Would you support faction uniforms to reduce the lag?

Thraben

Since the lag can't be fixed without a complete re-start (getting rid of the convoluted code in the process), the Devs probably need some ideas how to make Cyrodiil bearable.

As you probably know, individual appearances are a part of the lag problem - at least more so than the poor deer that once used to roam around there.

So - would you be willing to sacrifice it for the sake of a (better) playable game? Guild tabards will probably still be recognizable.

ThePedge

Not a bad idea, I would probably vote for all but self.

People, myself included, spent a lot of time and gold on their outfits. Would keep your individualism.

Then again, its nice to see others outfits.
Definitely wouldn't be against testing it to find out the impact. Would be a hell of a lot less textures to load.

Royaji

No, because...

Your character appearance is an even lesser contributor to the current perfomance issues than the poor deer you mention. They are server side-issues caused by moving too many calculations to the server and have nothing to do with character rendering which is a client-side operation.

Raammzzaa

No, because...

I have not heard character appearances and cosmetics cited previously by players, nor ZOS as a reason for lag and poor performance in the game.

x48rph

No, because...

No. Because while the cosmetics might have a little influence on it, it's not the root cause. While it was never perfect, cyrodil was a lot more playable in the past and then performance kept dropping more and more as they kept fiddling with stuff and adding more and more with no regards to performance. Like so many new sets I see all require the system to keep track of "stacks" and other gimmicks in order to figure out damage which in the case of dots gets dynamically recalculated (along with defense) every time it ticks instead of using the original values when the ability fired. When you start multiplying that by the amount of players, it's easy to see that their code is far from optimized and the problem certainly doesn't stem from rendering an outfit

VaranisArano

If it would work, sure. Do we have any evidence that it would or is this just yet another guess at a silver bullet?

Gilvoth

Yes. All 3 factions should automatically appear in their faction's uniform in Cyrodiil.

i do not believe this will help lower the high ping nor lessen lagg.
do you?

kylewwefan

Other (please stay constructive)

If Zos came out and said that our style is the definitive reason for poor Cyrodiil performance, I would gladly support a standardized alliance appearance.

This is sad because, Style is the true endgame in eso to many.

Thraben

x48rph wrote: »

No. Because while the cosmetics might have a little influence on it, it's not the root cause. While it was never perfect, cyrodil was a lot more playable in the past and then performance kept dropping more and more as they kept fiddling with stuff and adding more and more with no regards to performance. Like so many new sets I see all require the system to keep track of "stacks" and other gimmicks in order to figure out damage which in the case of dots gets dynamically recalculated (along with defense) every time it ticks instead of using the original values when the ability fired. When you start multiplying that by the amount of players, it's easy to see that their code is far from optimized and the problem certainly doesn't stem from rendering an outfit

Let´s explain a bit:

We can't optimize the code as many of the original coders have left the company long ago, and even IF there was a decent documentation the sheer amount of data is simply too much to be done in a realistic timeframe.

Basically, it would would require the game to be re-launched at the state of version 1.0 (or, at least before the lightning patch).

Now we know only a few games that were intended to calculate 500 vs 500 vs 500 players, and even fewer where the performance did not decline over time. The only one that comes to mind is Planetside2.

Whilst Planetside 2 has its own problems, it is still miles away from what we have to endure in Cyro every evening.

So, why is that?

Of course, there is little added content which jams the code. You can't avoid that with ESO. People just want to have new skills, new sets and new stuff.

What else?

Well, most players have only very limited appearance choices, and even those are rendered only if the said player is close enough.

And while it is true that the models and textures aren't the main problem here, it is the only thing that can be influenced. Talking about things that can't be improved is pointless. It's basically this or get rid of the anti- cheat server calculations.

People who haven't been around for 6 years probably can't even imagine how battles were at the beginning of this game: True enough, nobody had an idea what they were doing, but you had 200+ people running over a hill to kill you, and the view itself was not only majestic, you could even get away from them as there was no lag.

