Campaign Performance

Talcyndl

Just watch the Blob groups. For those of us playing on Azuras it is obvious that the lag spikes to unacceptable levels whenever a tightly packed group of 15-20+ starts spamming their skill 'rotation' (ie, Healing Springs, Purge, Steel Detonation).

The other lag is manageable (and may be helped by the "tweaks" you've been trying). But the real problem lag is the direct result of those groups.

Robbmrp

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

We have been making changes to abilities bit by bit to save calculation cycles on the server. Using the example of Hemorrhage, this ability would check an area around the size of a 2700 meter circle around the Nightblade which critically hit. The Hemorrhage ability would then apply a bonus (minor Savagery) to all allies in that area.

"All allies" can be 1 ally or 100 allies, but the ability system first needs to get ALL the entities in that area first...monsters, players, siege weapons, friend and foe, then sort that list out to find allies, then apply the bonus to them. Changing the ability to Group only cuts out a lot of sorting the server would have to do. That change has helped a little bit, but not a ton, so obviously we're still digging.

Hello @ZOS_BrianWheeler, thank you for the detailed explanation on what is being researched for performance issues. One suggestion on the above I bolded. To buff EVERY ally within a given space seems like a huge overkill to me. If you have 20 Nighblades within the same area, and they all proc relatively close to another, that's a tremendous load being placed on the servers for this. Why not make ANY buff for allies apply to only those that are grouped together within 50 meters. With this, the people that your grouped with get the benefit of the Buff and the load on the server has been greatly reduced.

IMO, other than Cyrodil Campaign buffs, no player buffs should occur for those people outside a group or 50 meter area. Even if you went to 100 meters, that's a big reduction on calculations on the area looked at.

This change could be done for EVERY player buff that looks at a radius greater than 100 meters or applies outside of grouping.

Please thank all of your staff for everything they are doing to make a more enjoyable gaming experience for us and HAPPY HOLIDAYS!!!!

WebBull

BuggeX wrote: »

AbraXuSeXile wrote: »

Bashev wrote: »

AbraXuSeXile wrote: »

All you got to do is look at what you changed in 1.2.3, this was where it all went wrong.

Latency and FPS was flawless before then.

Brian answered this question in the last ESO live. He said that they investigated the lightening patch and they concluded that there is no issues with it. The problem with the performance is noticeable around 1.2.3 because most of the players reached high rank at that time and more passive should be calculated.

Its a lie, i was running a train before 1.2.3 getting into 3 way fights with other trains. No lag.

lighting patch gave us weeks of issues and never recovered, when they fixed fps the latency was broke.

try not to zerg arround at azuras for one week, im sure you will notice how mutch better it will be..........

You act like there has never been lag in this game except for Azura. You have been here long enough to know it's not just Azura and it's not just zerging. Even if it was zerging, the game was designed for large group battles. They need to fix the lag regardless of how players play. As far as Azura specifically, you can be standing in High Rock and still lag out.

Same was with Thornblade. Seems as once this servers get heavily play, they start to die. And this is even with ZOS cutting back the pop lock multiple times. Now 2 groups of 24 fighting (sometimes even less) can completely lag out the server. There is simply no excuse for this as a game company.

To see them spend $1M on trying to buy back players is sickening when the money could have been spent to fix the game. 2 months from now there will be the same amount of players, the game will still be broken, and $1m will have been thrown away by ZOS.

/rant off

Turelus

Not too sure how you handle your servers, but again going back to that wonderful EVE Online.

They have dedicated high end nodes for star systems which see regular high traffic (main trade hub at 2,000 players) and players can ask for a reinforced high end node for upcoming large PvP battles or events. Do each of the Cyrodiil campaigns have their own nodes with high end ones for Azura's Star?

MrGrimey

Also keep in mind that BwB is not nearly as full as the vet campaign during prime time, I don't think that's the best comparison to come to the conclusion that it's abilities that are causing lag. At this point I'm willing to try anything to fix cyrodiil

driosketch

Mumyo wrote: »

That sounds bad tbh. I think u crossed a line with the champion system aswell.

Wonder if a CP free campaign would see better performance then.

BuggeX

WebBull wrote: »

BuggeX wrote: »

AbraXuSeXile wrote: »

Bashev wrote: »

AbraXuSeXile wrote: »

All you got to do is look at what you changed in 1.2.3, this was where it all went wrong.

Latency and FPS was flawless before then.

