Cyrodiil Performance Test and Double AP Event

BTHRZeroX

AzraelKrieg wrote: »

BTHRZeroX wrote: »

@ZOS_BrianWheeler Will this be for all systems and consoles?

All platforms.

KILLING4ALIVING wrote: »

@ZOS_BrianWheeler Will this apply to Imperial City as well?

Since IC is part of Cyrodiil, yes

thanks for the responce

mtwiggz

PandaIsAPotato wrote: »

Remove CP, return softcaps, k thx bai.

This guy knows what's up.

Ankael07

Takllin wrote: »

James-Wayne wrote: »

Takllin wrote: »

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

@MyNameIsElias We are aware of that behavior and will be adjusting values of Outposts, Resources and Keeps after the event.

Wait, why adjust it after? Why not with the event? Encourage us to test things other than 12k ticks.

But if there is enough people in the area of the flip doesn't it split that 6k up to everyone?

Nope. It's a base value.

NightbladeMechanics wrote: »

I feel like @Derra hasn't put much time into playing PvP without CP.

I also feel like he means that ZOS should have disabled all the passives and NOT the stat increases you obtain from individual stars to see how the passive/active components themselves contribute to lag separate from the stars.

That would be a correct proposal to make to improve ZOS' experiment, if that is indeed what he has been trying to articulate.

(I read through page 4. Forgive me if I missed a further development in this apparently circular conversation.)

Derra is a good player. I agree with him on this and with another thing he has said.

I've said this earlier and people are beginning to come in with the statements of "carried by CP". Anyone who has played both TF and Azura enough knows that players who perform well on either campaign perform well on the other.

Derra is also correct in that you can't trust the results of this test unless the outcome is that it is still laggy. You're not just hitting a switch and all of a sudden you have a controlled test environment. The "evidence" gathered during the test is going to be based on players playing completely differently from how they were before the test. If there is less lag you won't know if it was the play style changing or the CP passives (when you're trying to figure out if it's the CP passives). There are ways that players have for a long time advised to change the play style of PvP in an effort to reduce lag. Instead we get things like proxy det and barrier+purge nerfs. Just bandaids. The first "real" change they are proposing is to just shut off a game feature that the entire game (pvp included) is balanced around. For whatever reason this doesn't seem intelligent to me.

Edit: If the idea of the test is to see how non-cp affects campaigns like trueflame then that tells me already that they don't consider Azura's Star a good enough testing ground and that it doesn't see the type of action that you see on Trueflame. This is also true from my experiences playing on both. If you had two separate campaigns with different rule sets, equal populations (because pop caps), and different outcomes on server performance you would already have the necessary info to make any changes. Either this change is going to become permanent in the near future, or you can't say removing CP is why Azura performs better.

By ''players playing completely differently'' do you mean not being able to spam skills due to resource management issue? In that case it should be evidence enough.

Gilvoth

why do i smell a Perminant NON CP in ALL campaigns coming up ?

sly007

Alcast wrote: »

ComboBreaker88 wrote: »

Xbox one NA server Azuras star is DEAD. Nobody goes in there. The server runs better BECAUSE it has a lower population. Lol

EU PC AZURA is full in primetime. No lag

That's amazing. If that is the case, then this test will really give us a console players a taste of lagg free pvp. Azura's Star is utterly empty on ps4 NA.

Ishammael

Can we get dynamic ultimate to go with this slice of no CP???????

josh.lackey_ESO

The big problem with not having CP is resource management. It's not that suddenly people have to actually build for sustain -- a lot of people already build for sustain. But there are a number of builds, for example a stamblade ganker build, who can run absolutely no sustain at all. They move in, burst, get out. Losing CP passives leaves these builds relatively untouched. The builds hurt the most by loss of thief passives are actually the sustain builds! So it punishes people who do actually build for sustain, and leaves low-sustain builds more or less unaffected.

Put another way, the loss of thief passives do not affect all classes and play-styles equally. Some builds and classes are hurt much more than others. This is not something you can just adapt to. If you are a sustain build with CP, you will have to sacrifice significant damage or utility in order to sustain, where builds that don't need much sustain can stay fully focused on max damage. This is just making even more imbalance, where bursty gankers do equivalent damage to the CP campaign (since they lose 25% bonus damage, but you also lose a 25% damage reduction), but most builds will have to switch to very high-sustain builds just to keep from running out of resources all the time.

