Cyro/IC evaluation end of 2019?

tinythinker

Especially for those with a long view on the situation, how are the open world PvP zones? There are always new players and long time players leaving, complaints about lag, zergs, coordinated ball groups, getting one-shot, etc. Same old same old. But how full/active does the game feel for your platform/megaserver compared to one, two, or five years ago? How often do you find yourself in the types of battles you love the most. And so on. Are things steady? Improving? Declining?

There's always a lot of reactionary "sky-is-falling-ism" in MMORPGs from major patch to major patch, so it's hard to get a good read on things. But from a longer term perspective, how does it look?

Telel

Honestly khajiit wants to see only three things improve.

1) ZOS need to be far more open, and far less lenient, with how they handle abusive players. Faction lock slowed down some but the really hardcore disappointments continue to try and harass people out of the game. Even a temporary ban doesn't stop some as they already had, or went and got, secondary accounts.

2) They need to stop rewarding PVdoor hordes. Not to mention those who claim to be 'good' but who really just hop on to farm the few newbs remaining on the lowest population teams.

Make O-ticks a flat sum divided up amongst all affiliated players, give greater diminishing returns on D-ticks and taking out lower ranked/under CP opponents. Maybe even apply some diminishing returns for taking things belonging to the teams who are farther behind and or have no numbers to fight back with.

3) Server performance has gotten worse to the point to the point many of my guild simply don't enjoy playing past 6pm EST anymore. This continues to coincide with the arrival of certain elements. These tend to be those who've bragged about purposely stacking players to cause issues, or who just blob up and spam whatever is broken this patch.

If it's not the servers or the code then ZOS needs to take a very hard line stance on the people who are causing those issues.

If it is the servers and or code then need to fess up and give us something about how it's going to be fixed.

Other than that Telel is not all that bothered by things. The time they play in saw AD always having almost no actual players doing anything anyways. So having some proof we only have one, maybe two, bars and that the people going South are just bad is nice.

It's also pretty much proven that most of the people who wanted to freely switch sides definitely weren't doing it to 'even things out' . This makes laughing at them all the more refreshing, and common.

amir412

End the 3 banner war, and re-work the whole open world PVP.
Right now its a joke and cant really be compared to 4 years ago.

x48rph

Performance is as bad as ever during prime time. Seems every patch just makes it worse. It obviously has to do with not being able to handle the load since it performs much better in less populated campaigns.

I like the 3 faction war and taking keeps and stuff but I really wish they reworked it to not revovle around only taking keeps. Recently decided to finish gathering all the skyshards, complete all the dolmens , and a few other things I never got around to and it made me realize just how much wasted potential is there. The map is huge and there are so many nooks and crannies that would make for some really fun and interesting battles, places where using terrain and tactics would really matter but no one uses these areas cause there's no reason to go there. We just run from keep to keep, because those are all that matter, ignoring the other 75%% of the map. Such a waste

tinythinker

x48rph wrote: »

Performance is as bad as ever during prime time. Seems every patch just makes it worse. It obviously has to do with not being able to handle the load since it performs much better in less populated campaigns.

I like the 3 faction war and taking keeps and stuff but I really wish they reworked it to not revovle around only taking keeps. Recently decided to finish gathering all the skyshards, complete all the dolmens , and a few other things I never got around to and it made me realize just how much wasted potential is there. The map is huge and there are so many nooks and crannies that would make for some really fun and interesting battles, places where using terrain and tactics would really matter but no one uses these areas cause there's no reason to go there. We just run from keep to keep, because those are all that matter, ignoring the other 75%% of the map. Such a waste

I've littered the forums with specific ideas for using that potential but I won't bother repeating or linking to my own stuff or that posted by others. It's just not gonna happen

Alomar

Deader than dead, ya'll must be really bored to still be lagging.

tinythinker

Doesn't sound good

casparian

Summer 2018 we had three active campaigns. Though of course Vivec was the busiest, the no-cp and 7-day campaigns had reliable fights and regular participants. Now, every campaign but the main 30-day is completely dead, except for about 45 minutes every Saturday night when a couple guilds are waiting out their Kaal queue.

Performance is in general no better and sometimes even worse than it used to be. This patch I’ve had 1v1s on the edge of the map with a 4-second skill delay; my Onslaught killed an enemy magsorc from range after he streamed away.

Another difference between now and this time last year: when Cyrodiil got bad you could go to BGs. Now not even that is a good experience.

Sadly ZOS appears to have no interest in supporting the original vision of DAOC-style open-world, objective-based PVP. The only meaningful change they’ve made to Cyrodiil mechanics in years (other than the mostly-inconsequential destructible milegates thing) is the introduction of Volendrung, ESO’s equivalent of Fortnite’s mechs.

I want to believe, but things have only gotten worse since I started playing the game.