JohunBleek

No, because...

Fashion Scrolls is true endgame.

Zorgon_The_Revenged

Other (please stay constructive)

Not sure how much this would improve performance. Zos should try it on live for a week or two, with outfits according to alliance and rank brackets, just to test it like the no-CP test they did.

I wouldn't be against it if I saw very noticeable improvement. I guess I'd be more for it than Zos, given the possible loss of players buying costumes/outfit slots/motifs ect.

Helgarth

No, because...

Why would a player that paid the game make even more concessions for poor code or infrastructure?

newtinmpls

Thraben wrote: »

We can't optimize the code as many of the original coders have left the company long ago.

"Left"?

If they left on good terms and there was good documentation, what is the problem.

Or is "left" (either on bad terms or fired for cause, $$ or something else) part of the problem?

ThePedge

There's a reason endgame PvE guilds either hide each others characters completely, or all play as skeletons.

It helps reduce FPS drops and stutter, especially when changing bars. As your whole outfit is reloaded every time you swap bars.

Now imagine it's 30v30 at Alessia, how many players are constantly swapping bars.

Sure, it's not THE reason for the performance, but wouldn't hurt to test it.

Nemeliom

Yes. All 3 factions should automatically appear in their faction's uniform in Cyrodiil.

Yes, but only if the performance improves massively. If it's just a bit better, then no.

Charon_on_Vacation

the "improvement" such a change would make wouldn't even be noticable.
the look of characters is not the issue.

Xologamer

No, because...

if we get jsut red yellow and blue skeletons than yes but otherwise no
just would be ugly and there easier ways to improve performance

oxygen_thief

Other (please stay constructive)

they dont need ideas they need an intention to do it. inability and unwillingness are different things. you should think how to make them to fix it.

MrGhosty

Other (please stay constructive)

It would be nice if the game rendered "base" models while in Cyro while leaving you to see your own character's style (or toggle the alliance uniform). I'm not a code monkey so I don't know that it would help but at this point might as well throw anything we can against the wall to see what sticks.

I would love to see Zos start doing week long experiments where they tweak variables to see if adjusting things like this improves performance. At best we start getting improvements, at worst we get some new variables to play around.

mav1234

fashion wars is the true endgame!

if this actually would impact performance, maybe, but I am not convinced it would at all, since characters are rendered client side and tracking gear appearances is probably minor relative to all the calculations the server is doing.

Iskiab

Yes. All 3 factions should automatically appear in their faction's uniform in Cyrodiil.

Anything and everything to make it playable.

karthrag_inak

how about everyone is faction-colored sphere? bouncing around, into other players, minimal effects. Using primitive would reduce graphics lag on potatoes substantially.

or, you could get a decent computer, yes? Thinking that the graphics of the game in cyrodiil has any appreciable impact on the performance is like [snip]

[edited for inappropriate content/language]

eKsDee

A character's outfit doesn't impact server performance in even the slightest way, because the server is literally just storing data that describes the outfit, that then gets sent to the client where the outfit is constructed.

A character's outfit has the same performance impact as a character's name or appearance -- slim to none.

zyk

Other (please stay constructive)

Asset management causes huge issues in Cyrodii. More than people realize. I would love it if Cyro players were restricted to a selection of costumes to improve performance. With that said, it's not the main source of lag in Cyro and would not come close to solving the fundamental issues.

This wasn't an issue until the outfit system, but slowly became a major issue as more players utilized outfits.

The problem is that ESO is extremely aggressive at managing assets, so when you transit to/from an area with a lot of players, there will be opportunities for asset management lag. I found this especially annoying when I'd be fighting in a tower and a zerg arrived, causing massive stuttering despite the fact I have 24/8 GB of system/video ram that ESO mostly doesn't want to utilize.