This is an absurd state of affairs. In typical ZOS fashion, it rewards the behaviour that needs to be minimized, and punishes behavior that should be promoted. It pushes builds more to the extremes. Just like how every mechanic added to bust up zergs has instead been subverted by ball zergs and made them even more powerful. (vd, proxy det, destro ult, aoe caps, ground oils, etc.)

One major underlying problem is that abilities in non-CP campaigns have cp160 base costs instead of Lv50 base costs. Those base costs are balanced around having cp passives. If you take away the passives, the base cost needs to be moved down.

• For example, the Lv50 base cost for Crystal Fragments is 3150. The cp160 cost is 4050. That's about a 29% cost increase -- roughly offset by cost reduction and increased recovery.
• Another example: BoL Lv50 is 3570 and at cp160 it's 4590. Again a 29% increase in cost.

Removing the CP without lowering the base costs creates a campaign where sustain is artificially harder to accomplish than it would be at a flat level 50 cap with no cps, and harder than it can be at any point as you are leveling up your character.

Don't get me wrong, I am not opposed to campaigns with unique mechanics. I think we ought to have a week with no stealth and see if there is less lag. Or a week with no roots/snares. If either such a campaign existed, I'd immediately home that campaign and never leave it.

The other really big problem is poisons. They are broken in general, but specifically cost poisons (ravage magicka/stamina; cowardice) need to be flat-out removed, permanently. Especially if they suspect that extra server calculations are causing performing issues. But at least for this test, poisons should be disabled, because it's going to be completely miserable otherwise.

kyle.wilson

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

Hey gang!

As you saw in Matt’s 2017 roadmap, we are making Cyrodiil performance evaluation and fixing a priority this year. We want to make sure that Cyrodiil is a great PvP experience for everyone. Over the last year, we’ve made some good strides towards refining server performance across all campaigns, and we will continue down that path.

When looking into Cyrodiil issues, we definitely see (both in-game and through monitoring) situations where client and server performance degrade significantly when under high load. The small incremental changes we’ve made over the last year have helped, but they alone are not enough. So, we’re going to change our strategy a bit – which is the point of this post.

Simply put, Azura’s Star (the non-Champion Point campaign) runs much better, more efficiently, and is overall a much better PvP experience than the standard campaigns such as Trueflame or Haderus. Now that we’ve had a significant population density in Azura’s Star, we strongly suspect what has been theorized for a long time: Champion Rank passives and abilities are causing too much server load, especially in situations like Keep battles where there are tons of players in one place.

Because of this, we are going to run a series of PvP performance tests, and because it is impossible to simulate PvP load on our internal test servers (or on PTS), we will do this on all live servers on the dates of February 27 – March 6. This is not something we take lightly, and it is important that we evaluate performance when the server is under real-world load situations.

Our first test will be set up as follows:

• For a period of one week, all Champion Points will be disabled on all Campaigns on all platforms and megaservers
• During this time, AP gains in all Campaigns will be doubled, both to compensate for lack of CP and also to incentivize players to PvP so we can record as much data as possible
• Campaign durations and leaderboards will not be adjusted during this week

We encourage all players to continue their PvP activities in their respective Home, Guest, and Friends campaigns – we will be taking feedback and monitoring data on a daily basis during this test, and look forward to reading your constructive posts about server performance during the time of the test.

The results of this test will determine the next course of action for refining Cyrodiil server performance. Thank you for your perseverance and patience – we thoroughly appreciate your time, efforts, and feedback!

Thanks again, and see you in Cyrodiil!

-Wheeler

So, basically you are punishing players that have played since launch and accumulated CP. Azura Star runs fine because few people want to play it after it went CP free. Maybe if you offered this AP bonus only in AS, it would encourage people to play there.

Lets take it one step further, and force everyone in pvp into non-set white gear with no traits. Because apparently your programmers have no f'ng clue what they are doing.

Every patch recently has messed the game up.

What is your excuse now about why Azura Star's lag was so bad before CP were ever around. Last week it was proc sets. I guess the homestead patch proved that wrong. Remember AS was the lagfest before you changed the campaigns.

Hexys

Removing CP but changing battle spirit to give players more damage/resources would be a change without much difference and very easy to apply, this will also be new player friendly but a reason to not progress after level 50 if your end-focus is PvP.

Can't make everyone happy, but we all share one issue and this is the reason they are testing it, that is lagg. So let's make it the best next week and hope ZOS can come up with a solution for lagg-free PvP!

