What people should understand about Animation Canceling and the performance overhauls.

Thevampirenight

A disclaimer, when I made this threat I thought I was being helpful turns out I was wrong and fixing speculation from fact and well you guys if you see stuff like this or see what I have to do to fix or change things not to look that way please pm me here on the forums. Now I'm doing some edits to this and fixing it up right now. My issues with animation canceling isn't that its an exploit but the possibility that it could very well be hurting performance with the desynics and inadequacy with communication between the two. However that does not mean I want to see them remove it in fact. I'd rather them make it a base game feature reworking abilties to work as they do animation canceled by default and not having to animation cancel. Fixing the bug while also making the game act like everything is animation canceled. A win win for both sides so to speak.

Edited Version.
Animation canceling for as long as the game has been around has been an unintended feature of the game play but its a feature not an exploit because Zenimax has allowed it and endorced it from what I understand. Their stances support this. Plus what it takes to fix it requires reworking the entire combat system coding. That is a work a lot of work and a lot of manpower possibly to accomplish. Back in the day this game use to be able to handle so much. It use to be able to handle massive on massive pvp battle possibly between thousands upon thousands upon thousands of players. It use to be able to play a lot more smoothly.
But there was possibly one thing Zenimax possibly did not see coming and well it really hurt the games image so bad they took active steps to end it. The bots, once game came live the bot trains were everywhere. Going under maps flying up to gather resources preventing the common player from getting them to also farming the bosses preventing the players from killing the bosses. Game play was hindered by the Bots literally and there was gold spam in zone chats. Constant gold spam too. It was a gold sellers wet dream.

Over time they put in measures to hinder them and also reworked how the game functioned possibly adding in software to prevent them from flying around or going under the maps. As well as detecting them and not sure which one that was maybe the lighting overhaul patch. But that is when game performance started going down. The measures they were forced to take at the time started the game down the path of performance being downgraded. With many updates making the performance worse when they added the Cp system being one of the bigger ones possibly making it even worse. Then at some point they added in measures to prevent cheat engine which some players figured out to cheat the game and they took steps to prevent that. Given anti measures they have in place can really hinder the performance of the mega servers. Plus the many % based calculations and other things do not help at all it makes it worse worse and worse.

Aninmation canceling is canceling out abilities and improving dps going by many players that use it. Or other aspects of the game making combat seem faster then it would without it. Going by Gilliam Animation Canceling is desyncing yourself client with the server making it seem like their is more dps and there is not that is according to him. So I think there is truth to both what Gilliam was saying and also what most players and tend to say defending the animation canceling.

When the game and servers were not boggled down with code game could handle things a lot more like the old group finder and other things not to mention the old block system. These days the way things are in the game it just can't handle it all and all these % based calculations.

Basis of what I'm trying to say is the game can't handle things like it could when it launched. Many reasons, biggest is the protections they put into place and the cp system but also health desyncs caused by many game play factors like Animation canceling and other things making it worse as they need to rewrite the coding of the software. All the new percent based calculations don't help and coding like the alliance lock does not help. Which I suspect might be the reason why they only did one alliance locked campaign this time around.

List of fixes they have done and also fixes they are going to do or likely going to do to optimize performance.
1. Abilities only benefiting players if they are grouped with you. made to work only when in a group.
2.Reworking abilties that really cause harm to performance like Healing Springs.Very unpopular change but I imagine performance being the main reason for that.
3.Reworking Aoe which they are overhauling and will likely be the next big overhaul. (we see this when they release Greymoor.)
4.Deleting and reworking a lot of the coding to make server performance better they did that why we had to reinstall the game.
5. Reworked blocking system so it had a less effect on the overall performance of the game.
6.Cp system and combat performance overhaul is in the works. Meaning they are going to rework the entire cp system. I think its going to be done a lot like the racial passives. Most of the cps will likely be converted into Flat based calcuatlions instead of percentage. This would help a lot with performance as well, because all those % based calculations the server just has to many of them. Going more flat based and well game will able to handle the cp system and performance will go up in cp pvp campaigns which I'm sure are worse thne no cp calculations do to that very factor.
7.Cold Storage for accounts that are not active that way the servers don't have to calculate those that will help a lot.
8. Cast times.
9. Multi core support
10. Complete rewrite of the Looking for Group system.
Among many other things.


They are truly just beginning their changes. Group Finder rework, game code optimization clean up and block changes are just the start of the overhaul performance updates this game so desperately needs. Soon we will have an aoe rework and possibly other reworks including the much needed Cp rework which will be hopefully some time in third or fourth quarter.
Also here is the news thread being used to explain and tell us what they are doing to improve performance. At some point going by what Rich Said they will have a combat performance overhaul thread just like this one that will tell us what they are reworking with the combat system when it comes to performance.
https://www.elderscrollsonline.com/en-us/news/post/56681

I know many of you maybe upset about what they are doing and what they did to block but this has to be done there is not way getting around it. They are either going to have to make the game vulnerable again or make it optimized to work with the protections that keep cheaters and botters from overwhelming the game. It is no easy thing to do but at the end of it all the game will be a lot better performing and will be back on able on track for the many new things I'm sure will come . Got to have hope that things will be better which I'm sure they will be.

