Dear ZOS- Why can't we play "This game" it used to work

timidobserver

I hate to be the devil's advocate, but these people are just running around fighting in spread out clumps. There is no stacked ball group. For today's tactics you wouldn't even need to pan your camera from side to side to get all of them. Just about every player on that frame would be in just about the same spot spamming AoEs at each other. That is the difference.

That said, ZOS does need to fix the lag. At this point I don't even like to go into Azura Star or Haderus anymore.

Teargrants

Once you understand the ZOS approach, it all makes sense.

sadownik

forgive me but ill post here what i have written in other thread.

Let me sum up what i got from all the threads about lag and overall pvp performance in which Z. (or rather devs hired by Z.) put some input.

Game started with a lot of client side processing - which in turn allowed for large scale battles but also lead to multiple hacks. Extremely surprising decision judging by the fact that while ESO was first game developed by Z. but many people hired in development process are MMO veterans. So either total lack of control on developing process or "well we need to give people massive battles no matter what happens and we will worry later" attitude.

Changes to above resulted in very big loss of performance quality.

Mr. Wheeler tries to contain the issue as far as he can - removing mercenaries, forward camps, lowering campaign population , deerocide and so on - those didnt bring much change.

At the same time combat team led by mr. Wrobel led to situation in which players are able to constantly spam abilities due to plentiful resources. Pityful idea of introducing "zergbuster skill" led only to zergs using that skill themselves (who would have thought, right?). With lack of cooldowns, lack of limited ability usage caused bu rigorous resource management and last but not least animation canceling (which was a bug initially then converted to official tactic, perhaps by lack of ability of fixing it on the dev side?) servers performance goes down despite desperate measures implemented by mr Wheeler.

Doesnt it look like a serious problem in teams cooperation? Left hand doesn't know what right hand does, does it?

Now mr. Wheeler comes and tells us the lag is caused by players who unlocked High lvl skills and spam them. Were those skills hidden from developers? Weren't they included in server performance tests? Or perhaps another "give them cake and we will fix it later" attitude?

Please feel free to correct me but from what i see i dont have much hope for my return to the game, since the only element that was fun at some point - pvp is right now hopeless.

Knootewoot

I am really glad I played from early access and witnessed these grand lag-less battles. But im sad I watched those video's today. I wish they would revert the game to the version we had in march 2014 because that was TESO-PvP in it's heydays.

RIP PVP

Alcast

Teargrants wrote: »

Once you understand the ZOS approach, it all makes sense.

hahaha

Etaniel

Minno wrote: »

RinaldoGandolphi wrote: »

Dreyloch wrote: »

People keep beating this dead horse called 1.6

It's already been said numerous times that the entire population started to max out about that time. Everyone had morphs of their abilities. Everyone had gotten new sparkly effects on their skills. Please go watch the last videocast with Brian Wheeler. It explains a LOT of what's been happening.

Should it have been foreseen or fixed by now? YES! ... Can we all wish for those days when 200 ppl could be on screen? Sure.
Can we all turn down or off certain effects? Yes we can.Can we all stop blaming the lighting patch now? Yeah, I think we can. Calculating LoS, crunching the numbers to enhance or limit the AE of many abilities really is way more intensive on server load than the light crap. So please, that horse is nothing but atoms now.

Trust me, I hate the lag just as much as anyone. I want it fixed just as badly. But lets point in the right direction for the cause. Which isn't 1.6 directly.

I linked patch notes from the Devs stating this isn;t true. They admitted in their own patch notes the FPS bug with 1.2.3 was never fully fixed. They brushed it under the rug after giving us lip service. the cause of today's lag is listed in ZOS very own patch notes, that horrible FPS bug from back in the day was never fully fixed...performance was been down the drain since that patch, they need to roll the darn thing back, it worked before that update.

Correct. I was about to post those notes too!

Though Brian said via ESO live recently it wasnt the lighting patch. But somehow the patch notes paint a different picture.

Also, many of those visual patches were vague with 2 sentences only. I wonder how much of the light is being reflected around, how skill's lighting effects calculation if at all, if the slider bars introduced to reduce performance problems actually work?

Lots of craziness.

No, he said the server performances didn't take any particular hit with the lightning patch, he never talked about fps, and I don't think they ever denied that fps went to crap after that patch ? Perfomance wise, the lag existed before, and existed after, and I do think that slowly over time, the passives getting unlocked and the new stack on crown playstyle progressively made the lag worse.

The lighting patch is not to blame for lag, it is to blame for client fps performance.