Malveria

How are min-max PVPers meant to afford the sets they need to transition from CP builds to non-CP builds? Especially if they've had to run themselves broke for the current min-maxed builds they have? Legendary gear isn't cheap, some of the set pieces aren't cheap, and some people don't have the time to grind up a set they're only gonna use for 1 week.

Sorry if this has been mentioned but I don't have the time to trawl through 9 pages of what may or may not actually be constructive replies or trolling.

Whilst I commend the dev team for trying to find a problem with the system - although I must mention here that I have always been against the CP system from the onset - there are a lot of different factors in lag that I have seen. One of them being the way organised groups work and move through a much larger, disorganised zerg. Coordinated ulti dumps and healing spam has a lot to do with frame rate drop and latency.

Some of, or parts of, these organised groups probably won't be motivated to play on a non CP week due to the fact that they can't afford a min-maxed build. Especially if that set is only relevant for one week.

(inb4 people say 'well don't run a min-maxed build', you've missed the point of this post.)

stuartx13

But the lag was there before CP. In fact 3 month from lunch is when it really started right when lots of skill hit max lv.

DHale

I see this as a swing and a miss. You could make it five times ap and it would still not make me happy. I leveled many of my toons in the veteran system. I did not mind the veteran system and remembered all the lag before the cp system. The cp system was not something I asked for but I earned everyone of my 816 points. Why bother to get ap to get good gear when seducer will become my gear making all the damage gear I farmed and golded out useless.

Heavy and light attacking which is certainly low stress on the server is not my idea of "good" PVP. My brief and yawn inspiring foray into Azura will not be repeated.you have increased spell costs and nerfed cost reduction and regeneration so many times to "balance" the cp system. You keep a campaign open with cp... it will be packed. Haderus is never as laggy as TF on pc na. Why... because haderus is not as competitive as TF period.

Takllin

Ankael07 wrote: »

Takllin wrote: »

James-Wayne wrote: »

Takllin wrote: »

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

@MyNameIsElias We are aware of that behavior and will be adjusting values of Outposts, Resources and Keeps after the event.

Wait, why adjust it after? Why not with the event? Encourage us to test things other than 12k ticks.

But if there is enough people in the area of the flip doesn't it split that 6k up to everyone?

Nope. It's a base value.

NightbladeMechanics wrote: »

I feel like @Derra hasn't put much time into playing PvP without CP.

I also feel like he means that ZOS should have disabled all the passives and NOT the stat increases you obtain from individual stars to see how the passive/active components themselves contribute to lag separate from the stars.

That would be a correct proposal to make to improve ZOS' experiment, if that is indeed what he has been trying to articulate.

(I read through page 4. Forgive me if I missed a further development in this apparently circular conversation.)

Derra is a good player. I agree with him on this and with another thing he has said.

I've said this earlier and people are beginning to come in with the statements of "carried by CP". Anyone who has played both TF and Azura enough knows that players who perform well on either campaign perform well on the other.

Derra is also correct in that you can't trust the results of this test unless the outcome is that it is still laggy. You're not just hitting a switch and all of a sudden you have a controlled test environment. The "evidence" gathered during the test is going to be based on players playing completely differently from how they were before the test. If there is less lag you won't know if it was the play style changing or the CP passives (when you're trying to figure out if it's the CP passives). There are ways that players have for a long time advised to change the play style of PvP in an effort to reduce lag. Instead we get things like proxy det and barrier+purge nerfs. Just bandaids. The first "real" change they are proposing is to just shut off a game feature that the entire game (pvp included) is balanced around. For whatever reason this doesn't seem intelligent to me.

Edit: If the idea of the test is to see how non-cp affects campaigns like trueflame then that tells me already that they don't consider Azura's Star a good enough testing ground and that it doesn't see the type of action that you see on Trueflame. This is also true from my experiences playing on both. If you had two separate campaigns with different rule sets, equal populations (because pop caps), and different outcomes on server performance you would already have the necessary info to make any changes. Either this change is going to become permanent in the near future, or you can't say removing CP is why Azura performs better.

By ''players playing completely differently'' do you mean not being able to spam skills due to resource management issue? In that case it should be evidence enough.

If you haven't been mashing buttons since the game came out you've been doing things wrong.

Gilvoth

stuartx13 wrote: »

But the lag was there before CP. In fact 3 month from lunch is when it really started right when lots of skill hit max lv.

that is very true. and again when that lighting patch hit.
yes, i know they said it was not from that lighting patch, but, many of us here disagree with them.

