Cyrodiil Lag & Bugs/Issues

Casterial

I never really post on forums specially since my last actual post went completely unanswered by devs and we continue to see those issues in-game.

• Cyrodiil Lag
  This is an on going issue in Cyrodiil. As you approach a battle you can go from a steady 90-130 latency and slowly watch it increase as you approach the battle. It can go up slowly or largely, sometimes 200-300 ping every 50-200 meters or so you move closer.
  
  Now what causes this lag?
  ->It can't be the zergs! No way!
  Actually, this is a large portion of this issue. Zenimax decided to make only 2 MAIN PVP campaigns that people will use, causing everyone to bundle up, we were nearly full on all campaigns and now each faction has about a 100-man wait on prime time. But what causes the lag, and how are zergs involved? Simply look at it in an engineering perspective:
  Imagine each player has some file, maybe a header, or a cpp, or some sort of storing file that keeps our data and updates frequently to return the user updated values. The player(user) has a set amount of data, buffs that increase skills, damage taken, done, and healing. But OP how does this cause a lag? Well as those zergs bundle up it is not a frame rate issue most get, but ping. The simple answer is imagine Healing Springs skills, a skill like this checks the users around the caster, restores health to those low (so it checked their health and then saw they were low healing them, moving onto the next) After that it continues to do this, around 12 is decreases the heal, going into another code that is AOECAP.cpp or AOECAP.h or some sort of storing mechanism. Now thats done this will go back to the caster and restore the magicka to the caster. That is a total of at least 12 or so files being located, accessed and ran through the system in just that little ball.
  
  ->Ok but get to the point!This can be the same with damage, it accesses files, does the same checks and removes health from the user also displaying damage. This is all ran through the server code and compiler causing a slight lag. This is the major part, however after doing that there is the issue with large groups together causing more ping as the server was built to handle it, but not in such large numbers causing an even larger latency issue. Basically too much running on the server side.
• Frame Rate
  FPS drop is happening as you see a different banner above an enemy head. It can drop about 10-20 FPS I call this the "EP/AD" lag due to being DC but it alerts me when an enemy is near, sometimes my FPS gets locked. Confirmed with 10 others.
  
  Moving on.....
  Skill Issues
• Wrecking Blow
  Wrecking Blow should be somewhat bashable, interuptible. Why? When you have someone constantly spamming it on you all you can do is block and walk through them. But there is not much you can do besides being defensive. This skill is also able to be animation canceled causing it to be cast twice in one frame of casting time.
• Radiant Destruction
  Radiant % increase works fine, the 20% increase based off magicka is fine. However, Radiant Destruction TOOL TIP is too high and should be toned down. Being a 10k AVERAGE tool tip on every Templar is too high. If two Templars spam the ability on one and they do not purge they are instantly dead.
• Dragon Leap
  Dragon leap half the time fails, uses half ultimate, sometime all the ultimate. Dragon Leaps fails about 2/5 the time.
• Gap Closers(general)
  They don't work on anything but smooth ground.
• Green Dragon Blood
  Percentage based heal, but if you have 1 health and pop it you get 10% of your health back. The heal is near useless in Cyrodiil.
• Eclipse
  Eclipse is reflected skills that ARE NOT listed as a reflective skill. Were Wolves skills, flurry, and other skills can still be reflected.
• Camouflage Hunter
  Camouflage Hunter still procs too often, and off different skills that should not be causing it to proc. Some gank specs can get 2 Camo Hunters to proc twice in 0.02seconds causing 5-15k damage each.
• Shields
  Some classes have high shields, these can be spammed. Increase cost per 5-10seconds could maybe be a fix? Possible just 3 seconds? If this isn't a fix, then fix and or buff other class shields, such as Blazing shield which is near useless on 80% Templar builds.
• Heals
  These can still be used through LOS. This should not be a thing, healing people inside a tower from outside is an ongoing issue.
• Chains (DK)
  Still causing CC immunity, but has no CC what so ever.
  Can also enter keeps with Chains
• Night Blade Execute(stamina)
  The tooltip is magical damage, not physical damage.
• Flawless Dawnbreaker
  This gives weapon damage, but does magic damage.
• CC
  Some skills cause you to slide across the floor, or fly mid air and be slowed.
• Ambush
  spammable, CC that holds you in your place for good. Most spam this. Issue with it? You can use it to get into keeps through doors.
• Mist form
  It soaks up damage well, however why is it being nerfed constantly?
• Werewolf
  Can jump into keeps still
• Dawnbreaker of Smiting
  The dot is happening nearly after the use even after the fix. Please re-look at it.
  
  
  Sets
• Vicious Death
  This procs on low health targets, not recently dead players. Also, this procs off of guards.