KenaPKK

Minno wrote: »

PainfulFAFA wrote: »

Alcast wrote: »

https://youtu.be/-DV9TwsosyI?t=3m16s

sigh..
good ol' days of cyrodiil
Best thing was that a zerg like Joe's could be cut thru and wiped with an experienced guild.

Funny thing is, if you watch the intro trailer for this game, it is clear from a design standpoint that the game is suppose to have large scale battles with epic heroes running around killing people. Your comment represents the closest thing to the trailer intent.

Edit:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=soKDyDjc3KQ

Look at that Breton dude kick butt without a zerg!!!

THAT DUDE IS USING A ONE HAND SWORD + THROWING KNIVES SKILL LINE

MY FRIENDS AND I HAVE BEEN THEORIZING ON AND WANTING ONE OF THESE

ZOS PLS

helltiger

Minimum AoE on video.

Joy_Division

sadownik wrote: »

forgive me but ill post here what i have written in other thread.

Let me sum up what i got from all the threads about lag and overall pvp performance in which Z. (or rather devs hired by Z.) put some input.

Game started with a lot of client side processing - which in turn allowed for large scale battles but also lead to multiple hacks. Extremely surprising decision judging by the fact that while ESO was first game developed by Z. but many people hired in development process are MMO veterans. So either total lack of control on developing process or "well we need to give people massive battles no matter what happens and we will worry later" attitude.

Changes to above resulted in very big loss of performance quality.

Mr. Wheeler tries to contain the issue as far as he can - removing mercenaries, forward camps, lowering campaign population , deerocide and so on - those didnt bring much change.

At the same time combat team led by mr. Wrobel led to situation in which players are able to constantly spam abilities due to plentiful resources. Pityful idea of introducing "zergbuster skill" led only to zergs using that skill themselves (who would have thought, right?). With lack of cooldowns, lack of limited ability usage caused bu rigorous resource management and last but not least animation canceling (which was a bug initially then converted to official tactic, perhaps by lack of ability of fixing it on the dev side?) servers performance goes down despite desperate measures implemented by mr Wheeler.

Doesnt it look like a serious problem in teams cooperation? Left hand doesn't know what right hand does, does it?

Now mr. Wheeler comes and tells us the lag is caused by players who unlocked High lvl skills and spam them. Were those skills hidden from developers? Weren't they included in server performance tests? Or perhaps another "give them cake and we will fix it later" attitude?

Please feel free to correct me but from what i see i dont have much hope for my return to the game, since the only element that was fun at some point - pvp is right now hopeless.

That's a lot of it.

ZoS is throwing darts at a board though and the latest theory, that people all of a sudden unlocked passives at the time of the lighting patch, is just the new trendy explanation people have latched onto now that spamming meteors has apparently fell out of favor.

But I would add to your list ZoS's incredible arrogance and audacity in it's insistence on holding onto the garbage mechanic of AoE caps - something 87% of its customers do not want - which promotes precisely the type of gameplay that they themselves have admitted strains the servers.

Ezareth

Lucky28 wrote: »

don't know how much the lighting patch had to do with it. i think the majority of the lag problems came because they moved too many things from application to server in response to such things as speed hacks. which is putting too much strain on the server.

just my opinion.

The speed hack wasn't fixed until sometime in 1.6 The last player I saw using it was a templar named Taqya. The assumption that pushing what was previously client side calculations back to the server to correct exploits/hacks etc is likely correct however.

revonine

avid_mdb16_ESO wrote: »

FENGRUSH wrote: »

Dear ZOS threads never get a ZOS response - you fool!

At least now we know how to get @FENGRUSH response.

Just say "AOE Caps" three times and he will appear.

RinaldoGandolphi

Honestly, at this point...I doubt its ever fixed.

ZOS has been telling us since the lighting patch "Were working on a fix for the putid Cyrodiil performance that came with that patch" and nothing has really changed...almost 2 years.

I know 1 thing for certain, if there is still lag on the Thieves Guild PTS im out probably for good. At some point you have to come to terms and know when its time to walk away...the lag we see on PVP campaigns right now is simply unacceptable. If its not fixed with the TG update it probably never will be fixed. I could probably accept that if the PVE areas worked like they used to, but as Ezareth said, even Maelstrom Arena, a tiny solo instance, is even prone to crazy lag spikes, pve areas never used to lag like this...the PVP lag is starting effect the whole game now....at what point do we say "enough is enough"

Im hopin its fixed in the next update, but im not getting my hopes up.

Ezareth

Joy_Division wrote: »

sadownik wrote: »

forgive me but ill post here what i have written in other thread.