I am sorry about how I worded this thread and I do have to thank @StaticWave even though I don't agree with him on everything his thread has shown me that I needed to do better when it comes to communicating my opinions and not mix them up as they are facts and this is something I've been told about before in a discord I'm in.

dazee

TBH there isnt really any issue with healing springs. I heal vet DLC dungeons and honestly barely end up using it, I use breath of life way more since its a hell a lot more healing for one target, and usually the tank is the one taking huge quick damage. healing springs I use at most a couple times in a row on people when huge aoe healing is needed- not really that often in the dungeons I was running- and I use barrier on backbar to make people need less aoe healing.

Thevampirenight

dazee wrote: »

TBH there isnt really any issue with healing springs. I heal vet DLC dungeons and honestly barely end up using it, I use breath of life way more since its a hell a lot more healing for one target, and usually the tank is the one taking huge quick damage. healing springs I use at most a couple times in a row on people when huge aoe healing is needed- not really that often in the dungeons I was running- and I use barrier on backbar to make people need less aoe healing.

The issues with abilties like Healing Springs is that when in high combat group on group or zerg on zerg they get spammed along with other massive aoe effects and ultimates plus having all those % based calculation passives and cp points going on in the same general area. Its not pretty it causes what I will call a lag sink. These lag sinks are caused by multiple calculations a lot of particles going off at the same time plus these particles getting constantly spammed constantly in one area. If people know how they can easily overload the servers doing this.

As well as decrease the overhaul performance of the entire game. A certain Orcish Pvp Streamer mentioned in the Harrowstorm pts patch notes vid he did. Mentioning he was going to do something similar with the tank meta planning on making his orc army use all tank meta and making it so the servers feel it to get his message across that they need to fix it. I watched his live stream and that was what he was planning on doing.

There are actually players that know how to punish the server or how to do it and he is one of them. Old Healing springs from what I understand if everyone was using it or spamming it and a massive pvp group and if he decided to use it to overrealm what the servers can process the servers would feel it very much so. Pvp in that campaign would be basically unplayable because of it and it could branch out to other areas of the game.
Given I think he has enough of a pvp following on his twitch stream it is likely he could do it and others could follow in his foot steps causing very huge problems with performance. The game servers are vulnerable to this type of coordinated attack and all is needed is certain abilities already in the game.

Lysette

Thank you very much for explaining it in this detail and as well the history of development, thevampirenight. I really appreciate your input because it makes me understand, why they are doing that, before I did not see any benefit in it, because with high latency it is just turning the desync to the other side - not seeing it long before the effect happens, but long afterwards. Well,if it has to be done, it has to be done - any complain about it won't help then.

Aikar

Speaking as a Sr. Software Engineer, Software Architect, Systems Engineer, and many other hats, with a strong focus on performance and designing highly performant solutions to problems in architecture, including game servers, I can say most of this post is FUD and nonsense.

Only a few things you said are valid:

Reworking AoE's: Yes, they can rework AoE's to have less impact to performance. But doesn't require any impact to gameplay.
note they said:

AoE Ability Performance on the Server: This work focuses on making these ability types more specialized so that they are more efficient on server performance. Note: The overall player experience for these abilities (damage/functionality) should not change. This work is in progress and on track to release with Update 26.

I'll even tell you how!

Naive solution to Aoe's:
Find all Entities in the region, iterate them doing distance calculations to find who is in the radius, and for cone shapes, even more complex intersection math.

Issue: Testing most entities that will never be true due to extremely far distance.

Improvement: Sub regions within a zone breaking it into such as 16x16 segments, maintaining entity lists when an entity enters it.
Iteration only now has to look at current + 1 or 2 neighbors out for entity comparison.
Further improvements can then be made to buffer up spells in a short time period every 100ms, and then do AoE hit calculations concurrently over multiple cores.

Potential savings could be upwards to 90%+

Additional optimization: store by type, players, hostile, npcs. aoe's only look at valid type lists.
Benefit: healing spells don't even have to look at hostiles
Damage spells don't have to look at friendlies.

Plenty of ways to improve code without changing features.

Multicore support: already on roadmap. doesn't require gameplay changes.

Complete rewrite of the Looking for Group system. Already in progress/a lot done.

And comments on some of the bad points:

Cold Storage: Unless they have an architectural problem that offline players impact performance, which would be insanely sad.... then this is not going to help anything. The only thing offline players should have any impact on things is daily timers suck as resets and enlightenment.

But I've personally never seen anyone say "omg that enlightenment delay needs to be fixed now!!!" or "My dailies aren't resetting"

This is 2020.... computers can do math pretty dang well..... Percentages on combat is NOT the source of lag... seriously where in the world did you get that to think that was the issue?

There are architectural level issues that have bad scalability, and that is what they have to fix.

Changing dmg *= 1.2343213213 ; to dmg += 200; would be an insane suggestion.

If they are on some servers from the 90's that don't have cpu's capable of simple math..... then yeah that's the real issue.

