Will Zenimax ever consider upgrading the ESO servers?

Cronopoly

The use of the word "Server" in regards to Performance is shallow at best, and I'm not attacking the OP.

For any enterprise Datacenter/Application there's a lot of moving parts.

External Network
Your ISP provides the first Internet access set of hops (Routers), that your Game clients VPN tunnel runs across to the ZOS datacenter. Several of these HOPS are outside the control of ZOS and your ISP. Many only see Ping times in ms and think that tells the entire story of the Network...Not even close.

At the ZOS colocation Datacenter, The Edge Routers have to interface with the DMZ (Demilitarized Zone) Firewalls and Routers to manage the Network traffic. There's many ways that a bottleneck, misconfiguration , or D.O.S. can affect valid traffic to the Edge Firewalls and Routers for network traffic destined to go in & out of the Datacenter.

ACE's or "Content Switches", Network routers that specifically are designed to take multiple Network sessions and route their traffic to specific servers etc... These need to be configured correctly and balanced, so as to make sure prime time load balancing occurs where any one network interface/server is not overloaded.

Databases have to have "Stats" performed on them to make sure their "Cache" is optimal as they are typically Optically cabled to the "Servers" for extremely fast data access.

Game Servers...sigh Whether it's Solaris/Unix/Windows, session management in Memory is a tricky proposision that Game Architects have to manage carefully.
O/S - The O/S needs to be used in a fashion where it basically gets out of the way and supports the game Engine Nodes (multiple game brokers) running simultaneously. Whether its Player sessions, Network VPN session management, Storage, Ram, Garbage Collection etc.

My 21 years of Enterprise Datacenter work on Billion dollar companies, so many IT devs/Engineers are obvlivious to the I/O bus on their server and how like everything else is NOT UNLIMITED in bandwidth. It has a rated speed and can heat up and or bottleneck when it has to process from CPU to RAM (user sessions). In short there's alot of areas to screw up or neglect...causing problems at prime time or anytime...

I would ask my devs to profile their application while looking at Memory speeds, Storage speeds and Fiber channels. Some idiots would buy complete systems without knowing what part of their Million dollar new Server(s), Databases, Network, and Application(code) was the "Bottleneck".

I would type more but my brother needs help bleeding the Brakes on his 4Runner. By now anyone should get the point.

Saying Servers need an upgrade is truly ignorant of ZOS situation. And we will never be given insight to the actual architecture...Oh well

Cronopoly.

TineaCruris

LuxLunae wrote: »

idk wrote: »

A program that is not well-written continues to run poorly on a better PC. Considering Cyrodiil used to perform better than it does today it is clear the servers are not the issue but how Zos has managed the game.

In many ways, Zos seems to have bitten off more than they can handle, and pushing mega-servers as they have is just one of those areas.

This is why zos is cleaning up their code first before buying better servers.

I started using fear in pvp. It is the best stun. For some reason it makes the foe stand there looking stupid even after its done.

That "some reason" is the lag causes unbreakable stuns. It's not just fear, it's every stun in the game that does that for, oh, I don't know, the last 18 months or more.

What evidence do you have that ZOS is "cleaning up their code"? How can you know that?....or are you taking their word for it?

TineaCruris

gatekeeper13 wrote: »

The experience from the recent MYM event told us that it is possible for Cyro to see some performance improvement.

Can't tell what they did to the server, but it worked better at full load than it works now at 1 bar population.

Maybe they dedicated more hardware? Whatever the truth is, I dont see them spending money to upgrade their servers. They will milk their game till it's dead and then shut them down.

That definitely appears to be the business model.

The performance going back to the trash can after the MYM event destroyed the last hope I had that ZOS is actually working on any fixes.... other than to the crown store and creating more shiny objects that are useless in game. They had many of the performance issues resolved or mitigated for the MYM event somehow, but they are CHOOSING not to continue with the improved performance for some reason. So we have to assume they have no intention of making the necessary investments to improve performance for the long term. This is the only conclusion that can reasonably be drawn from the data set we as customers have to work with.

TineaCruris

Elsonso wrote: »

gatekeeper13 wrote: »

Whatever the truth is, I dont see them spending money to upgrade their servers. They will milk their game till it's dead and then shut them down.