Brian answered this question in the last ESO live. He said that they investigated the lightening patch and they concluded that there is no issues with it. The problem with the performance is noticeable around 1.2.3 because most of the players reached high rank at that time and more passive should be calculated.

Its a lie, i was running a train before 1.2.3 getting into 3 way fights with other trains. No lag.

lighting patch gave us weeks of issues and never recovered, when they fixed fps the latency was broke.

try not to zerg arround at azuras for one week, im sure you will notice how mutch better it will be..........

You act like there has never been lag in this game except for Azura. You have been here long enough to know it's not just Azura and it's not just zerging. Even if it was zerging, the game was designed for large group battles. They need to fix the lag regardless of how players play. As far as Azura specifically, you can be standing in High Rock and still lag out.

Same was with Thornblade. Seems as once this servers get heavily play, they start to die. And this is even with ZOS cutting back the pop lock multiple times. Now 2 groups of 24 fighting (sometimes even less) can completely lag out the server. There is simply no excuse for this as a game company.

To see them spend $1M on trying to buy back players is sickening when the money could have been spent to fix the game. 2 months from now there will be the same amount of players, the game will still be broken, and $1m will have been thrown away by ZOS.

/rant off

yes i was Long enought here to see how the game was developed over the time.
and to say the truth, the lag is far better than it used to be 6 mounths ago on azuras or thornblade where 1min lags was nothing unusal. The lag is still here when Groups fight, from 500-4000ms witch cause also the fps Drops.


zos would have enought cash to spend, second the 1m doesnt come from zos diractly
and then, its sold out with 50.000 at year over 20 years

PainfulFAFA

MrGrimey wrote: »

Also keep in mind that BwB is not nearly as full as the vet campaign during prime time, I don't think that's the best comparison to come to the conclusion that it's abilities that are causing lag. At this point I'm willing to try anything to fix cyrodiil

wrong
i used to play BWB back when it was poplocked (before IC came along) and the server would NEVER lag despite the 2-3 zergs running around in each faction.

Those of us who played BWB back in its' glorious days know that.
Hardly anybody had purge,barrier, passives, or gear that would proc all the time.

ZOS_BrianWheeler

In the case of BwB vs. "Vet Campaign X" we're looking at the XBOX where Haderus and BWB have quite literally the same population and BWB performance is great vs. Haderus' which isn't.

When PC switched over to Tamriel Unlimited, the same thing was noted with BwB vs. Azura in which case both had the same population and the same comparison was seen there.

frozywozy

@ZOS_BrianWheeler

My personnal suggestions :

- Reduce the actual population cap by another 20%
- Reduce the number of campaign to 3
- Reduce the max group size of Trueflame to 16 and Haderus to 8

Reducing the amount of campaigns will make the remaining ones more competitives and will incentive the large guilds all stacked on Azura Star at the moment to spread out across the 3 campaigns making the overall PvP experience at primetime more enjoyable with less performance issues, especially on Azura Star.

The rest is up to 24+ organized large groups. The actual game engine doesn't support a fully optimized large group of 24 players fighting the same amount of players without major consequences. I know some groups don't care about performances problems and still have fun in the lag.

This being said, it doesn't mean that you are forced to do the same. Start thinking about your behaviour and cap your group at 16 to avoid more frustrations and salt from players who get trained by your ball spamming unbreakable ccs every evening. As @Talcyndl pointed out, organized groups are not the only cause of latency issues but they are the most important one. When the inner of a keep goes down with considerable amount of players in the keep area (50+), my ping usually sits between 150 and 300. As soon as the 24+ organized group starts pushing inside the breach, my ping and everybody in my group instantly skyrocket up to 1200+ and it becomes unplayable. If you get stuck in a CC (fear or blazing spears), it takes 3-5seconds to cc break and you find yourself dead on the ground with steel tornados and proximity in your death recap.

Please, for the happiness of all, if you are aware of a guild in your faction running on a regular basis another large organized group of 24+ players, consider trying and homing another campaign.

ZOS_BrianWheeler

The number of campaigns will be getting adjusted in Thieves Guild when we get some tech online that allows players to assign any alliance to any campaign.

Turelus

frozywozy wrote: »

@ZOS_BrianWheeler

My personnal suggestions :

- Reduce the actual population cap by another 20%
- Reduce the number of campaign to 3
- Reduce the max group size of Trueflame to 16 and Haderus to 8

Reducing the amount of campaigns will make the remaining ones more competitives and will incentive the large guilds all stacked on Azura Star at the moment to spread out across the 3 campaigns making the overall PvP experience at primetime more enjoyable with less performance issues, especially on Azura Star.