AC is NOT the source of the issue either.... Faster actions is outscaled by simply having more players playing too.

precambria

THEY actually found a way to NERF SKILL, well I'll be damned.... it really does feel like my actions per second are capped now and basically slow mode has been activated, I didn't use animations cancelling to much but bar swap and chaining the right skills with light weaving made a huge difference. It honestly feels like they just made it so that people who were capable of being many times faster of the rest were brought down to the "average" level with a general slowing down of combat and skill responsiveness.

Sanctum74

It’s funny to see people write these long winded comments and or threads about how animation canceling is somehow causing the lag, but let’s be honest AC has been around since the beginning of the game so how did it all of a sudden magically cause this lag?

The only thing that has changed is proc sets, costumes, flashy mounts, Cp increases, and new classes like warden and necro that have flashy animations that cause more server calculations.

I get it it you don’t like ac, than fine don’t use it, but please stop blaming it for the cause of lag

Noxavian

precambria wrote: »

THEY actually found a way to NERF SKILL, well I'll be damned.... it really does feel like my actions per second are capped now and basically slow mode has been activated, I didn't use animations cancelling to much but bar swap and chaining the right skills with light weaving made a huge difference. It honestly feels like they just made it so that people who were capable of being many times faster of the rest were brought down to the "average" level with a general slowing down of combat and skill responsiveness.

Cancelling an animation isn't skill.

Just how glitching games back in the day isn't considered skill.

Animations are there for a reason. If they didn't want people to see them, then we'd be playing a text-based MMO.

Thevampirenight

Aikar wrote: »

Speaking as a Sr. Software Engineer, Software Architect, Systems Engineer, and many other hats, with a strong focus on performance and designing highly performant solutions to problems in architecture, including game servers, I can say most of this post is FUD and nonsense.

Only a few things you said are valid:

Reworking AoE's: Yes, they can rework AoE's to have less impact to performance. But doesn't require any impact to gameplay.
note they said:

AoE Ability Performance on the Server: This work focuses on making these ability types more specialized so that they are more efficient on server performance. Note: The overall player experience for these abilities (damage/functionality) should not change. This work is in progress and on track to release with Update 26.

I'll even tell you how!

Naive solution to Aoe's:
Find all Entities in the region, iterate them doing distance calculations to find who is in the radius, and for cone shapes, even more complex intersection math.

Issue: Testing most entities that will never be true due to extremely far distance.

Improvement: Sub regions within a zone breaking it into such as 16x16 segments, maintaining entity lists when an entity enters it.
Iteration only now has to look at current + 1 or 2 neighbors out for entity comparison.

Potential savings could be upwards to 90%+

Additional optimization: store by type, players, hostile, npcs. aoe's only look at valid type lists.
Benefit: healing spells don't even have to look at hostiles
Damage spells don't have to look at friendlies.

Multicore support: already on roadmap. doesn't require gameplay changes.

Complete rewrite of the Looking for Group system. Already in progress/a lot done.

And comments on some of the bad points:

Cold Storage: Unless they have an architectural problem that offline players impact performance, which would be insanely sad.... then this is not going to help anything. The only thing offline players should have any impact on things is daily timers suck as resets and enlightenment.

But I've personally never seen anyone say "omg that enlightenment delay needs to be fixed now!!!" or "My dailies aren't resetting"

This is 2020.... computers can do math pretty dang well..... Percentages on combat is NOT the source of lag... seriously where in the world did you get that to think that was the issue?

There are architectural level issues that have bad scalability, and that is what they have to fix.

Changing dmg *= 1.2343213213 ; to dmg += 200; would be an insane suggestion.

If they are on some servers from the 90's that don't have cpu's capable of simple math..... then yeah that's the real issue.

AC is NOT the source of the issue either.... Faster actions is outscaled by simply having more players playing too.

Its the unique way their engine or servers are handled. I mentioned in my post they had to do things like put in code and other stuff that hinders the performance as the response to bots. Well that is enough where % based calculations and there are so many of them in the game. It Can and will effect the over all performance especially if there is millions of players and accounts.

The cold storage basically will put into storage player characters and accounts locking them away until someone decides to come back to the game. Basically they putting a lot of data that their servers have on it. Which is why they are doing this by the way so they can reduce the strain of that data and well given there might be millions of accounts not being used right now. That boggles down the log in system and character load in going by what I'm understanding.

They explained it in their performance roadmap.
Account Database “Cold Storage”
There are millions of accounts in our database. The goal of this task is to split the character database into “active” and “inactive” shards to remove the need to pool all the character records for all logins
User Experience: Faster account login and character loads
NOTE: Players logging in for the first time after being inactive for a few years will notice an initial longer load while their account is transferred from inactive to active

oXI_Viper_IXo

Thevampirenight wrote: »

It is no easy thing to do but at the end of it all the game will be a lot better performing and will be back on able on track for the many new things I'm sure will come . Got to have hope that things will be better which I'm sure they will be.

😁😂🤣

Lysette

Timers should not be an issue, because a normal efficient implementation of timers are just using 1 actual global timer, basically derived from the system time - lets call it G - basically an long integer. Every other timer is as well just a number and not a real running timer - basically the end time of the process - lets call it X.

now:

setting the time is: X = G + length
timer is still active is: X > G
time remaining is. X - G

Simplest math and you just have to check for it, if the information is required - which it is not in cold storage or when the player is offline. if ZOS would use real timers, this would be silly and I doubt they are that silly.