Let me sum up what i got from all the threads about lag and overall pvp performance in which Z. (or rather devs hired by Z.) put some input.

Game started with a lot of client side processing - which in turn allowed for large scale battles but also lead to multiple hacks. Extremely surprising decision judging by the fact that while ESO was first game developed by Z. but many people hired in development process are MMO veterans. So either total lack of control on developing process or "well we need to give people massive battles no matter what happens and we will worry later" attitude.

Changes to above resulted in very big loss of performance quality.

Mr. Wheeler tries to contain the issue as far as he can - removing mercenaries, forward camps, lowering campaign population , deerocide and so on - those didnt bring much change.

At the same time combat team led by mr. Wrobel led to situation in which players are able to constantly spam abilities due to plentiful resources. Pityful idea of introducing "zergbuster skill" led only to zergs using that skill themselves (who would have thought, right?). With lack of cooldowns, lack of limited ability usage caused bu rigorous resource management and last but not least animation canceling (which was a bug initially then converted to official tactic, perhaps by lack of ability of fixing it on the dev side?) servers performance goes down despite desperate measures implemented by mr Wheeler.

Doesnt it look like a serious problem in teams cooperation? Left hand doesn't know what right hand does, does it?

Now mr. Wheeler comes and tells us the lag is caused by players who unlocked High lvl skills and spam them. Were those skills hidden from developers? Weren't they included in server performance tests? Or perhaps another "give them cake and we will fix it later" attitude?

Please feel free to correct me but from what i see i dont have much hope for my return to the game, since the only element that was fun at some point - pvp is right now hopeless.

That's a lot of it.

ZoS is throwing darts at a board though and the latest theory, that people all of a sudden unlocked passives at the time of the lighting patch, is just the new trendy explanation people have latched onto now that spamming meteors has apparently fell out of favor.

But I would add to your list ZoS's incredible arrogance and audacity in it's insistence on holding onto the garbage mechanic of AoE caps - something 87% of its customers do not want - which promotes precisely the type of gameplay that they themselves have admitted strains the servers.

I actually think Brian's explanation made a lot of sense and the timing of it did line up with the point at which many players had begun to lock the top tier abilities. I remember playing my Sorc and having a ton of sorcs asking me what was that ability that I was using to teleport all over the place. Skill advancing then was far slower than it is now and the time it took to reach Vet 10 was just insane compared to getting Vet 16 today.

Now when you go into PvP easily 80-90% of the players are Vet16 with most of them running every ability they want on their bars. There was so little information available about the game out there at the time of the lighting patch, the vast majority of players didn't even understand how Impenetrable worked (broken as hell then).

PvP did swifty mature from the 1.3 to 1.5 patch but even in 1.5 there were a ton of players who simply did not understand how shields worked and such. Look at the skill level of players in any PvP videos from the 1.3-1.5 era. It was significantly less than it is from the videos you watch today.

sadownik

Ezareth wrote: »

Joy_Division wrote: »

sadownik wrote: »

forgive me but ill post here what i have written in other thread.

Let me sum up what i got from all the threads about lag and overall pvp performance in which Z. (or rather devs hired by Z.) put some input.

Game started with a lot of client side processing - which in turn allowed for large scale battles but also lead to multiple hacks. Extremely surprising decision judging by the fact that while ESO was first game developed by Z. but many people hired in development process are MMO veterans. So either total lack of control on developing process or "well we need to give people massive battles no matter what happens and we will worry later" attitude.

Changes to above resulted in very big loss of performance quality.

Mr. Wheeler tries to contain the issue as far as he can - removing mercenaries, forward camps, lowering campaign population , deerocide and so on - those didnt bring much change.

At the same time combat team led by mr. Wrobel led to situation in which players are able to constantly spam abilities due to plentiful resources. Pityful idea of introducing "zergbuster skill" led only to zergs using that skill themselves (who would have thought, right?). With lack of cooldowns, lack of limited ability usage caused bu rigorous resource management and last but not least animation canceling (which was a bug initially then converted to official tactic, perhaps by lack of ability of fixing it on the dev side?) servers performance goes down despite desperate measures implemented by mr Wheeler.

Doesnt it look like a serious problem in teams cooperation? Left hand doesn't know what right hand does, does it?

Now mr. Wheeler comes and tells us the lag is caused by players who unlocked High lvl skills and spam them. Were those skills hidden from developers? Weren't they included in server performance tests? Or perhaps another "give them cake and we will fix it later" attitude?

Please feel free to correct me but from what i see i dont have much hope for my return to the game, since the only element that was fun at some point - pvp is right now hopeless.

That's a lot of it.