I would rather not see another reduction in the number of players able to join, it already feels like a wasteland sometimes.
Agree with campaign reductions fully.
Reducing group size doesn't change anything, people will just make two groups and follow each other.

jim_mau

/cast firedragonscale for reflect

im no expert but has anyone checked if animation cancelling contributes to lag? say 20 -30 ppl onscreen, spamming 4 abilities in 2 seconds, creating a bottleneck of calculations crammed into a small time frame? just brainstorming a bit

*hides*

Joy_Division

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

In the case of BwB vs. "Vet Campaign X" we're looking at the XBOX where Haderus and BWB have quite literally the same population and BWB performance is great vs. Haderus' which isn't.

When PC switched over to Tamriel Unlimited, the same thing was noted with BwB vs. Azura in which case both had the same population and the same comparison was seen there.

The top PvP blob guilds did not run nightly in BwB and on the of chance they did, it was a more casual atmosphere that did away with the highly structured "stack on crown" tactic.

frozywozy

Turelus wrote: »

frozywozy wrote: »

@ZOS_BrianWheeler

My personnal suggestions :

- Reduce the actual population cap by another 20%
- Reduce the number of campaign to 3
- Reduce the max group size of Trueflame to 16 and Haderus to 8

Reducing the amount of campaigns will make the remaining ones more competitives and will incentive the large guilds all stacked on Azura Star at the moment to spread out across the 3 campaigns making the overall PvP experience at primetime more enjoyable with less performance issues, especially on Azura Star.

I would rather not see another reduction in the number of players able to join, it already feels like a wasteland sometimes.
Agree with campaign reductions fully.
Reducing group size doesn't change anything, people will just make two groups and follow each other.

This has nothing to do with the population cap. It is a problem related to Cyrodiil and Imperial City (pve land with no objectives related to the campaign) sharing the same population.

What I usually do when I feel like there is not max population on the surface even though the lock appears on the population panel, I go into the sewers and I ask politely for support in the war happening up there. I also propose them to go to other campaigns (less competitive) to do sewer farm runs to not impact Azura Star too much.

Until we have a new system in place with objectives in IC that give points to your faction or anything of the sort, this is what we have to deal with.

It doesn't mean that because sometimes Cyrodiil feels like a wasteland with max pop that we should not reduce the population cap though. During primetime, it is definitely not a wasteland. It it way too many players on the screen at once for what the server is able to support.

Rylana

Joy_Division wrote: »

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

In the case of BwB vs. "Vet Campaign X" we're looking at the XBOX where Haderus and BWB have quite literally the same population and BWB performance is great vs. Haderus' which isn't.

When PC switched over to Tamriel Unlimited, the same thing was noted with BwB vs. Azura in which case both had the same population and the same comparison was seen there.

The top PvP blob guilds did not run nightly in BwB and on the of chance they did, it was a more casual atmosphere that did away with the highly structured "stack on crown" tactic.

That is an absolute fabrication (or perhaps just ignorance/not seeing it). Most of the major guilds ran lowbies for quite a period of time (in many cases because emp farming was easier, or in most other cases because lag was less and balance was better). Hell there are ballgroups TODAY in blackwater.

You must have never seen the red or yellow ball of doom six months ago there. That... was painful to watch. More especially because TTK was so so high on the campaign, no one died, crashing into each other, the engagement often stalemated midfield or in a keep for an hour before enough finally would go down for a side to gain a decisive advantage. Even then, cleanup could take 10-20 minutes.

sirinsidiator

Just an idea, but maybe you could change the priority for abilities during lag. Right now it seems like single target attacks get dropped very often, but AOE mostly work. Heals and resurrections seem to always work.
If you could switch that around for PVP in order to make single target damage always work and instead drop AOE damage and heals without applying them it would result in less people using AOE during lag and more people dying faster because of less heals. That way it should defuse a situation where two large armies are clashing pretty fast.

Joy_Division

Rylana wrote: »

Joy_Division wrote: »

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

In the case of BwB vs. "Vet Campaign X" we're looking at the XBOX where Haderus and BWB have quite literally the same population and BWB performance is great vs. Haderus' which isn't.

When PC switched over to Tamriel Unlimited, the same thing was noted with BwB vs. Azura in which case both had the same population and the same comparison was seen there.