They will milk the game until it is dead. That is totally true, and you would do the same, I am sure. I mean, seriously, the whole point of the game is to make money. If it were not, they would not even waste the effort to monetize it.

ZOS could spend the rest of days just rolling out PVE content every quarter and pay no heed, or money, to performance. The game would probably continue to be successful for years, given that PVE works pretty well, even with the performance as it is today.

Unless someone has decided that ZOS just lies about stuff, it is easily observable that they are spending money to improve performance. There are some performance improvements on PTS that I want today. I don't want to wait.

Of course, I am exclusively a PVE player, so my idea of "performance improvements" will be different from someone who is measuring performance by PVP standards.

^
This accurately describes what Zenimax has been doing for the last 18-24 months. We are WELL into the milking the PvE'rs and new customers for all they are worth and totally disregarding everything PvP. Yet, ZOS still advertises ESO as being an MMO with PvP.

Destai

SimplyRuben wrote: »

idk wrote: »

A program that is not well-written continues to run poorly on a better PC. Considering Cyrodiil used to perform better than it does today it is clear the servers are not the issue but how Zos has managed the game.

In many ways, Zos seems to have bitten off more than they can handle, and pushing mega-servers as they have is just one of those areas.

It's just gutting. The game has so much potential, especially PvP with how unique and engaging combat can be but it's all ruined by the [snip]

I wish I could still enjoy Cyrodil but I can't bare that lag and junk of non-functional abilities even after spamming keys, random ping spikes, dawnbreaker not registrating hits and more.. if only it just worked.

[Edited to remove Bashing]

It's ruined by the longstanding performance issues for sure. I don't think the megaservers is the issue, it's the "engine". Like you're saying, it's code not capacity.

Destai

NeoXanthus wrote: »

They don’t have enough or the right kind of compute resources to handle high time load. I see these debates almost every time they talk about fixing game code. The problem with that is it is expensive and most cases does not bare fruit. The old information technology saying that is still true today “CPU cycles are cheap and heart beats are expensive.” Meaning in the long run it will cost more to rewrite a program than it does to throw more hardware at it.

Other big issue with this game currently is transport. They are using a great anti-DDoS service in fact it is one of the best out there. There setup is one that use asymmetric massive cloud-based anti-DDoS cleaning services using Generic Routing Encapsulation (GRE) tunnels for returned clean traffic. Again, this is a great setup and used by some of the biggest and best companies out there. The issue is ESO application sets the “Don’t Fragment” or DF bit to value of 1. This means a good amount of traffic will be larger than the max transmission unit or MTU for short. This can be migrated a multitude of different ways however none of them are good and many of them increase latency by load.

I propose ZoS/ESO gets a massive data center upgrade and transport overhaul.

Honestly, it sounds like they should scrap the Cyrodiil PVP and replace it with PVE at this point. Someone else posted this and I totally agree. Making focused PVP matches really cuts down on the server problems and makes skill balancing easier. Let's face it, after 6 years of PVP being problematic, time to cut your losses. Thank Azura PVE mostly works.

TineaCruris

Destai wrote: »

NeoXanthus wrote: »

They don’t have enough or the right kind of compute resources to handle high time load. I see these debates almost every time they talk about fixing game code. The problem with that is it is expensive and most cases does not bare fruit. The old information technology saying that is still true today “CPU cycles are cheap and heart beats are expensive.” Meaning in the long run it will cost more to rewrite a program than it does to throw more hardware at it.

Other big issue with this game currently is transport. They are using a great anti-DDoS service in fact it is one of the best out there. There setup is one that use asymmetric massive cloud-based anti-DDoS cleaning services using Generic Routing Encapsulation (GRE) tunnels for returned clean traffic. Again, this is a great setup and used by some of the biggest and best companies out there. The issue is ESO application sets the “Don’t Fragment” or DF bit to value of 1. This means a good amount of traffic will be larger than the max transmission unit or MTU for short. This can be migrated a multitude of different ways however none of them are good and many of them increase latency by load.

I propose ZoS/ESO gets a massive data center upgrade and transport overhaul.