Thevampirenight

Sanctum74 wrote: »

It’s funny to see people write these long winded comments and or threads about how animation canceling is somehow causing the lag, but let’s be honest AC has been around since the beginning of the game so how did it all of a sudden magically cause this lag?

The only thing that has changed is proc sets, costumes, flashy mounts, Cp increases, and new classes like warden and necro that have flashy animations that cause more server calculations.

I get it it you don’t like ac, than fine don’t use it, but please stop blaming it for the cause of lag

I'm going by what they have said, I'm fine with animation canceling. But after hearing Gilliam explain it it make sense. Animation canceling is by no means the only source of the issues its part of the larger whole of the issues that have to be addressed. If they can rework animation canceling so it doesn't stress out the servers I'm all for it. If they can rework animations so they actually fire off abilties faster I'm more for that even. There is many solutions they can come up with. To make the combat fast past rewarding and also not clunky. But they need to get a lid on the whole picture of performance issues and the biggest detractors for it.

The Devs have said that blocking was part of that issue so they had to rework it like they did with Sprint. So it was one of those issues they had to address. They wouldn't have reworked it if they didn't have to do so.

Dusk_Coven

Thevampirenight wrote: »

Plus the many % based calculations and other things do not help at all it makes it worse worse and worse.

I do remember a sweeping race change patch where dynamic values were adjusted to static values. Was it explained as an aid for the server? I honestly don't remember but fewer dynamic calculations to help the server would be plausible.

idk

The OP of the thread linked below has a much clearer explanation about the client-side desync OP is trying to explain. Unfortunately, OP is including a lot of irrelevant information which is why I provided this link by a Zos dev who used to be a top player in ESO.

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/511531/how-the-new-block-is-system-going-to-work-explained-by-zos-gilliams-livestream-twitch-video-clip/p1

Dusk_Coven

Noxavian wrote: »

Just how glitching games back in the day isn't considered skill.

Deliberately taking advantage of a glitch over and over again, such as https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/502195/dungeon-explorer-costume-removal, is commonly known as an "exploit".
Deliberately glitching anything, especially with server impact, should be considered as being against TOS.

EIGHTS

It's no longer that lag as before. I think it solve one kind of lag.
As I said, someone can't play ESO without cheating. XD

Thevampirenight

idk wrote: »

The OP of the thread linked below has a much clearer explanation about the client-side desync OP is trying to explain. Unfortunately, OP is including a lot of irrelevant information which is why I provided this link by a Zos dev who used to be a top player in ESO.

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/511531/how-the-new-block-is-system-going-to-work-explained-by-zos-gilliams-livestream-twitch-video-clip/p1

Yeah at times I suck at explaining things and should be more clearer. You are right I should have not included anything irrelevant information.
Here is a thread that was posted explaining the new changes as well that I almost forgot about. Where ZOS_BrianWheeler
explains they changes they were making days before they released the pts patch notes.
https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/comment/6538035#Comment_6538035

Siohwenoeht

Animation cancelling DOES NOT let you violate the GCD and therefore cannot possibly do what you imply.

As has been stated on the countless other threads, ani-cancel cuts the end of the animation off AFTER the effect of the skill/light attack is registered. You cannot fire multiple skills in one global cool down.

You can cancel a light attack (1sec cool down) with a skill (1sec GCD) and cancel SOME skills with bash. The limitations imposed by the GCD is inviolate.

Ani-cancel has little to no impact on server load because the calculations have already occurred and the actions registered by the server BEFORE the animation finishes.

We can complain about client to server desyncs, but they are not caused by animation cancelling. The server knows what has registered and it's your client that hasn't received the information that makes the appearance of skills landing all at once.

rager82b14_ESO

Animation should matter in the game. To make every skill every spell be the same is boring. GCD should not be the only factor when picking what skill you use.

Gilvoth

animation canceling was never intended, it should be removed from eso.
i enjoyed it for a short time and i do it and use it.
however, as i said earlier in another thread it bears repeating here as well on this same subject because we know what animation canceling is and we know how to do it, infact you cannot play eso without animation canceling because it happens automatically and it is Very easy to perfect it and work with it. but i dont like it and i see it as a glitch and a plague and it does add stress to the servers and ruins gameplay. it also makes fighting others in pvp problematic and opens the doors to glitches that obviously were never intended.
it needs to be removed.

Thevampirenight

EIGHTS wrote: »

It's no longer that lag as before. I think it solve one kind of lag.
As I said, someone can't play ESO without cheating. XD

Well given animation canceling is an unintended feature. Its not technically exploiting as Zenimax says its okay. But it does not mean it doesn't have any impact at all when to many players do it. Here is the thing some abilties really really take to long to animate, sorcerer shards and the warden bear animation casting. I do think the animations all need to be reworked and those abilties to be reworked to naturally cast faster in the same manner and speed when being animation canceled. So you don't have to anmation cancel as the game fires off those abilities as fast as animation canceling. What I'm saying is animation canceling should be built into the game itself as an official feature. That does not need to do a light attack for it to work.

