar "Rite of Passage" does, this goes for anti-zerg mechanisms and alleviate computations server-side. This includes Werewolf.
12. Emperors : they are a natural counter to zergs. However I would make some changes to the way emperorship works :
    - Crowning of the highest logged player at the time of the six castels capture.
    - At any time the next 3 highest logged players have "champion bonus" and get 1/3rd (33%) of all emperor bonuses.
    - At any given time next 6 highest logged players have "contender bonus" and get 1/6th (16%) of all emperor bonuses.
    Consequence : at any time the 3 champions of a faction have reasonable chances to defeat the emperor then, same for the six contenders. Each faction now has 10 "promoted" players at any given + 1 potential emperor. These promoted players always appear on your faction map when in Cyrodil.
13. Last but not least, Melee play vs Range Play : Range is a much more resource-heavy playstyle. Server has to compute ballistic and line of sight. Action and results are delayed and occupy memory much longer than instantaneous melee playstyle. But since launch melee (and heavy armor) have the downside of it all. They do not do more damage but provide less security and better survivability. They do not even cost less. Heavy armor is the starving armor and provide lesser survivability than the other two since passive mitigation it offers is much inferior to all active mitigation mechanisms the game has to offer (bubbles, rool-dodge, block...). Melee playstyle is not even cheaper in term of resources and if you want to play in the frontline you will quickly be resource-less and dead especially if you are stamina-based. As a result 90% of damaging abilities in Cyrodil are done from range and range play just dominates PVP. Zerg-power adds insult to injury since Melee is currently even less viable against zergs with no anti zerg abilities allowing melee to cast and play in the middle of the hell (root immunity, cc immunity, etc.). If ZOS put serious thought in melee play... like reading my previous post in this issue*, you will shift many players from range to melee style and drastically diminish the burden on server computations while bringing balance to a PVP playstyle you seem to ignore since launch (or have no competitive PVP knowledge of) : the melee warrior/berserker/juggernaut despite naming (deceitfully) some passives that way.

I really hope this game succeeds, but as others I hold my (large) PVP community away from this game for now. I know them they need performance first, balance second. In current stat they would just come in and leave after one night of lag fest. They would also not like that individual amazingness is not rewarded : no performance ranking apart from PVP grinding. At least give a per tick ranking, a killing blow ranking, a damage ranking and a heal and siege ranking per tick or hour. Announce server-wide all 1v3 and more wins and longest Killing streaks. Bring some incentives out of Zerging : we have been heroes in PVE, we should still be able to be heroes in PVP ! Allow small group/individual heroic actions to be performed (infiltration, sabotage, intelligence, ganking (+1 to speed boost to roads), solo intrusion in castles, etc...), rewarded and recognized in the leaderboards !


*Previous post in this issue : http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/148711/1-6-pts-heavy-armor-feedback/p1

Fizzlewizzle

Why not make the PvP area smaller, and provide other content in the areas which aren't used for PvP?

(Beware, Professionally drawn map in the next spoiler)

The red area could be the main PvP zone.
There won't be things like Dolmens, Quests or dungeons here. Just a pure PVP area.

Two Keeps for each alliance would provide an entrance to a tunnel (two tunnels per alliance), which will end at the scroll holding place (hidden underground).
The 2 scrolls will be held at these hiding places, two scrolls at the keeps that give access to it, and 2 scrolls at the small can be kept close to the wall, which would force an enemy group to get close to it to steal the scroll.

The Black circle would be the end of the PvP area. It will be a huge wall with at the "alliance borders" (the Blue, Red and Yellow lines) enough NPC's on the walls to kill any hostile groups that tries to "conquer" the walls.
The players that belong to said alliance could just pass through a gate (or multiple gates) on these walls.
There will be a town at the other side of the walls which level 10 players could teleport too when they start a campaign.

The Gray areas will be Neutral areas (you will see who belongs to which alliance, but you can't fight eachother) with an endgame (VR14) Dolmen at the keeps that are located in those areas.

These Dolmens will be extremely hard, spawning only the toughest enemies (the ones you normally fight just before destroying a normal dolmen) as normal mobs, and Uber Titan-like enemies for bosses.
All 3 alliances will be able to enter these areas, the two alliances next to the gray area by a "side door"and the third alliance through a door thats connected to the PvP area.

The Alliance areas (The red, Blue and Yellow zones) could be VR14 areas with quests, dolmens and dungeons for the players to do.


It nothing more then an idea, it would counter the horse simulator we have now.

Sausage

Currently zergs can move too easily, limit it and bring back the camps and lets see how it goes.

OtarTheMad

Thanks for the update Paul.