The top PvP blob guilds did not run nightly in BwB and on the of chance they did, it was a more casual atmosphere that did away with the highly structured "stack on crown" tactic.

That is an absolute fabrication (or perhaps just ignorance/not seeing it). Most of the major guilds ran lowbies for quite a period of time (in many cases because emp farming was easier, or in most other cases because lag was less and balance was better). Hell there are ballgroups TODAY in blackwater.

You must have never seen the red or yellow ball of doom six months ago there. That... was painful to watch. More especially because TTK was so so high on the campaign, no one died, crashing into each other, the engagement often stalemated midfield or in a keep for an hour before enough finally would go down for a side to gain a decisive advantage. Even then, cleanup could take 10-20 minutes.

I must have missed it. I do not deny the high TTK or high volume of players at a particular area, but when I spent my time on BwB, while I did see organized groups, I did not see the blob "stack-on-crown" tactics that are part and parcel to veteran play with its prox dets, barriers, steel tornadoes.

As for what's happening today, I'll take your word for it because the champion system + never needed damage reduction has made BwB PvP, which was once enjoyable ... painful to play

RAGUNAnoOne

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

The number of campaigns will be getting adjusted in Thieves Guild when we get some tech online that allows players to assign any alliance to any campaign.

wait, what does this part mean? also please stop closing campaigns the only ones left on PS4 for fighting are BWB (closed to me) azuras Zergfest (no fun at all) thornblade (EP and DC only also very one sided) the rest are buff servers and I know the outcry will happen if you remove those...

VincentBlanquin

jim_mau wrote: »

/cast firedragonscale for reflect

im no expert but has anyone checked if animation cancelling contributes to lag? say 20 -30 ppl onscreen, spamming 4 abilities in 2 seconds, creating a bottleneck of calculations crammed into a small time frame? just brainstorming a bit

*hides*

of course it does. there are many things that are rather at "not saying mode"

PeggymoeXD

Honestly the thing that keeps me from playing ESO 24/7 and destroying any bit of a social life I have is the fact that I get pissed off and rage quit because of lag. I'm afraid if it's ultimately fixed, I will never stop.

Sublime

How about changing Magicka Detonation to the inverse of the current AOE caps?

I.e. The first 6 target take 100% damage, the next 24 take 150%, the next 30 take 200% and all additional ones take 300%.

AbraXuSeXile

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

The number of campaigns will be getting adjusted in Thieves Guild when we get some tech online that allows players to assign any alliance to any campaign.

I love how you try make it sound hard.

Minno

WebBull wrote: »

BuggeX wrote: »

AbraXuSeXile wrote: »

Bashev wrote: »

AbraXuSeXile wrote: »

All you got to do is look at what you changed in 1.2.3, this was where it all went wrong.

Latency and FPS was flawless before then.

Brian answered this question in the last ESO live. He said that they investigated the lightening patch and they concluded that there is no issues with it. The problem with the performance is noticeable around 1.2.3 because most of the players reached high rank at that time and more passive should be calculated.

Its a lie, i was running a train before 1.2.3 getting into 3 way fights with other trains. No lag.

lighting patch gave us weeks of issues and never recovered, when they fixed fps the latency was broke.

try not to zerg arround at azuras for one week, im sure you will notice how mutch better it will be..........

You act like there has never been lag in this game except for Azura. You have been here long enough to know it's not just Azura and it's not just zerging. Even if it was zerging, the game was designed for large group battles. They need to fix the lag regardless of how players play. As far as Azura specifically, you can be standing in High Rock and still lag out.

Same was with Thornblade. Seems as once this servers get heavily play, they start to die. And this is even with ZOS cutting back the pop lock multiple times. Now 2 groups of 24 fighting (sometimes even less) can completely lag out the server. There is simply no excuse for this as a game company.

To see them spend $1M on trying to buy back players is sickening when the money could have been spent to fix the game. 2 months from now there will be the same amount of players, the game will still be broken, and $1m will have been thrown away by ZOS.

/rant off

$50,000 per year for 20 years.
That's roughly the cost of (6) recent college graduates they would have to train and would fully develop within 3 years. At that 3 year mark youd see the biggest quality output. And after 3 years, those workers might leave for another company to increase their pay grade/find new projects.

That million is not as big as you think in the grade scheme of things. Plus, judging from the fact it's a media pull and that Zenimax probably has an advertising department, this was scrounged up from the ad department's old budget (I haven't noticed their ads lately so I assume it's via free areas like twitch and Reddit).