Some abilties really do and should have cast times though. Abilities that bring down the performance so much like certain healing abilties. Should have a two or three second cast time or cool down this company seems to be against abilties cool downs but have used cast times on certain powers.
Animation canceling is still going to be there, I think they do support it enough to allow players to do it. I think one load screen tip even had some advice on how to perform an animation cancel.

That does not mean there isn't behind the scenes issues the animation canceling feature as some might call it that can cause performance drops. Just because its not seen on live does not mean its not impacting the servers. So its not that they are cheating, as Zenimax seems to like high passed combat. Which is why we don't have actual cool downs on abilties and can just keep firing them off. Only thing close to a cool down on abilties is the cast times. Which I do think there should be more of not all abilties but the ones most damaging to performance for example Healing Springs.

All group play abilties that only effect players in a group should have cast times as well all and some highly performance degrading aoe abilties should have cast times. Spamables should not have cast times as they are built for well being spammed. There has to be some cool down or limit on performance killing abilties. Not all but the worst offenders. Cast times would help with issues when it comes to downgrading performance in the areas where abilties are being spammed and causing lag sinks. Making it so those players will have to cut back on spamming these abilties non stop while zerging. Would help for sure when it comes to Cyrodiil performance.

Ankael07

Why is the only argument against AC is always ''it wasnt intended'' like thats a bad thing? You know what else wasnt intended? Discovery of penicillin. But it turned out to be a lifesaver for countless people.

So many people dont have the necessary muscle memory to execute AC and thats okay. But that doesnt give you the right to butcher gameplay fluidity for many other people

Thevampirenight

Ankael07 wrote: »

Why is the only argument against AC is always ''it wasnt intended'' like thats a bad thing? You know what else wasnt intended? Discovery of penicillin. But it turned out to be a lifesaver for countless people.

So many people dont have the necessary muscle memory to execute AC and thats okay. But that doesnt give you the right to butcher gameplay fluidity for many other people

Well given how down hill Eso Performance has become for many players it might either have to come down to fluidity
allowing animation canceling to continue on with no changes and allow bad performance to continue to drive many players away or fixing performance combat may be less fluid but have a playable game in return maybe even enticing players back and new players into the game. As time goes on as performance improvements overhauls are added the game it could even feel more fluid. Maybe not as before but well closer to it. Fluidity might never be the same but at the same time it could come closer to it.
This game has real limitations, there is a reason why we don't have capes or cloaks. Game can't handle it and there is many other limitations as well so they have to work within those limitations. Even if we like it or not they have to do work with those limits of the game engine and those limits actually put into place what they can and can not do with it. So I do think players should keep this in mind and that includes myself of course. Even if we really want something the game might not be able to handle it.
Its not about muscle memory, or about butchering gameplay fluidity this is about performance and play ability of the product.

Siohwenoeht

Thevampirenight wrote: »

Ankael07 wrote: »

Why is the only argument against AC is always ''it wasnt intended'' like thats a bad thing? You know what else wasnt intended? Discovery of penicillin. But it turned out to be a lifesaver for countless people.

So many people dont have the necessary muscle memory to execute AC and thats okay. But that doesnt give you the right to butcher gameplay fluidity for many other people

Well given how down hill Eso Performance has become for many players it might either have to come down to fluidity
allowing animation canceling to continue on with no changes and allow bad performance to continue to drive many players away or fixing performance combat may be less fluid but have a playable game in return maybe even enticing players back and new players into the game. As time goes on as performance improvements overhauls are added the game it could even feel more fluid. Maybe not as before but well closer to it. Fluidity might never be the same but at the same time it could come closer to it.
This game has real limitations, there is a reason why we don't have capes or cloaks. Game can't handle it and there is many other limitations as well so they have to work within those limitations. Even if we like it or not they have to do work with those limits of the game engine and those limits actually put into place what they can and can not do with it. So I do think players should keep this in mind and that includes myself of course. Even if we really want something the game might not be able to handle it.
Its not about muscle memory, or about butchering gameplay fluidity this is about performance and play ability of the product.

I've asked before, but where is the direct evidence that animation cancelling has anything to do with poor performance? All either side has is conjecture because no one knows the exact coding. Some of us have basic or better understanding of how server calculations work in general, and would bet that cancelling animations which have already registered their effect before the animation ends adds exactly zero load to the server.

I could say for instance; having no player collision which allows people to stack on top of each other, forcing the server to constantly evaluate which player a given ability is hitting would have much more impact than the math required behind activating abilities and light attacks/block in rapid succession.

But without any evidence to back up that claim, it's just an opinion, as is what you say causes excess server load.

precambria

Noxavian wrote: »

precambria wrote: »

THEY actually found a way to NERF SKILL, well I'll be damned.... it really does feel like my actions per second are capped now and basically slow mode has been activated, I didn't use animations cancelling to much but bar swap and chaining the right skills with light weaving made a huge difference. It honestly feels like they just made it so that people who were capable of being many times faster of the rest were brought down to the "average" level with a general slowing down of combat and skill responsiveness.