It wouldn't hurt if you gave us more objectives like maybe the ability to capture towns, abandoned milegates, maybe even a bridge since half of the pvp server is there anyway. (half joking, half serious about the bridge idea)

You place "trials-like" bosses in a manor or something like it in towns and cities and have it be pretty difficult to take. If your group beats the boss, and it will require a good sized group to beat him/her, then you won the town/city. You could add towns like Bravil (already in game anyway) and some others for fun. Taking these towns gives keeps more guards and makes them a little more powerful (hit harder) since you have more resources like food, blacksmiths etc.

I would contemplate adding more guards to keeps and resources, if you add mages as one it would be a good idea that they are Cyromancers or Storm Mages just to change it up. Also adding a General to each keep who is difficult to beat and only shows up when you are on the second flag will help out probably. Give DK-like NPCs more DK-like skills like the ability to drop a Standard, Healing mages can drop Rememberance or Nova and mages can continue to drop Negate.

Also placing 4x4 arenas around PvP wouldn't be a bad idea either. Maybe just three, one per alliance. To limit things so people don't stop PvPing set some limitations on when the arena is open or some objectives a group needs to accomplish to open it.

Also maybe a random encounter on the road or two with traveling enemy soldiers.

Imperial City will help a lot as well whenever that is finally put into the game but adding some more objectives in PvP besides taking keeps and resources will probably help out lag and spread people out a bit. I would love it if you placed Kill Enemy bounty board also in keeps so when we happen to have a long defense players can still turn in the quests and pick up another.

kelly.medleyb14_ESO

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.

Thanks for addressing we will await patiently whilst you work on it

AbraXuSeXile

kelly.medleyb14_ESO wrote: »

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.

Thanks for addressing we will await patiently whilst you work on it

No, We've been patient enough it's time to act.

tomiffseb17_ESO

AbraXuSeXile wrote: »

Whatever they did that patch (which they didnt fix for at least 2 weeks of hell) messed up this game, There was absolutely no issues before then and the game ran like a dream.

This is not true. Maybe the lag wasnt that bad but Many various performance issues were still there from the beginning it just didnt affected the majority. Thats why the lucky ones only remember the lightning patch and the fact everyone dropped to 2-3 fps there. Tons of players had problems and low fps with high end rigs way before that patch and thats still a problem
So reverting things would help but would not solve the core issue for everyone. Even if they fix the terrible lag and latency ill be curious how many topics will the new players make about why they have low fps in cyrodiil. Maybe at the moment arent tons of them but you know, we eithet gave up, or just get used to it. Either way is sad..

EskimoBrother

ZOS_PaulSage wrote: »

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.

No. In fact, the features you added in 1.6 seem to have made the lag much worse(much like every previous patch). It seems like it takes a lot less players for the server to start lagging now. Those "LARGE SCALE BATTLES" your game can supposedly handle are a thing of the past. We've been very patient as players paying for an unfinished product, it's been a year now. Time for you to start showing some results.

[Moderator Note: Edited per our rules on Flaming]

pmn100b16_ESO

Seems to me instead of asking the players to stop grouping up to solve the problems, you need to solve the problems so people can group up. Cyrodiil objectives (AP gain, keep/scroll capture) encourages big groups and large scale battles. That is what the game was designed around.

PeggymoeXD

This is why we have yet to hear anything about the Imperial City. If a campaign can't handle 50 people in and around a keep, imagine day 1 of the IC and there are hundreds in a tiny underground sewer.

Elsonso

Mujuro wrote: »

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.)

Throwing more hardware at the issue tends to work only if the underlying code is designed to support such scaling. I'm assuming that ESO did not anticipate such performance/load scaling.

When he says that throwing hardware at it is not the answer, he means that the limitations they are currently facing are bound by a transactions per second issue and adding more hardware is not going to increase the TPS. I do not think it is as much of an anticipation problem as a technology limitation.

Skjoldur wrote: »

sc_prabhu1986rwb17_ESO wrote: »

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.

I have read this many times now. What does a lighting patch, that, if I understand it correctly, is a client side change, have to do with server side problems?

The lighting change gets a bum rap because it happened to be in the same update that they made some other change in the way the game worked at a fundamental level. They have already said, in one of the ESO Live episodes, if I remember, that the lighting change was not the problem. There is not much else in that Update, so whatever it was, they never told us about it.

Sarousse

What about caltrops proccing the 2-pieces meteor set ?

During a massive keep fight, you can hear like 5 meteors/second.

No need to wonder why it's laggy.

Garion

LOL.

glak

These three below can be done with great effect and little effort. Parasitic zergers will always pack, though.