ZoS is throwing darts at a board though and the latest theory, that people all of a sudden unlocked passives at the time of the lighting patch, is just the new trendy explanation people have latched onto now that spamming meteors has apparently fell out of favor.

But I would add to your list ZoS's incredible arrogance and audacity in it's insistence on holding onto the garbage mechanic of AoE caps - something 87% of its customers do not want - which promotes precisely the type of gameplay that they themselves have admitted strains the servers.

I actually think Brian's explanation made a lot of sense and the timing of it did line up with the point at which many players had begun to lock the top tier abilities. I remember playing my Sorc and having a ton of sorcs asking me what was that ability that I was using to teleport all over the place. Skill advancing then was far slower than it is now and the time it took to reach Vet 10 was just insane compared to getting Vet 16 today.

Now when you go into PvP easily 80-90% of the players are Vet16 with most of them running every ability they want on their bars. There was so little information available about the game out there at the time of the lighting patch, the vast majority of players didn't even understand how Impenetrable worked (broken as hell then).

PvP did swifty mature from the 1.3 to 1.5 patch but even in 1.5 there were a ton of players who simply did not understand how shields worked and such. Look at the skill level of players in any PvP videos from the 1.3-1.5 era. It was significantly less than it is from the videos you watch today.

You might be right, but the issue is - how they didnt see that coming? Lag is caused by players who lvled up enough to unlock certain skill? What does it tell us about QA in Z.? And its absolutely beyond me how people are still subbing - its enabling a poor quality of development imho.

Takllin

sadownik wrote: »

Ezareth wrote: »

Joy_Division wrote: »

sadownik wrote: »

forgive me but ill post here what i have written in other thread.

Let me sum up what i got from all the threads about lag and overall pvp performance in which Z. (or rather devs hired by Z.) put some input.

Game started with a lot of client side processing - which in turn allowed for large scale battles but also lead to multiple hacks. Extremely surprising decision judging by the fact that while ESO was first game developed by Z. but many people hired in development process are MMO veterans. So either total lack of control on developing process or "well we need to give people massive battles no matter what happens and we will worry later" attitude.

Changes to above resulted in very big loss of performance quality.

Mr. Wheeler tries to contain the issue as far as he can - removing mercenaries, forward camps, lowering campaign population , deerocide and so on - those didnt bring much change.

At the same time combat team led by mr. Wrobel led to situation in which players are able to constantly spam abilities due to plentiful resources. Pityful idea of introducing "zergbuster skill" led only to zergs using that skill themselves (who would have thought, right?). With lack of cooldowns, lack of limited ability usage caused bu rigorous resource management and last but not least animation canceling (which was a bug initially then converted to official tactic, perhaps by lack of ability of fixing it on the dev side?) servers performance goes down despite desperate measures implemented by mr Wheeler.

Doesnt it look like a serious problem in teams cooperation? Left hand doesn't know what right hand does, does it?

Now mr. Wheeler comes and tells us the lag is caused by players who unlocked High lvl skills and spam them. Were those skills hidden from developers? Weren't they included in server performance tests? Or perhaps another "give them cake and we will fix it later" attitude?

Please feel free to correct me but from what i see i dont have much hope for my return to the game, since the only element that was fun at some point - pvp is right now hopeless.

That's a lot of it.

ZoS is throwing darts at a board though and the latest theory, that people all of a sudden unlocked passives at the time of the lighting patch, is just the new trendy explanation people have latched onto now that spamming meteors has apparently fell out of favor.

But I would add to your list ZoS's incredible arrogance and audacity in it's insistence on holding onto the garbage mechanic of AoE caps - something 87% of its customers do not want - which promotes precisely the type of gameplay that they themselves have admitted strains the servers.

I actually think Brian's explanation made a lot of sense and the timing of it did line up with the point at which many players had begun to lock the top tier abilities. I remember playing my Sorc and having a ton of sorcs asking me what was that ability that I was using to teleport all over the place. Skill advancing then was far slower than it is now and the time it took to reach Vet 10 was just insane compared to getting Vet 16 today.

Now when you go into PvP easily 80-90% of the players are Vet16 with most of them running every ability they want on their bars. There was so little information available about the game out there at the time of the lighting patch, the vast majority of players didn't even understand how Impenetrable worked (broken as hell then).

PvP did swifty mature from the 1.3 to 1.5 patch but even in 1.5 there were a ton of players who simply did not understand how shields worked and such. Look at the skill level of players in any PvP videos from the 1.3-1.5 era. It was significantly less than it is from the videos you watch today.