Honestly, it sounds like they should scrap the Cyrodiil PVP and replace it with PVE at this point. Someone else posted this and I totally agree. Making focused PVP matches really cuts down on the server problems and makes skill balancing easier. Let's face it, after 6 years of PVP being problematic, time to cut your losses. Thank Azura PVE mostly works.

PvP was great, almost 100% of the time, for the first three years. They managed to make things work pretty good during the MYM event 2020. So we know they CAN fix things for the most part, but they CHOOSE not to for some reason.

PvP is the end game. When you get to where PvE is not a challenge on any level, you go to PvP and play against people instead of a robot. If they take PvP out of the game, may as well take grouping and the "online" part with it and rename ESO "skyrim II"

Elsonso

TineaCruris wrote: »

PvP was great, almost 100% of the time, for the first three years.

I quit PVP over performance because it was becoming a slide show whenever a fort was being attacked. Power Point Online. Fighting over forts is sort of the thing to do in Cyrodiil, so it was kinda important. There were other things, like drunk players and nothing but zergs, but the slide shows were the main reason.

That was long before the three year mark. It was in 2015, as I recall.

As far as I am concerned, the time to complain about PVP performance was 20 updates ago, and it didn't do any good then, either. Now, it should just be treated "as-is" and if you can deal with it, super, but if you can't, time to move onto some other activity or to a different game.

TineaCruris

Elsonso wrote: »

TineaCruris wrote: »

PvP was great, almost 100% of the time, for the first three years.

I quit PVP over performance because it was becoming a slide show whenever a fort was being attacked. Power Point Online. Fighting over forts is sort of the thing to do in Cyrodiil, so it was kinda important. There were other things, like drunk players and nothing but zergs, but the slide shows were the main reason.

That was long before the three year mark. It was in 2015, as I recall.

As far as I am concerned, the time to complain about PVP performance was 20 updates ago, and it didn't do any good then, either. Now, it should just be treated "as-is" and if you can deal with it, super, but if you can't, time to move onto some other activity or to a different game.

I believe this is the exact take home message Zenimax is trying their absolute best to drive home to their customers.

Elsonso

TineaCruris wrote: »

Elsonso wrote: »

TineaCruris wrote: »

PvP was great, almost 100% of the time, for the first three years.

I quit PVP over performance because it was becoming a slide show whenever a fort was being attacked. Power Point Online. Fighting over forts is sort of the thing to do in Cyrodiil, so it was kinda important. There were other things, like drunk players and nothing but zergs, but the slide shows were the main reason.

That was long before the three year mark. It was in 2015, as I recall.

As far as I am concerned, the time to complain about PVP performance was 20 updates ago, and it didn't do any good then, either. Now, it should just be treated "as-is" and if you can deal with it, super, but if you can't, time to move onto some other activity or to a different game.

I believe this is the exact take home message Zenimax is trying their absolute best to drive home to their customers.

I agree that this is the message, but as with too many things that ZOS communicates, not the intention.

In my reply above, you caused me to go back in history and look, only to find that Update 6 included a "fix Cyrodiil" that did not work. Update 6. Greymoor is Update 26. Twenty updates later, ZOS is still tinkering with Cyrodiil and performance.

Granted, Cyrodiil performance has not been in the toilet that entire time, but I don't think they ever "fixed" it, either. It sort of bounces up and down, one problem giving way to another. Today, I guess it isn't Power Point Online, but something else that prevents a satisfactory experience.

On the other hand, outside of Cyrodiil, I think things are shaping up nicely, at the moment.

Idinuse

idk wrote: »

A program that is not well-written continues to run poorly on a better PC. Considering Cyrodiil used to perform better than it does today it is clear the servers are not the issue but how Zos has managed the game.

In many ways, Zos seems to have bitten off more than they can handle, and pushing mega-servers as they have is just one of those areas.

But how come that during i.e. Midyear Mayhem the experience is far better, with much less skill lagging and as soon as that's over it returns to the usual lag fest, I just don't get it.

Palidon

To quote what John Wayne once said, "THAT WILL BE THE DAY"

vamp_emily

I don't think the current issues is solely do to poor/outdated hardware. I think they need to hire new employees that can take them to the next level.