Finisherofwar

There is already a no cp campaign. I enjoy my campaign as it is and if I wanted to play no cp I'd join the campaign set up for that specifically.

As I see it what you're saying in this post is that since u don't know how to fix the lag in cp campaigns you're just going to completely take away that experience.

I'm not ok with this.

WRX

Approved

Gilvoth

Finisherofwar wrote: »

There is already a no cp campaign. I enjoy my campaign as it is and if I wanted to play no cp I'd join the campaign set up for that specifically.

As I see it what you're saying in this post is that since u don't know how to fix the lag in cp campaigns you're just going to completely take away that experience.

I'm not ok with this.

i agree with you.
this is a very touchy subject for many of us.
i believe that eso should be rebuilt. starting first with combat and how Pve and PvP works. and then go from there.
allow us to keep the current build and play with it untill they are done.
but that is not going to happen.
instead they just cut out entire builds and then let us deal with it.
saves money and keeps jobs.

kyle.wilson

dwemer_paleologist wrote: »

Finisherofwar wrote: »

There is already a no cp campaign. I enjoy my campaign as it is and if I wanted to play no cp I'd join the campaign set up for that specifically.

As I see it what you're saying in this post is that since u don't know how to fix the lag in cp campaigns you're just going to completely take away that experience.

I'm not ok with this.

i agree with you.
this is a very touchy subject for many of us.
i believe that eso should be rebuilt. starting first with combat and how Pve and PvP works. and then go from there.
allow us to keep the current build and play with it untill they are done.
but that is not going to happen.
instead they just cut out entire builds and then let us deal with it.
saves money and keeps jobs.

If they mess this up and the players leave then it won't save jobs.

Gilvoth

they removed justice system,
they removed veteran levels,
they removed spell crafting,
this will be the fourth removal of serious game changing structure('s).
right ? or am i not understanding correctly ?

VycDarkshadow

I love the hypocrisy of the playerbase sometimes.

"Fix PvP Lag!" (Zenimax discovers procs critting adds server lag, and fixes it) "Don't change things in PvP!"
"Fix PvP Lag!" (Zenimax tries a temporary, week-long idea) "Don't change things in PvP!"

I seriously think you people whine just for the sake of whining.

Takllin

VycDarkshadow wrote: »

I love the hypocrisy of the playerbase sometimes.

"Fix PvP Lag!" (Zenimax discovers procs critting adds server lag, and fixes it) "Don't change things in PvP!"
"Fix PvP Lag!" (Zenimax tries a temporary, week-long idea) "Don't change things in PvP!"

I seriously think you people whine just for the sake of whining.

They, and no one here, ever said that proc sets critting added to server lag. What even?

TrueGreenSmoker

Soo.. Should I still run with light armour on my magicka sorc or heavy during the event?

AzraelKrieg

Finisherofwar wrote: »

There is already a no cp campaign. I enjoy my campaign as it is and if I wanted to play no cp I'd join the campaign set up for that specifically.

As I see it what you're saying in this post is that since u don't know how to fix the lag in cp campaigns you're just going to completely take away that experience.

I'm not ok with this.

This is purely a test to see if CP is the case with regards to lag in those CP campaigns.

kyle.wilson wrote: »

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

Hey gang!

As you saw in Matt’s 2017 roadmap, we are making Cyrodiil performance evaluation and fixing a priority this year. We want to make sure that Cyrodiil is a great PvP experience for everyone. Over the last year, we’ve made some good strides towards refining server performance across all campaigns, and we will continue down that path.

When looking into Cyrodiil issues, we definitely see (both in-game and through monitoring) situations where client and server performance degrade significantly when under high load. The small incremental changes we’ve made over the last year have helped, but they alone are not enough. So, we’re going to change our strategy a bit – which is the point of this post.

Simply put, Azura’s Star (the non-Champion Point campaign) runs much better, more efficiently, and is overall a much better PvP experience than the standard campaigns such as Trueflame or Haderus. Now that we’ve had a significant population density in Azura’s Star, we strongly suspect what has been theorized for a long time: Champion Rank passives and abilities are causing too much server load, especially in situations like Keep battles where there are tons of players in one place.

Because of this, we are going to run a series of PvP performance tests, and because it is impossible to simulate PvP load on our internal test servers (or on PTS), we will do this on all live servers on the dates of February 27 – March 6. This is not something we take lightly, and it is important that we evaluate performance when the server is under real-world load situations.