You might be right, but the issue is - how they didnt see that coming? Lag is caused by players who lvled up enough to unlock certain skill? What does it tell us about QA in Z.? And its absolutely beyond me how people are still subbing - its enabling a poor quality of development imho.

They've shown all the time that they have poor QA/development. How many bugs are still around from beta? How many of the same bugs occur every update? How many bugs do they create after fixing one? Each update brings around more bugs which they almost never fix, and these are game breaking bugs, not minor things. Half the time they can't even reproduce the bugs we see on live too.

Simply put they don't have the resources or quality to sustain a game like this. Not trying to be mean to them or anything, it's just the facts of the matter.

Reverb

I've been avoiding this thread for days, the title made me sure that whateverwas inside would make me sad. I was right, almost fatal levels of nostalgia here. There are some really strong theories posted about the root cause of declining game quality and stability, and I doubt we'll ever know how true any of them are. Whatever the cause, it's just sad.

Early eso pvp videos serve to remind me how I became loyal to this game to begin with, but they also drive home the current state of the game, and how few reasons I have to stay loyal. Nostalgia and hope only go so far.

Joy_Division

Ezareth wrote: »

Joy_Division wrote: »

sadownik wrote: »

forgive me but ill post here what i have written in other thread.

Let me sum up what i got from all the threads about lag and overall pvp performance in which Z. (or rather devs hired by Z.) put some input.

Game started with a lot of client side processing - which in turn allowed for large scale battles but also lead to multiple hacks. Extremely surprising decision judging by the fact that while ESO was first game developed by Z. but many people hired in development process are MMO veterans. So either total lack of control on developing process or "well we need to give people massive battles no matter what happens and we will worry later" attitude.

Changes to above resulted in very big loss of performance quality.

Mr. Wheeler tries to contain the issue as far as he can - removing mercenaries, forward camps, lowering campaign population , deerocide and so on - those didnt bring much change.

At the same time combat team led by mr. Wrobel led to situation in which players are able to constantly spam abilities due to plentiful resources. Pityful idea of introducing "zergbuster skill" led only to zergs using that skill themselves (who would have thought, right?). With lack of cooldowns, lack of limited ability usage caused bu rigorous resource management and last but not least animation canceling (which was a bug initially then converted to official tactic, perhaps by lack of ability of fixing it on the dev side?) servers performance goes down despite desperate measures implemented by mr Wheeler.

Doesnt it look like a serious problem in teams cooperation? Left hand doesn't know what right hand does, does it?

Now mr. Wheeler comes and tells us the lag is caused by players who unlocked High lvl skills and spam them. Were those skills hidden from developers? Weren't they included in server performance tests? Or perhaps another "give them cake and we will fix it later" attitude?

Please feel free to correct me but from what i see i dont have much hope for my return to the game, since the only element that was fun at some point - pvp is right now hopeless.

That's a lot of it.

ZoS is throwing darts at a board though and the latest theory, that people all of a sudden unlocked passives at the time of the lighting patch, is just the new trendy explanation people have latched onto now that spamming meteors has apparently fell out of favor.

But I would add to your list ZoS's incredible arrogance and audacity in it's insistence on holding onto the garbage mechanic of AoE caps - something 87% of its customers do not want - which promotes precisely the type of gameplay that they themselves have admitted strains the servers.

I actually think Brian's explanation made a lot of sense and the timing of it did line up with the point at which many players had begun to lock the top tier abilities. I remember playing my Sorc and having a ton of sorcs asking me what was that ability that I was using to teleport all over the place. Skill advancing then was far slower than it is now and the time it took to reach Vet 10 was just insane compared to getting Vet 16 today.

Now when you go into PvP easily 80-90% of the players are Vet16 with most of them running every ability they want on their bars. There was so little information available about the game out there at the time of the lighting patch, the vast majority of players didn't even understand how Impenetrable worked (broken as hell then).

PvP did swifty mature from the 1.3 to 1.5 patch but even in 1.5 there were a ton of players who simply did not understand how shields worked and such. Look at the skill level of players in any PvP videos from the 1.3-1.5 era. It was significantly less than it is from the videos you watch today.

I will agree that most people who PvPed back then, and I'll include myself, had no idea what they were doing. But Brian cant tell me that there weren't many people running around with passives unlocked because by the time you got to VR1, you pretty much had them all and there were entire guilds and groups who maxed out there characters in the first few weeks.

If I watch an old video I recorded from May, I do see a lot of level 34s and what not, but I see the same number of VRs in roughly the same proximity as I do today. I was in TSYM's ball group spamming AoEs before the lighting patch. So I think this explanation, while intuitive and part of the reason, it does not adequately account for the drastic performance issues.