Cancelling an animation isn't skill.

Just how glitching games back in the day isn't considered skill.

Animations are there for a reason. If they didn't want people to see them, then we'd be playing a text-based MMO.

Yeah it is skill, it takes practice timing and it was not a glitch it's a function that was intended to be there to allow transition from blocking to acting to allow for realistic combat/fast paced gameplay, was it's function to be a way to game the system to do more pve DPS no it wasn't that was just a creative application of how combat in this game is supposed to play. btw I can still do it, but it's pointless because even without doing it your skills are now capped at a much slower rate which has basically ruined the feel of the game (I pray that I am wrong and it is just server side lag, but with 80ms it still feels like garbage)

I didn't really use block cancel very much TBH I mostly PvP which was a bit laggy for that, it feels now like they made the actual input of skills and the ability to play with multiple bars at a fast rate no longer work, the changes clearly extend beyond block cancel alone it slowed down the entire game and is causing things to get stuck constantly. I can't execute people half the time now and it feels like slow motion, my actual damage has gone down up to 500k in a BG, I did NOT clutch off block cancels to be fast I relied on my skill firing on input and being able to chain one action into another with weaving which does not work anymore. Either this is lag and hopefully I will wake up one day and it's gone, or they broke the game to make it slower and those who were not fast to begin with will not notice the change as much.

I played this game in closed beta , it's going to be impossible to adjust to suddenly playing a turn based game where my train of thought is derailed by the input lag, this was supposed to be a performance improvement and it IS NOT LOL the game is still dropping frames and lagging out at the cost of it being fun to play.

Thevampirenight

Siohwenoeht wrote: »

Thevampirenight wrote: »

Ankael07 wrote: »

Why is the only argument against AC is always ''it wasnt intended'' like thats a bad thing? You know what else wasnt intended? Discovery of penicillin. But it turned out to be a lifesaver for countless people.

So many people dont have the necessary muscle memory to execute AC and thats okay. But that doesnt give you the right to butcher gameplay fluidity for many other people

Well given how down hill Eso Performance has become for many players it might either have to come down to fluidity
allowing animation canceling to continue on with no changes and allow bad performance to continue to drive many players away or fixing performance combat may be less fluid but have a playable game in return maybe even enticing players back and new players into the game. As time goes on as performance improvements overhauls are added the game it could even feel more fluid. Maybe not as before but well closer to it. Fluidity might never be the same but at the same time it could come closer to it.
This game has real limitations, there is a reason why we don't have capes or cloaks. Game can't handle it and there is many other limitations as well so they have to work within those limitations. Even if we like it or not they have to do work with those limits of the game engine and those limits actually put into place what they can and can not do with it. So I do think players should keep this in mind and that includes myself of course. Even if we really want something the game might not be able to handle it.
Its not about muscle memory, or about butchering gameplay fluidity this is about performance and play ability of the product.

I've asked before, but where is the direct evidence that animation cancelling has anything to do with poor performance? All either side has is conjecture because no one knows the exact coding. Some of us have basic or better understanding of how server calculations work in general, and would bet that cancelling animations which have already registered their effect before the animation ends adds exactly zero load to the server.

I could say for instance; having no player collision which allows people to stack on top of each other, forcing the server to constantly evaluate which player a given ability is hitting would have much more impact than the math required behind activating abilities and light attacks/block in rapid succession.

But without any evidence to back up that claim, it's just an opinion, as is what you say causes excess server load.

Well given they went out of the way to make the block changes a big focus of this very big performance update they did where we had to reinstall the game. Plus what Gilliam said about Desyncs, I looked up the word on Wikipedia and it redirects straight to the lag definition page. https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Desync&redirect=no
Not only what Gilliam said on his video but also what Brian wheeler had to say.

Block is an ability that everyone can use at any time, which means it can create a lot of traffic for the server to handle. In our continued efforts to improve performance, we are adjusting how the ability works under the hood. You will still be able to do everything you used to with Block. What you’ll notice is animations will blend a bit differently out of a “block cancel”, but the effectiveness of an ability will remain and function the same; the ability will still fire when “block cancelled” but you won’t have any “dead time” before the global combat cooldown ends. This should also get rid of a few health desync issues when getting killing blows with abilities that have been triggered after a block cancel. By refactoring Block much the same way we did with Sprint in the previous Update, we expect the usage of that ability to be more performant.

Going by GIlliams video, I think its the dead time meaning possibly the health desync between client and server being the thing they fixed with it. So what they fixed was something people really like about annimation canceling faster casting times and faster damaging. They still left in the animation canceling but you won't get extra damage from doing so. All it will do I believe will shorten some abilties animation times allowing them to fire faster. But it will no longer cause the client to be desynced from the server when you block cancel.

Also looked up Dead time and it basically means
noun
time in which someone or something is inactive or unable to act productively.
"the dead time spent on airplanes and buses"
PHYSICS
the period after the recording of a particle or pulse when a detector is unable to record another.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_time

So what they did is made it so the two have to communicate they can't just desync out. This means they fixed the majority of lag/desyncs that made block canceling work. Now abilties fire off the same and communicate the same even if animation canceling so you no longer get that extra damage when it comes to animation canceling. So basically it works the same as if your not using animation canceling. When it comes to block animation canceling abilties. At least from what I understand that is what they did with it.