Our first test will be set up as follows:

• For a period of one week, all Champion Points will be disabled on all Campaigns on all platforms and megaservers
• During this time, AP gains in all Campaigns will be doubled, both to compensate for lack of CP and also to incentivize players to PvP so we can record as much data as possible
• Campaign durations and leaderboards will not be adjusted during this week

We encourage all players to continue their PvP activities in their respective Home, Guest, and Friends campaigns – we will be taking feedback and monitoring data on a daily basis during this test, and look forward to reading your constructive posts about server performance during the time of the test.

The results of this test will determine the next course of action for refining Cyrodiil server performance. Thank you for your perseverance and patience – we thoroughly appreciate your time, efforts, and feedback!

Thanks again, and see you in Cyrodiil!

-Wheeler

So, basically you are punishing players that have played since launch and accumulated CP. Azura Star runs fine because few people want to play it after it went CP free. Maybe if you offered this AP bonus only in AS, it would encourage people to play there.

Lets take it one step father, and force everyone in pvp into non-set white gear with no traits. Because apparently your programmers have no <snip> clue what they are doing.

Every patch recently has messed the game up.

What is your excuse now about why Azura Star's lag was so bad before CP were ever around. Last week it was proc sets. I guess the homestead patch proved that wrong. Remember AS was the lagfest before you changed the campaigns.

Azura's is usually pop-locked so you're wrong about it being empty.

kyle.wilson

On PC/NA AS is only poplocked during prime time gaming. at 00:41 est it was not. Even when it is "locked" I've never been in a queue for AS.
But, like usual TF is poplocked.



generally AS gains quite a few people when BWB fighting stagnates.

OtarTheMad

I applaud ZOS for trying to figure this out and I will definitely PvP more in order to help. I truly don't get why players are complaining. Would you rather ZOS not try at all? Continue to guess on their server that can't replicate the issue? I think we should all help out and fix this issue, maybe it's not CP and CP passives... but why not try?

Like someone else said I think at this point some are just complaining for the sake of complaining and that's just sad. I play in TF, Haderus, AZ and BwB and my builds don't change much for each so for players going crazy that they have to "farm new gear/mats" for the week of no CP I just laugh... try a different food... if you're magicka then just try use that purple drink Witchmother's Potent Brew... sustain solved w/ no gear changes.

Mojomonkeyman

Dear Brian,

the no cp campaigns have clear downsides balance wise. Such a test has to be prepared with balance changes going hand in hand. Don`t treat us like guinea pigs for tests which are not thought out to the end.

I personally experience the no cp campaign as the most imbalanced mess in eso. And I`m someone who was as much against the introduction of CP as it can get. But the game is balanced around them now for a while.

Proc sets are totally out of control in no cp, poisons, siege, and much more stuff as well - all those have increasing effects on solo play, which is already difficult in cp campaigns.

Skillful and fun gameplay? Not in Azurah. I`m as opposed to this test in its current form as it can get.

Regards

stuartx13

Well i love big Battles in eso.But why do you think most RTS games (i know this is a mmo) like bf2,3,4,1 only let you play 64 man servers.

Paraflex

Anyone who complains about all the time they spent farming CP and needing to use CP is a tool waiting to be farmed in the new batttlegrounds.

There's no way anyone can think CP and gradual CP increases will lead to a healthy PvP environment. The CP system will only make PvP worse over time.

PvE players should be happy they didn't disable your CP the same week for fighting trials..,,the amount of cry babies on the forums would be historic.

My votes for no CP in all campaigns. I hope this trial period goes well and it's the end of CP in all campaigns.

Joy_Division

Well I'm all for testing, but what exactly is ZoS going to do?

During the test week, they are going to find out that there is less lag (however, the reasons for less lag will not necessarily be CP related. Ques are going to be super packed with people testing this and looking for double AP that we aren't going to get the lag inducing events).

Does this mean we're going to have no CP in cyrodiil is that's the case?

A lot people here may be excited about that, but I'm apprehensive. Not that I like CP, I don't, I hate them too, but how are you exactly going to balance two different games? Or does this mean I;ll have to put up with OP poisons, gank builds being even more OP because they dont care about sustain, armor set bonuses designed for CP, having to farm TWO different sharpened weapons with your terrible RNG, etc.?

No thank you. If you are going to remove CP from PvP, remove it from the entire game.

bubblebuttboss

did you guys all start playing after cp was implemented?

*** was just as bad before cp, worse even.