Sacadon wrote: »

• 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

NadiusMaximus wrote: »

Only real way of fixing it just dawned on me.

Reduce the skills we take into Cyrodil to two per bar and no ultimate.
Make battles be fought with weapons , light and heavy attacks.
One damage ability and one heal, or two damage, or two heals. That's it.


I'll lol myself for that one, but might be how they handle it vs. Fixing it for real before next year.

Developer event ideas on the PTS server.

• event without ultimates. Then you'll be able to find the most lag-causing normal skills like eclipse, steel tornado, etc.
• same as no ultimates but weapon skills only.
• again but only class skills
• event where only ultimates and heavy/light attacks can be used. Lag spikes will show which ultimates cause the most pain on the server.
• putting it all together: allow subscribers onto the dev integration server, allow only the lag-causing skills, fix those skills with frequent restarts or intentional scrollbacks.

Vahrokh

lordrichter wrote: »

The lighting change gets a bum rap because it happened to be in the same update that they made some other change in the way the game worked at a fundamental level. They have already said, in one of the ESO Live episodes, if I remember, that the lighting change was not the problem. There is not much else in that Update, so whatever it was, they never told us about it.

In fact it was not the ligthing patch per se that killed the game. That patch improved visuals in map portions usually not even touched during PvP.
They were not very verbose about what happened for real because companies don't talk about security issues.

Back at the time the game was plagued by people botting, teleporting A LOT, map hacking. The game used to have a "light, optimistic protocol" to communicate players actions to the server. That saved a lot of resources and allowed for large battles.

However sooner or later reality happens: cheaters had long studied ESO protocols and could devise ways to exploit some critical portion of the gameplay. While most used them to farm gold to sell for cash, some PvP cheaters took the same tools to gain unfair advantages in PvP: see through buildings, see stealthed people, fly, teleport and more.

ZoS kept a low profile and recoded the network code from "optimistic" to "realistic". That is, they had to move a lot of "anti-cheat checks" from the potentially tampered with clients to the server. This put a massive additional stress on the amount of data to be processed. There are some ways around this but they require a true recode from scratch, they can't affort it.
So, thanks to cheaters, now PvP is laggy and slow. Actually, thanks to game designers who imagined a world where cheaters don't exist and coded a whole platform with this flawed belief.

Samadhi

Fizzlewizzle wrote: »

Why not make the PvP area smaller, and provide other content in the areas which aren't used for PvP?

(Beware, Professionally drawn map in the next spoiler)

The red area could be the main PvP zone.
There won't be things like Dolmens, Quests or dungeons here. Just a pure PVP area.

Two Keeps for each alliance would provide an entrance to a tunnel (two tunnels per alliance), which will end at the scroll holding place (hidden underground).
The 2 scrolls will be held at these hiding places, two scrolls at the keeps that give access to it, and 2 scrolls at the small can be kept close to the wall, which would force an enemy group to get close to it to steal the scroll.

The Black circle would be the end of the PvP area. It will be a huge wall with at the "alliance borders" (the Blue, Red and Yellow lines) enough NPC's on the walls to kill any hostile groups that tries to "conquer" the walls.
The players that belong to said alliance could just pass through a gate (or multiple gates) on these walls.
There will be a town at the other side of the walls which level 10 players could teleport too when they start a campaign.

The Gray areas will be Neutral areas (you will see who belongs to which alliance, but you can't fight eachother) with an endgame (VR14) Dolmen at the keeps that are located in those areas.

These Dolmens will be extremely hard, spawning only the toughest enemies (the ones you normally fight just before destroying a normal dolmen) as normal mobs, and Uber Titan-like enemies for bosses.
All 3 alliances will be able to enter these areas, the two alliances next to the gray area by a "side door"and the third alliance through a door thats connected to the PvP area.

The Alliance areas (The red, Blue and Yellow zones) could be VR14 areas with quests, dolmens and dungeons for the players to do.


It nothing more then an idea, it would counter the horse simulator we have now.

So your solution to the issue of lag caused by too many PvP players in a small area is to forcibly confine all PvP players to an even smaller map, and turn the rest of Cyrodiil into PvE zones?

No thank you.

We need fixes to make PvP in Cyrodiil more viable in its intended format, not a castration of PvP in Cyrodiil.

Perfectly fine with turning all the PvE quests in Cyrodiil to v14 and dramatically increasing their experience output for endgame players, but they should also remain part of the PvP map to accomodate.

Perhaps the quest hub towns need to have their quest exp dramatically increased, and have the completion of 10 daily quests in a town provide a buff that is meaningful to PvP players (ex: increases spell power and weapon power by 5% and increases AP gains by 5% for 5 hours; only applies to a character while in Cyrodiil).