Unfortunately, this won't happen because character customization is probably where ZOS earns most of its income, so removing customization from Cyrodiil would essentially de-monetize it.

technohic

I think we all are getting just a bit too desperate for a working game and are grasping at straws.

fred4

No, because...

No, because it's pure conjecture on your part. You have to, unfortunately, leave it to the programmers at ZOS to figure out how to improve performance.

Tranquilizer

Yes. All 3 factions should automatically appear in their faction's uniform in Cyrodiil.

I'd agree to mostly everything that helps reducing the lag. If pvp uniforms would do the job (or part of it), be my guest.

Izanagi.Xiiib16_ESO

No, because...

Its going to make performance worse & ZOS already think PVPers dont contribute enough to the crown store, removing cosmetics from PVP would make this worse.

Deathlord92

I can’t see this helping and besides I like how my character looks his not a guard his an assassin.

Cronopoly

It's likely not a huge cause of delay. All games serialize all known objects in the game meaning they get binary numbers sent to clients for Object, Type, Texture, color etc... these are typically sent one way to your client via UDP (one way network communications protocol) for all player characters, friends and enemies in range of your character. There's no meaningful calculation on the server backend involved. It gets sent once to your client when in range (characters are in the same proximity) and gets garbage collected (Deleted) when out of range.

Now Server side calculations every play "cycle/frame" (Multiple times per second) regarding Player location, speed , direction, heals or damage per cycle, spell and physical impacts especially in PVP and can really keep a server side "Cycle" busy and cause lag.

Basically if all interactions the server needs to occur (Receipt of client data / processing said data / sending client data back) happen within the expected "optimal Cycle or Frame" (fractions / portions of a second, how many are known only to Zos) then everything is great if communications to player clients are "Normal".

That said if the Server (trying to 100% complete all expected interactions takes too much time per frame/cycle, IE 150% more time than normal, or the dreaded 500% more time than normal, we see it as massive LAG as the server is just bogged down with "Stuff" it has to do.

So when Zos is trying to optimize what can be done, it literally is about trying to "Profile" the most time/cpu expensive "Actions" or calculations that occur each frame. Is it your AOE hitting multiple people....Remember when we had AOE nerfs limited to 6 people instead of "all"...that was why. Limiting servers side interactions causing expensive calculations within the cycle/frames on the servers...

Now if Zos moved to faster servers, saw extra frame time available, AOE's could be un-nerfed etc or any other "Action" that might have been limited/culled etc...

Ok i have beat a dead horse.

P.S.
If you have any general questions about enterprise data centers, let me know. I'll try to answer with some of this knowledge i have in mah brain. (21 years working for #2 website datacenter) My specialty was putting humpty dumpty back together when say all Credit Cards stopped working for 3000 stores and 100,000 web users...as one example. My team experienced recoveries of service, and permanent root cause in over 16,000 major incidents from all sides of Enterprise IT, (ZOS mainframes, CICS, AS400, SRDF / Timefinder, all OS's of servers Win, Linux, Solaris, Teradata, and all types of Network scopes, OC provider circuits (Routers, VIPs, ACE, Telephony, Firewalls/DMZ's, Storage, UPS/EPO/Battery farms etc, Datacenter Power.)

zyk

Other (please stay constructive)

@Cronopoly

Art assets don't create network lag, they create client processing lag while the assets are managed. You can feel this when you leave an extremely busy area like Rawl by transiting to a different location in Reaper's March or approach/leave a heavily farmed dolmen in Alik'r. When the client loads an art asset like armor, it has to process it before displaying it. Every player can have over a dozen customized items that must be processed on each client before they can be displayed.

This manifests itself as client stutter. It can be felt in Cyrodiil every time there's a large number of players in one area which happens a lot.

With that said, not everyone is affected equally some people are more sensitive to different kinds of lag and it will be felt more by older hardware.

This isn't _the_ issue that's plagued Cyrodiil for 6 years. That issue is server processing lag.