The anti-botting measures and the decision to shift much of the work server side, however, sounds the more reasonable theory. I'm not sure why the game is 32 bit or why ZoS trusted our clients to do a lot of the work, but they clearly underestimated the amount of strain that a functioning and interesting recent MMO with anti-cheating measures will create. We don't want to go back to the days of rampant bots and I have zero interest in playing a game that limits calculations to basic attacks against a flat armor rating, so while all this theorizing is intellectually stimulating, it doesn't really make ESO what it was advertised as.

ZoS's passivity in hoping the PvP community will police itself and act in ways that lessen the strain on servers is naive and breeds unneeded toxicity and resentment. IMHO they deserve to be taken to task for their failure to recognize the crap their customers go through on a nightly basis and institute actual game-play mechanics that punish behavior that tanks the server and rewards behavior that does not. Their fanatical adherence to AoE Caps is an object lesson in what not to do for any future game designer.

Takllin

Reverb wrote: »

I've been avoiding this thread for days, the title made me sure that whateverwas inside would make me sad. I was right, almost fatal levels of nostalgia here. There are some really strong theories posted about the root cause of declining game quality and stability, and I doubt we'll ever know how true any of them are. Whatever the cause, it's just sad.

Early eso pvp videos serve to remind me how I became loyal to this game to begin with, but they also drive home me of the current state of the game, and how few reasons I have to stay loyal. Nostalgia and hope only go so far.

We all keep playing because of the nolstagia of how good this game was at launch, but secretly, deep down inside we know that game will never see the light of day again.

There also aren't any equivalent options that are even on par with ESO right now. The MMO market is in a bad shape. I mean ESO won MMO of the year...

gw2only1b14_ESO

Still have to question US players on EU servers and EU players on US servers and latency issues Dont fool yourselves this stuff has been around since beta but yea with there "cut" backs ie less juice for the server the lag has intensified these questions have been asked since:

http://tamrielfoundry.com/topic/playing-on-the-na-server-from-europe/


It is crazy not even being in the area of a seige/attack 2 or 3 keeps away hell even in Camp your ping will be 300 to 400+ at times

TheLaw

They don't care. Brian Wheeler doesn't care. PVP is a sideshow in ESO now.

gw2only1b14_ESO

TheLaw wrote: »

They don't care. Brian Wheeler doesn't care. PVP is a slideshow in ESO now.

I fixed that for you

Yolokin_Swagonborn

TheLaw wrote: »

They don't care. Brian Wheeler doesn't care. PVP is a sideshow in ESO now.

ZOS goes through spasms of ostensible caring that give us a bit of hope only to retreat into radio silence again and again. After Craglorn launched, and PvP was sent in to single digit frames for months, you couldn't get any ZOS employee to even admit PvP existed. In every reddit AMA, and every ESO live, PvP questions were systematically ignored. We didn't even hear from Brian Wheeler for a whole 6 months or so. Some of us worried for his safety and thought that he was locked in a basement at ZOS while the entire company was given a gag order about anything PvP.

But then the transition to B2P happened and suddenly PvP was important again and a tool to attract new players to the game. Wheeler magically emerged again and we started hearing things about PvP mini-games within cyrodiil and requests for our feedback.

But soon after the Tamriel Unlimited Launch hype ended, PvP was allowed to fade into obscurity again. I don't know what causes these sudden jolts of short lived PvP attention. It is still happening today.

• Eric Wrobel suddenly appears on the forums!
• Asks for feedback on several PvP topics, gets a torrent of enthusiastic responses from the playerbase
• starts a thread about the issue of most concern to the community (AoE caps) then (here comes the strange part)
• completely avoids the issue of AOE caps which was the entire purpose of the thread
• Never posts again and reverts to radio silence.

Do they not realize how half-hearted and disingenuous this inconsistent behavior looks?

riverdragon72

lol all three factions should gather at keeps tomorrow at a set time and try what was done in angry joes video

revonine

gw2only1b14_ESO wrote: »

Still have to question US players on EU servers and EU players on US servers and latency issues Dont fool yourselves this stuff has been around since beta but yea with there "cut" backs ie less juice for the server the lag has intensified these questions have been asked since:

http://tamrielfoundry.com/topic/playing-on-the-na-server-from-europe/


It is crazy not even being in the area of a seige/attack 2 or 3 keeps away hell even in Camp your ping will be 300 to 400+ at times

I load into camp from the queue, hit streak. Nothing happens for 3 seconds then suddenly my character jerks forward. Nope not even gonna bother. And I then log out for the night.