Tigerseye

Ankael07 wrote: »

Why is the only argument against AC is always ''it wasnt intended'' like thats a bad thing? You know what else wasnt intended? Discovery of penicillin. But it turned out to be a lifesaver for countless people.

You seem to make that same analogy in every thread on this subject...

If you are so superior to everyone else, maybe think of a new one.

Siohwenoeht

Thevampirenight wrote: »

Siohwenoeht wrote: »

Thevampirenight wrote: »

Ankael07 wrote: »

Why is the only argument against AC is always ''it wasnt intended'' like thats a bad thing? You know what else wasnt intended? Discovery of penicillin. But it turned out to be a lifesaver for countless people.

So many people dont have the necessary muscle memory to execute AC and thats okay. But that doesnt give you the right to butcher gameplay fluidity for many other people

Well given how down hill Eso Performance has become for many players it might either have to come down to fluidity
allowing animation canceling to continue on with no changes and allow bad performance to continue to drive many players away or fixing performance combat may be less fluid but have a playable game in return maybe even enticing players back and new players into the game. As time goes on as performance improvements overhauls are added the game it could even feel more fluid. Maybe not as before but well closer to it. Fluidity might never be the same but at the same time it could come closer to it.
This game has real limitations, there is a reason why we don't have capes or cloaks. Game can't handle it and there is many other limitations as well so they have to work within those limitations. Even if we like it or not they have to do work with those limits of the game engine and those limits actually put into place what they can and can not do with it. So I do think players should keep this in mind and that includes myself of course. Even if we really want something the game might not be able to handle it.
Its not about muscle memory, or about butchering gameplay fluidity this is about performance and play ability of the product.

I've asked before, but where is the direct evidence that animation cancelling has anything to do with poor performance? All either side has is conjecture because no one knows the exact coding. Some of us have basic or better understanding of how server calculations work in general, and would bet that cancelling animations which have already registered their effect before the animation ends adds exactly zero load to the server.

I could say for instance; having no player collision which allows people to stack on top of each other, forcing the server to constantly evaluate which player a given ability is hitting would have much more impact than the math required behind activating abilities and light attacks/block in rapid succession.

But without any evidence to back up that claim, it's just an opinion, as is what you say causes excess server load.

Well given they went out of the way to make the block changes a big focus of this very big performance update they did where we had to reinstall the game. Plus what Gilliam said about Desyncs, I looked up the word on Wikipedia and it redirects straight to the lag definition page. https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Desync&redirect=no
Not only what Gilliam said on his video but also what Brian wheeler had to say.

Block is an ability that everyone can use at any time, which means it can create a lot of traffic for the server to handle. In our continued efforts to improve performance, we are adjusting how the ability works under the hood. You will still be able to do everything you used to with Block. What you’ll notice is animations will blend a bit differently out of a “block cancel”, but the effectiveness of an ability will remain and function the same; the ability will still fire when “block cancelled” but you won’t have any “dead time” before the global combat cooldown ends. This should also get rid of a few health desync issues when getting killing blows with abilities that have been triggered after a block cancel. By refactoring Block much the same way we did with Sprint in the previous Update, we expect the usage of that ability to be more performant.

Going by GIlliams video, I think its the dead time meaning possibly the health desync between client and server being the thing they fixed with it. So what they fixed was something people really like about annimation canceling faster casting times and faster damaging. They still left in the animation canceling but you won't get extra damage from doing so. All it will do I believe will shorten some abilties animation times allowing them to fire faster. But it will no longer cause the client to be desynced from the server when you block cancel.

Also looked up Dead time and it basically means
noun
time in which someone or something is inactive or unable to act productively.
"the dead time spent on airplanes and buses"
PHYSICS
the period after the recording of a particle or pulse when a detector is unable to record another.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_time

So what they did is made it so the two have to communicate they can't just desync out. This means they fixed the majority of lag/desyncs that made block canceling work. Now abilties fire off the same and communicate the same even if animation canceling so you no longer get that extra damage when it comes to animation canceling. So basically it works the same as if your not using animation canceling. When it comes to block animation canceling abilties. At least from what I understand that is what they did with it.

But you cannot "speed up" damage. The damage is registered before the animation ends, within the GCD unless it is a cast time ability. Even most channels "tick" meaning the damage is registered at intervals and if cancelled by block or roll dodge, only the registered damage remains, it does not add what ever damage didn't tick.

You cannot use ani-cancelling to increase or decrease the time an ability takes to register it's effect.

Even in the post from Gilliam, he states that this is not removing block cancelling, but adjusting when animations end. You are still able to block cancel and have the previous ability's effect register.

He also stated that the desync was because of the client lagging behind the server. Server performance is separate from server-client desync.

Thevampirenight

Siohwenoeht wrote: »

Thevampirenight wrote: »

Siohwenoeht wrote: »

Thevampirenight wrote: »

Ankael07 wrote: »

Why is the only argument against AC is always ''it wasnt intended'' like thats a bad thing? You know what else wasnt intended? Discovery of penicillin. But it turned out to be a lifesaver for countless people.