Go ahead and post what you guys think! Add on to this list, let it grow! Also go ahead and please let me know if any of these should not be on the list. Please keep this forum clean, and please also keep this forum respected. I do not wanna' see arguments. Just disagreements or agreements.

Thank you guys.
Casterial

SafiyerAmitora

Critable shields and potentially major/minor shields instead of raising the cost or putting on a cast time.

Igneous shield, its base skill, and the other morph could do with a bit of a boost shield-strength-wise (especially if paired with critable shields).

Molten whip (morph of lava whip) could be switched to cost stam and scale off max stam and weapon damage.

No aoe caps, both to reduce the amount of checks the server has to do (therefore reducing lag) and to make it easier for smaller groups to take on larger groups/zergs.

Green dragon blood, to make it more desirable especially when paired with builds that use health or stam pots often, could do with being granted minor fortitude and endurance instead of major.

BalgusFlinn

Since thieves guild DLC my FPS in cyrodill can drop to -> 0 <- . freaking zero man. 10-20 fps at the worst before this update. And this isn't 50v50, it happens in 10v10. of all the problems OP listed I think this is the worst.
Elder Slideshow Online is what this has turned into.

Merlight

@Casterial delete the "Cyrodiil lag" spoiler, that's not how compiled programs operate. The source code is compiled, binaries deployed on servers (patch day), loaded from disk when the server is started, and then runs from memory for the whole week until next maintenance.

puffy99

Elder Slidehow funny man...
So true.
The dungeons are also feeling the effects.
More blue screen problems, porting to another dungeon instance, dudes can't travel to you etc, lag bordering on crashing etc.

This weekend I felt it was held together by a strand of cotton candy..

Ffastyl

Casterial wrote: »

• CC
  Some skills cause you to slide across the floor, or fly mid air and be slowed.

This is an issue with the Roll Dodge mechanic rather than CC. Veteran PvEers are aware of and work around this with relatively little difficulty, hence no PvEers are complaining about it. Roll Dodge nullifies single target attacks for the duration of the animation but does not update player positioning until the end of the animation. For PvE this means Roll Dodging out of an AoE at the last second will result in getting hit by it, regardless of if graphically you are outside of range; so long as the animation has not finished, the player is considered to be standing where the roll started. For PvP this behaviour results in "sliding." The player is hit by a CC before the Roll Dodge has finished, so the CC's forced movement (stun, knockdown, knockback, etc.) are calculated based on the player's position at the start of the Roll Dodge and applied accordingly.

If by sliding you are referring to the state where the player is stuck in a knockdown state, unable to cast skills yet able to move until CCed again, then Roll Dodge has nothing to do with it. This specific case of "sliding" has only been recently observed in high latency battles, so resolving the lag may also resolve this glitch.

Casterial

Merlight wrote: »

@Casterial delete the "Cyrodiil lag" spoiler, that's not how compiled programs operate. The source code is compiled, binaries deployed on servers (patch day), loaded from disk when the server is started, and then runs from memory for the whole week until next maintenance.

I wont delete it, but this is a cause of lag. I understand this. I was going based off the engine itself and not the server.

Sirvandal

I am not a tech guy!

Can these issues being solved with a better performing server, more cores etc.? Or is it possible Zeni disconect Cyrodiil from the mega server (the whole server lags cause of Cyro) and set up a separate server for Cyrodiil with extreme high perfomance?

Ffastyl

Hardware is not a primary issue. Better optimized hardware can allow for better performance but only if the software is optimized to bring out that performance. A few months back the Devs stated on ESO Live that upgrading hardware will not increase performance by any worthwhile amount. They are digging through the game's code, looking for areas that can be optimized further or were poorly written.

Setting up parallel processors does allow for more power but at the cost of more overhead as each processor needs to communicate with the other, slowing down the whole rig. The fastest systems are ones with one part that can handle everything. Think of it as assigning a task to a group of people. More people does mean more thinking power and the ability to divide work into manageable loads, but it also slows the development process as the work from one person needs to be shared and verified by the other people in the group. Using more servers can help with performance in certain situations, but sooner or later the communication lines will become the bottleneck.

When ESO initially launched in 2014 many calculations were done client side, relaying the results to the megaserver. People who hacked the code could then cheat the game in several ways. Bots teleporting through solid ground and mining ore from beneath the map was an occurrence. In Update 4, more commonly known as the lighting patch, most of these calculations were moved to the server side to prevent such cheating. This increase in server stress, compounded by players gaining access to proc/AoE heavy abilities about the same time led to the immense lag and crashing issues of Cyrodiil. The lag we have today is far better than it was in the past, despite all the doomsaying. The Devs have been slowly rewriting the game's code for efficiency. And no, one cannot quickly rewrite code for efficiency. The lag is an ongoing issue with no silver bullet cure, just as the Devs say.

This is from a Comp Sci undergrad.

Casterial

Keep this forum going guys! We need some of these to be fixed.