Kadoin

1. Worse lag
2. Worse balance
3. Hammer
4. Zergs being near indestructable because of skill changes and buffs to skills like purge no one asked for
5. Tanks being near indestructable because ZOS doesn't take feedback seriously and won't nerf some of these defensive and crutch sets like pariah and fury
6. Sustain and race changes affecting classes disproportionately leading cases to where if you pick a "bad" combination you will feel it in combat (which I could have sworn was what they wanted to address with the changes...)
7. HP% heals and heals in general that don't require investment into stats outperforming the heals that do because of "balance" changes

TLDR: play heavy/medium armor stam with a class hp% heal and copy build like 99% of Cyrodiil. When that doesn't work, just come to the forums and start complaining about a class with everyone else and try to get it nerfed. Oh and only play a mag class other than sorc if you like pain.

Shaloknir

Kadoin wrote: »

1. Worse lag
2. Worse balance
3. Hammer
4. Zergs being near indestructable because of skill changes and buffs to skills like purge no one asked for
5. Tanks being near indestructable because ZOS doesn't take feedback seriously and won't nerf some of these defensive and crutch sets like pariah and fury
6. Sustain and race changes affecting classes disproportionately leading cases to where if you pick a "bad" combination you will feel it in combat (which I could have sworn was what they wanted to address with the changes...)
7. HP% heals and heals in general that don't require investment into stats outperforming the heals that do because of "balance" changes

TLDR: play heavy/medium armor stam with a class hp% heal and copy build like 99% of Cyrodiil. When that doesn't work, just come to the forums and start complaining about a class with everyone else and try to get it nerfed. Oh and only play a mag class other than sorc if you like pain.

I do not agree with #2. In my opinion balance has improved massively over the years. I have seen over the years shield stacking sorcs, shield bashing ultimate spamming vampire dks and many other things that were borderline broken. So i would say balance has improved. I enjoy my pvp a lot these days. Only performance is an inconvenience.

gepe87

More keeps please. Its the only way to scatter population. Artifacts just dont work well.

Royaji

Population is only able to fill one campaign (two on PC EU but at what cost?). That's less than 400 players... Yeah, not good.

Joy_Division

tinythinker wrote: »

Especially for those with a long view on the situation, how are the open world PvP zones? There are always new players and long time players leaving, complaints about lag, zergs, coordinated ball groups, getting one-shot, etc. Same old same old. But how full/active does the game feel for your platform/megaserver compared to one, two, or five years ago? How often do you find yourself in the types of battles you love the most. And so on. Are things steady? Improving? Declining?

There's always a lot of reactionary "sky-is-falling-ism" in MMORPGs from major patch to major patch, so it's hard to get a good read on things. But from a longer term perspective, how does it look?

Tiny!

We've both been around long enough. ESO has always been marred by the issues you listed above, hence same old same old. The difference is now the game is not as fun to play, which has lessened people's collective tolerance for lag, zergs, imbalance, etc.

The new combat devs seem to think that percentage modifiers are more fun than skills that actually have an impact on gameplay, that cast-times on ultimates and average players being carried by high-health builds makes for exciting fights, that homogenizing every skill in the game and just using different colors on them make for class identity.

Zos has made the game so much less fun that I actually would rather play a game like Destiny 2 against an AI opponent as I can play interesting builds that actually have an meaningful impact on gameplay.

tinythinker

Joy_Division wrote: »

tinythinker wrote: »

Especially for those with a long view on the situation, how are the open world PvP zones? There are always new players and long time players leaving, complaints about lag, zergs, coordinated ball groups, getting one-shot, etc. Same old same old. But how full/active does the game feel for your platform/megaserver compared to one, two, or five years ago? How often do you find yourself in the types of battles you love the most. And so on. Are things steady? Improving? Declining?

There's always a lot of reactionary "sky-is-falling-ism" in MMORPGs from major patch to major patch, so it's hard to get a good read on things. But from a longer term perspective, how does it look?

Tiny!

We've both been around long enough. ESO has always been marred by the issues you listed above, hence same old same old. The difference is now the game is not as fun to play, which has lessened people's collective tolerance for lag, zergs, imbalance, etc.

The new combat devs seem to think that percentage modifiers are more fun than skills that actually have an impact on gameplay, that cast-times on ultimates and average players being carried by high-health builds makes for exciting fights, that homogenizing every skill in the game and just using different colors on them make for class identity.

Zos has made the game so much less fun that I actually would rather play a game like Destiny 2 against an AI opponent as I can play interesting builds that actually have an meaningful impact on gameplay.

That's too bad. I was always stubborn and played light armor Templar no matter what. And lazy so I always had the same mediocre crafted gear. But somehow it always worked well enough for AvAvA and pitched PvP battles if I was clever and well-positioned and had the patience to find the right openings. The idea of always having a way to be useful and always having a meaningful or enjoyable target meant you always had a spot on the team, even if way down on the depth chart.

I do think there is a genuine desire from ZOS to make Cyro/IC more fun and accessible (i.e. better performance, balance, chances for spontaneous action, etc.), it just seems to be elusive. Obviously they can't please everyone, and there's always someone happy or upset with any change made, but they have to have some metric for success other than standardization for its own sake. I recall the new combat skills team talking in the last year about getting rid of redundant effects on class abilities and kept thinking, "But, the fewer sources of something, the more you are forced to take a particular skill to get it."

Anyway, just trying to take the temperature. I know I'm not the only one who pops in here to get a sense of which way the wind is blowing.