This could help spread people out a bit by giving other tasks worth doing in Cyrodiil, and turn the quest hubs back into small-scale PvP hotspots like they used to be before their experience got nerfed.

Fizzlewizzle

Samadhi wrote: »

Fizzlewizzle wrote: »

Why not make the PvP area smaller, and provide other content in the areas which aren't used for PvP?

(Beware, Professionally drawn map in the next spoiler)

The red area could be the main PvP zone.
There won't be things like Dolmens, Quests or dungeons here. Just a pure PVP area.

Two Keeps for each alliance would provide an entrance to a tunnel (two tunnels per alliance), which will end at the scroll holding place (hidden underground).
The 2 scrolls will be held at these hiding places, two scrolls at the keeps that give access to it, and 2 scrolls at the small can be kept close to the wall, which would force an enemy group to get close to it to steal the scroll.

The Black circle would be the end of the PvP area. It will be a huge wall with at the "alliance borders" (the Blue, Red and Yellow lines) enough NPC's on the walls to kill any hostile groups that tries to "conquer" the walls.
The players that belong to said alliance could just pass through a gate (or multiple gates) on these walls.
There will be a town at the other side of the walls which level 10 players could teleport too when they start a campaign.

The Gray areas will be Neutral areas (you will see who belongs to which alliance, but you can't fight eachother) with an endgame (VR14) Dolmen at the keeps that are located in those areas.

These Dolmens will be extremely hard, spawning only the toughest enemies (the ones you normally fight just before destroying a normal dolmen) as normal mobs, and Uber Titan-like enemies for bosses.
All 3 alliances will be able to enter these areas, the two alliances next to the gray area by a "side door"and the third alliance through a door thats connected to the PvP area.

The Alliance areas (The red, Blue and Yellow zones) could be VR14 areas with quests, dolmens and dungeons for the players to do.


It nothing more then an idea, it would counter the horse simulator we have now.

So your solution to the issue of lag caused by too many PvP players in a small area is to forcibly confine all PvP players to an even smaller map, and turn the rest of Cyrodiil into PvE zones?

No thank you.

We need fixes to make PvP in Cyrodiil more viable in its intended format, not a castration of PvP in Cyrodiil.

Perfectly fine with turning all the PvE quests in Cyrodiil to v14 and dramatically increasing their experience output for endgame players, but they should also remain part of the PvP map to accomodate.

Perhaps the quest hub towns need to have their quest exp dramatically increased, and have the completion of 10 daily quests in a town provide a buff that is meaningful to PvP players (ex: increases spell power and weapon power by 5% and increases AP gains by 5% for 5 hours; only applies to a character while in Cyrodiil).

This could help spread people out a bit by giving other tasks worth doing in Cyrodiil, and turn the quest hubs back into small-scale PvP hotspots like they used to be before their experience got nerfed.

I personally haven't had any lag or anything while in PVP. I don't see many people (might be the cause), but when i find a group to siege with i don't notice a drop in performance or the like.

My personal thought about the whole problem was a zone, 3 to 4 times the size of a normal zone, with all sorts of wildlife, NPC's quests and other activities being the cause of the problem.
On a crowded day in Rawl Kha (skill spammer or not) i don't notice any problems. I know for sure that in places i can't see there are people fighting and doing quests (basically like Cyrodiil) in Reapers March, but the total map in which this happens is only about 1/3rd of Cyrodill, which might limit the stain on the server.

Now if you have a map in which you encourage the skill spamming (PvP) but remove all "unnecessary" features for a PvP zone (Quests, Dungeons, Dolmens) it might lessen the strain on the server. Keeping only the base necessities (landscaping, Keeps and Guards) surely won't be as harsh on the system as what currently is happening in Cyrodiil.

The alliance zones, as well as the "gray zones" was just an idea about what to do with the areas that are left over when you would limit the PvP area. Having more stuff to do endgame, having a more stable PvP environment and being able to work together with players from another alliance (for ones) does seem like a good deal if you say it out loud.
(But, thats my personal opinion.)

stefan.gustavsonb16_ESO

Vahrokh wrote: »

ZoS kept a low profile and recoded the network code from "optimistic" to "realistic". That is, they had to move a lot of "anti-cheat checks" from the potentially tampered with clients to the server. This put a massive additional stress on the amount of data to be processed. There are some ways around this but they require a true recode from scratch, they can't affort it.

That original "optimistic" network code might actually work on consoles, because they are not nearly as easily hackable. I might be dreaming, but I think it's possible. I don't own a console, so it won't help me, but it would help the game.