So many people dont have the necessary muscle memory to execute AC and thats okay. But that doesnt give you the right to butcher gameplay fluidity for many other people

Well given how down hill Eso Performance has become for many players it might either have to come down to fluidity
allowing animation canceling to continue on with no changes and allow bad performance to continue to drive many players away or fixing performance combat may be less fluid but have a playable game in return maybe even enticing players back and new players into the game. As time goes on as performance improvements overhauls are added the game it could even feel more fluid. Maybe not as before but well closer to it. Fluidity might never be the same but at the same time it could come closer to it.
This game has real limitations, there is a reason why we don't have capes or cloaks. Game can't handle it and there is many other limitations as well so they have to work within those limitations. Even if we like it or not they have to do work with those limits of the game engine and those limits actually put into place what they can and can not do with it. So I do think players should keep this in mind and that includes myself of course. Even if we really want something the game might not be able to handle it.
Its not about muscle memory, or about butchering gameplay fluidity this is about performance and play ability of the product.

I've asked before, but where is the direct evidence that animation cancelling has anything to do with poor performance? All either side has is conjecture because no one knows the exact coding. Some of us have basic or better understanding of how server calculations work in general, and would bet that cancelling animations which have already registered their effect before the animation ends adds exactly zero load to the server.

I could say for instance; having no player collision which allows people to stack on top of each other, forcing the server to constantly evaluate which player a given ability is hitting would have much more impact than the math required behind activating abilities and light attacks/block in rapid succession.

But without any evidence to back up that claim, it's just an opinion, as is what you say causes excess server load.

Well given they went out of the way to make the block changes a big focus of this very big performance update they did where we had to reinstall the game. Plus what Gilliam said about Desyncs, I looked up the word on Wikipedia and it redirects straight to the lag definition page. https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Desync&redirect=no
Not only what Gilliam said on his video but also what Brian wheeler had to say.

Block is an ability that everyone can use at any time, which means it can create a lot of traffic for the server to handle. In our continued efforts to improve performance, we are adjusting how the ability works under the hood. You will still be able to do everything you used to with Block. What you’ll notice is animations will blend a bit differently out of a “block cancel”, but the effectiveness of an ability will remain and function the same; the ability will still fire when “block cancelled” but you won’t have any “dead time” before the global combat cooldown ends. This should also get rid of a few health desync issues when getting killing blows with abilities that have been triggered after a block cancel. By refactoring Block much the same way we did with Sprint in the previous Update, we expect the usage of that ability to be more performant.

Going by GIlliams video, I think its the dead time meaning possibly the health desync between client and server being the thing they fixed with it. So what they fixed was something people really like about annimation canceling faster casting times and faster damaging. They still left in the animation canceling but you won't get extra damage from doing so. All it will do I believe will shorten some abilties animation times allowing them to fire faster. But it will no longer cause the client to be desynced from the server when you block cancel.

Also looked up Dead time and it basically means
noun
time in which someone or something is inactive or unable to act productively.
"the dead time spent on airplanes and buses"
PHYSICS
the period after the recording of a particle or pulse when a detector is unable to record another.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_time

So what they did is made it so the two have to communicate they can't just desync out. This means they fixed the majority of lag/desyncs that made block canceling work. Now abilties fire off the same and communicate the same even if animation canceling so you no longer get that extra damage when it comes to animation canceling. So basically it works the same as if your not using animation canceling. When it comes to block animation canceling abilties. At least from what I understand that is what they did with it.

But you cannot "speed up" damage. The damage is registered before the animation ends, within the GCD unless it is a cast time ability. Even most channels "tick" meaning the damage is registered at intervals and if cancelled by block or roll dodge, only the registered damage remains, it does not add what ever damage didn't tick.

You cannot use ani-cancelling to increase or decrease the time an ability takes to register it's effect.

Even in the post from Gilliam, he states that this is not removing block cancelling, but adjusting when animations end. You are still able to block cancel and have the previous ability's effect register.

Well I do remember him saying it wouldn't be as fast as it is on live right now. I would have to rewatch it. But it is possible players will have to relearn how to do it. As they did change the mechanics of it. In game if I do animation cancel sometimes I just don't, I will use a weapon for that. I tend not to use block or that. I'm not to fond of the blocking system because of one reason and that is that stupid glow shield thing that ruins how it looks. No way to disable it either. I would not mind if they completely fixed block canceling just so they can get rid of that trash. It just looks bad and I wish Zenimax would just get rid of it.

mocap

it's kinda wierd to read all that "block and Healing springs increasing server load by a lot!"
What server? Casio 1990 calculator? Why other MMO doesn't have such problems?

Just a single modern GPU can do 10^12 operations, GTX 2080 for example. 10 TFLOPS = 10,000,000,000,000 or 10 trillions floating point opearations per second.

10 ****** trillions operations per second just for one video card. And we talk about big server and how damn block can increase its load time. Cheesus...

Casterial

no tldr, but you forgot they moved ALL calculations to the server off of the client ~3-4years ago.