Shunravi

riverdragon72 wrote: »

lol all three factions should gather at keeps tomorrow at a set time and try what was done in angry joes video

Would be fun...

PainfulFAFA

Years from now, game developers will look back at this game fail and use it to make a point.

"Never implement AoE caps, without balancing abilities first."

Ezareth

sadownik wrote: »

Ezareth wrote: »

Joy_Division wrote: »

sadownik wrote: »

forgive me but ill post here what i have written in other thread.

Let me sum up what i got from all the threads about lag and overall pvp performance in which Z. (or rather devs hired by Z.) put some input.

Game started with a lot of client side processing - which in turn allowed for large scale battles but also lead to multiple hacks. Extremely surprising decision judging by the fact that while ESO was first game developed by Z. but many people hired in development process are MMO veterans. So either total lack of control on developing process or "well we need to give people massive battles no matter what happens and we will worry later" attitude.

Changes to above resulted in very big loss of performance quality.

Mr. Wheeler tries to contain the issue as far as he can - removing mercenaries, forward camps, lowering campaign population , deerocide and so on - those didnt bring much change.

At the same time combat team led by mr. Wrobel led to situation in which players are able to constantly spam abilities due to plentiful resources. Pityful idea of introducing "zergbuster skill" led only to zergs using that skill themselves (who would have thought, right?). With lack of cooldowns, lack of limited ability usage caused bu rigorous resource management and last but not least animation canceling (which was a bug initially then converted to official tactic, perhaps by lack of ability of fixing it on the dev side?) servers performance goes down despite desperate measures implemented by mr Wheeler.

Doesnt it look like a serious problem in teams cooperation? Left hand doesn't know what right hand does, does it?

Now mr. Wheeler comes and tells us the lag is caused by players who unlocked High lvl skills and spam them. Were those skills hidden from developers? Weren't they included in server performance tests? Or perhaps another "give them cake and we will fix it later" attitude?

Please feel free to correct me but from what i see i dont have much hope for my return to the game, since the only element that was fun at some point - pvp is right now hopeless.

That's a lot of it.

ZoS is throwing darts at a board though and the latest theory, that people all of a sudden unlocked passives at the time of the lighting patch, is just the new trendy explanation people have latched onto now that spamming meteors has apparently fell out of favor.

But I would add to your list ZoS's incredible arrogance and audacity in it's insistence on holding onto the garbage mechanic of AoE caps - something 87% of its customers do not want - which promotes precisely the type of gameplay that they themselves have admitted strains the servers.

I actually think Brian's explanation made a lot of sense and the timing of it did line up with the point at which many players had begun to lock the top tier abilities. I remember playing my Sorc and having a ton of sorcs asking me what was that ability that I was using to teleport all over the place. Skill advancing then was far slower than it is now and the time it took to reach Vet 10 was just insane compared to getting Vet 16 today.

Now when you go into PvP easily 80-90% of the players are Vet16 with most of them running every ability they want on their bars. There was so little information available about the game out there at the time of the lighting patch, the vast majority of players didn't even understand how Impenetrable worked (broken as hell then).

PvP did swifty mature from the 1.3 to 1.5 patch but even in 1.5 there were a ton of players who simply did not understand how shields worked and such. Look at the skill level of players in any PvP videos from the 1.3-1.5 era. It was significantly less than it is from the videos you watch today.

You might be right, but the issue is - how they didnt see that coming? Lag is caused by players who lvled up enough to unlock certain skill? What does it tell us about QA in Z.? And its absolutely beyond me how people are still subbing - its enabling a poor quality of development imho.

It tells me ZoS sucks at their own game really. Not all that surprising in the industry.

Ezareth

Joy_Division wrote: »

Ezareth wrote: »

Joy_Division wrote: »

sadownik wrote: »

forgive me but ill post here what i have written in other thread.

Let me sum up what i got from all the threads about lag and overall pvp performance in which Z. (or rather devs hired by Z.) put some input.

Game started with a lot of client side processing - which in turn allowed for large scale battles but also lead to multiple hacks. Extremely surprising decision judging by the fact that while ESO was first game developed by Z. but many people hired in development process are MMO veterans. So either total lack of control on developing process or "well we need to give people massive battles no matter what happens and we will worry later" attitude.

Changes to above resulted in very big loss of performance quality.

Mr. Wheeler tries to contain the issue as far as he can - removing mercenaries, forward camps, lowering campaign population , deerocide and so on - those didnt bring much change.

