Suggestion for high player density

Alaztor91

After reading the latest patch notes I noticed something:

Miscellaneous
General
Made additional fixes for the issue where your game could crash when changing zones or using a wayshrine.
Fixed an issue that could cause long or seemingly-infinite load screens in zones containing a high density of player characters.

I think I saw those same lines on last week patch or the homestead one, my point is, after 1T I noticed that many people started to complain about lag and/or fps drops when large quantities of players are present, especially in cities. That didn't happened that often before mainly because of the alliance restrictions, but since 1T launched we , in theory, see 3x(all 3 factions) the amount of people we used to see on our instances.

I don't know the technical details on how exactly the server or the client handles rendering player characters,etc. but I think ZoS could implement something like this to help alleviate the issue:

Character Model Limit and Character Model Quality

These 2 options would be in the graphic settings and would allow people to control the number of player character they can see and the quality of them.
-For example if both are set to full, you would see every player character and with max quality(textures,effects on weapons,etc)
-If both are set on the lowest setting you would see the 10 closest(numbers can be adjusted) player characters and with low quality(they would all use the same basic predefined armor and weapon models). You would always see the other players nameplates

These options would allow the player to control how much performance impact they get when alot of players are around, obviously it wouldn't work that well in cyrodill but I think it would help in cities,dolmens, everywhere where many players congregate in pve.

edit: I know that you see players as black silhouettes until they render, but afaik they all end up rendering eventually, my suggestions would prevent some players from rendering at all.

Tandor

Disabling spell/skill casting and pets inside city boundaries would also help those who have performance issues. Yes that would mean no dueling in cities and that would be beneficial to performance in itself, especially around wayshrines and crafting centres (although it's a lot less common now the novelty has worn off). In particular, people spamming AOE spells for no good reason can be a total nuisance.