And now that I think about it, it could be a way of Zennimax spending some cash before an end to a financial quarter to increase their products value. "Crown sales in December increased" type of hype. And they most likely did the numbers.

Rune_Relic

Turelus wrote: »

frozywozy wrote: »

@ZOS_BrianWheeler

My personnal suggestions :

- Reduce the actual population cap by another 20%
- Reduce the number of campaign to 3
- Reduce the max group size of Trueflame to 16 and Haderus to 8

Reducing the amount of campaigns will make the remaining ones more competitives and will incentive the large guilds all stacked on Azura Star at the moment to spread out across the 3 campaigns making the overall PvP experience at primetime more enjoyable with less performance issues, especially on Azura Star.

I would rather not see another reduction in the number of players able to join, it already feels like a wasteland sometimes.
Agree with campaign reductions fully.
Reducing group size doesn't change anything, people will just make two groups and follow each other.

Yeah..cant keep cutting the population.
Agree campaigns need reducing to stop alliance servers....but where does that population go when all are poplocked.
Reducing group size does help with pug groups who aren't on teamspeak.
First I did when starting out was spam LFG and join group....like most new players do.
Result....group hits max size and all follow crown and do what they are told (by the expert leading or gets kicked from group)

More experienced guilds of course will work around the limitation anyway.
EXCEPT.. many skills are going Group only.
So those buffs that once hit all members of both groups (and leechers) will only hit your group.

kwisatz

VincentBlanquin wrote: »

"abilities bit by bit"

this you should doing from day one and you present it as new solution, pathetic

No need to be rude.

VincentBlanquin

kwisatz wrote: »

VincentBlanquin wrote: »

"abilities bit by bit"

this you should doing from day one and you present it as new solution, pathetic

No need to be rude.

yeah, but i am so tired experienced how zos trying solve issues for years, the issues that are already solved in other games for years.

every game suffer from lag and only way to reduce it is tweaking abilities effect. its usually horrible after every big update but gets better over time. eso seems to be only worse and worse at lagging

tell me what exactly work in this game?

system is out of control without stats soft capped, resource management is non existant because of overpowered champion system. everything is about burst, cc mechanics are broken and suffer with latency and lag. animation cancelling isnt balanced across specs, everything is about spam few buttons (if not one), damage aoe cap promote zerging ....

sorry to be rude )))

Alucardo

This is awesome. Thanks for the communication, Brian. I'll be playing around in IC until you guys find a fix because there's no lag at all in there, even on Azuras. It's beautiful.

Valen_Byte

AbraXuSeXile wrote: »

Bashev wrote: »

AbraXuSeXile wrote: »

All you got to do is look at what you changed in 1.2.3, this was where it all went wrong.

Latency and FPS was flawless before then.

Brian answered this question in the last ESO live. He said that they investigated the lightening patch and they concluded that there is no issues with it. The problem with the performance is noticeable around 1.2.3 because most of the players reached high rank at that time and more passive should be calculated.

Its a lie, i was running a train before 1.2.3 getting into 3 way fights with other trains. No lag.

lighting patch gave us weeks of issues and never recovered, when they fixed fps the latency was broke.

Truth.

Lighting patch IS where it all went wrong. NEVER had lag before then. HUGE battles, the likes of which have never been seen again.

My jaw hit the floor the first time I saw a major battle in Cro. There were hundreds of players on my screen. No lag whatsoever.

PainfulFAFA

Valen_Byte wrote: »

AbraXuSeXile wrote: »

Bashev wrote: »

AbraXuSeXile wrote: »

All you got to do is look at what you changed in 1.2.3, this was where it all went wrong.

Latency and FPS was flawless before then.

Brian answered this question in the last ESO live. He said that they investigated the lightening patch and they concluded that there is no issues with it. The problem with the performance is noticeable around 1.2.3 because most of the players reached high rank at that time and more passive should be calculated.

Its a lie, i was running a train before 1.2.3 getting into 3 way fights with other trains. No lag.

lighting patch gave us weeks of issues and never recovered, when they fixed fps the latency was broke.

Truth.

Lighting patch IS where it all went wrong. NEVER had lag before then. HUGE battles, the likes of which have never been seen again.

My jaw hit the floor the first time I saw a major battle in Cro. There were hundreds of players on my screen. No lag whatsoever.

Yep!!
The battles were huuuuuge, no lag, and keeep
fights could last for 20-45 mins at times with 30k-50k ticks.
After a certain patch those massive amazing battle were never to be seen again