At the same time combat team led by mr. Wrobel led to situation in which players are able to constantly spam abilities due to plentiful resources. Pityful idea of introducing "zergbuster skill" led only to zergs using that skill themselves (who would have thought, right?). With lack of cooldowns, lack of limited ability usage caused bu rigorous resource management and last but not least animation canceling (which was a bug initially then converted to official tactic, perhaps by lack of ability of fixing it on the dev side?) servers performance goes down despite desperate measures implemented by mr Wheeler.

Doesnt it look like a serious problem in teams cooperation? Left hand doesn't know what right hand does, does it?

Now mr. Wheeler comes and tells us the lag is caused by players who unlocked High lvl skills and spam them. Were those skills hidden from developers? Weren't they included in server performance tests? Or perhaps another "give them cake and we will fix it later" attitude?

Please feel free to correct me but from what i see i dont have much hope for my return to the game, since the only element that was fun at some point - pvp is right now hopeless.

That's a lot of it.

ZoS is throwing darts at a board though and the latest theory, that people all of a sudden unlocked passives at the time of the lighting patch, is just the new trendy explanation people have latched onto now that spamming meteors has apparently fell out of favor.

But I would add to your list ZoS's incredible arrogance and audacity in it's insistence on holding onto the garbage mechanic of AoE caps - something 87% of its customers do not want - which promotes precisely the type of gameplay that they themselves have admitted strains the servers.

I actually think Brian's explanation made a lot of sense and the timing of it did line up with the point at which many players had begun to lock the top tier abilities. I remember playing my Sorc and having a ton of sorcs asking me what was that ability that I was using to teleport all over the place. Skill advancing then was far slower than it is now and the time it took to reach Vet 10 was just insane compared to getting Vet 16 today.

Now when you go into PvP easily 80-90% of the players are Vet16 with most of them running every ability they want on their bars. There was so little information available about the game out there at the time of the lighting patch, the vast majority of players didn't even understand how Impenetrable worked (broken as hell then).

PvP did swifty mature from the 1.3 to 1.5 patch but even in 1.5 there were a ton of players who simply did not understand how shields worked and such. Look at the skill level of players in any PvP videos from the 1.3-1.5 era. It was significantly less than it is from the videos you watch today.

I will agree that most people who PvPed back then, and I'll include myself, had no idea what they were doing. But Brian cant tell me that there weren't many people running around with passives unlocked because by the time you got to VR1, you pretty much had them all and there were entire guilds and groups who maxed out there characters in the first few weeks.

If I watch an old video I recorded from May, I do see a lot of level 34s and what not, but I see the same number of VRs in roughly the same proximity as I do today. I was in TSYM's ball group spamming AoEs before the lighting patch. So I think this explanation, while intuitive and part of the reason, it does not adequately account for the drastic performance issues.

The anti-botting measures and the decision to shift much of the work server side, however, sounds the more reasonable theory. I'm not sure why the game is 32 bit or why ZoS trusted our clients to do a lot of the work, but they clearly underestimated the amount of strain that a functioning and interesting recent MMO with anti-cheating measures will create. We don't want to go back to the days of rampant bots and I have zero interest in playing a game that limits calculations to basic attacks against a flat armor rating, so while all this theorizing is intellectually stimulating, it doesn't really make ESO what it was advertised as.

ZoS's passivity in hoping the PvP community will police itself and act in ways that lessen the strain on servers is naive and breeds unneeded toxicity and resentment. IMHO they deserve to be taken to task for their failure to recognize the crap their customers go through on a nightly basis and institute actual game-play mechanics that punish behavior that tanks the server and rewards behavior that does not. Their fanatical adherence to AoE Caps is an object lesson in what not to do for any future game designer.

The client is 32-bit likely because they're using several middleware platforms that are also 32-bit. I don't think I've heard or seen anything that can successfully integrate 32-bit and 64-bit architecture in the same product, it's one or the other.

That said 64-bit will not solve this game's problems. The ESO executable never approaches 2GB for me and it isn't lagging because a lack of memory addresses on your client.

I think the Client net-code was probably not as well thought out as they thought it was, perhaps they have novice network coders, that will be a mystery to us forever I fear.

gw2only1b14_ESO

Shunravi wrote: »

riverdragon72 wrote: »

lol all three factions should gather at keeps tomorrow at a set time and try what was done in angry joes video

Would be fun...

Be even more fun If Zeni partakes like the one time they did a year back in fact every single zeni employee so they can truly get a fulll effect and maybe even more of a sense of urgency on the issue .



*plus it may release some frustration a bit

Alomar

Oh boy those were the days, when ESO still had potential. Now, I expect nothing positive from ZOS, when trash goes in trash comes out.