Update on Cyrodiil Performance & Upcoming AOE Tests

Wolf_Eye

Hmm. Between this and the rapids change, I have to wonder if they're determined to purposely make as many people upset with them as possible.

What will be next? Reducing the total number of furnishings in everyone's houses by 50 to improve performance? I'm sure the housing enthusiasts will love that.

This whole situation is very saddening and exhausting.

Tigor

Elsonso wrote: »

Tigor wrote: »

Banana wrote: »

Spend some money on the $#@&-$ servers

I hear these kind of remarks often. Some questions again

The current servers are from somewhere in 2014, roughly 6 years

What servers are now used?
Are there currently better servers?
Can the game easily be moved to a different server?
What servers do other games use?

ESO may already be the state of the art game, and only needs some little segregation.

We do not know what they are using now. They showed pictures of PC EU back in 2014, and it was not hard to tell what ZOS was using for their hardware platform. I doubt they will ever update us or show new pictures. These pictures are still available on the ESO website.

Based on the pictures, they were using Hewlett Packard Enterprise servers at launch, and that is probably still the case. Once that decision is made, there really isn't much of a reason to switch to a different company after only 6 years, unless the company stops selling, and that is not the case. These can be upgraded in-place without needing to switch suppliers.

http://files.elderscrollsonline.com/uploads/blogs/72d25c7769c29b3b467796da4b101a3d.jpg

The above picture shows a portion of the EU server, circa 2014. We do not know how much larger the EU server might be. This picture represents up to about 270 Hewlett Packard commercial servers. Each of these servers are one or two Intel Xeon server CPUs, multi-core and multi-thread, probably a couple hundred gigabytes of RAM, and an SSD for the OS and software.

The actual number of servers will probably be less than 270. It is hard to tell from the back what is installed. Fully populated, it is 272 servers.

The little green light, third tower over, second enclosure down, on the right, by itself, next to the white power cable. That is the power light for the Grey Host campaign server on PC EU. I jest, of course.



Wider image, also from 2014, showing the Frankfurt data center and the EU server. Anyone who seriously thinks that ZOS is so cheap that they are running the server on some Windows 95 machine with an Intel 386 out of Lambert's office should probably rethink. This not a cheap megaserver.

When people say that Grey Host is lagging on PC/EU and that ZOS should upgrade the servers rather than wasting time on 3 second cooldowns, this makes no sense to me. With all the hardware that is running this game, hundreds of server computers, the portion of it that is running Grey Host, even across all six megaservers, is relatively tiny. I have to think that the cost to upgrade that little part is much cheaper than what they are spending in developers, and losing in revenue, working on game play fixes. To think that they have not done that, before spending more on other solutions, is [snipped].

Some pictures from 2014. The server status is

Elsonso wrote: »

Tigor wrote: »

Banana wrote: »

Spend some money on the $#@&-$ servers

I hear these kind of remarks often. Some questions again

The current servers are from somewhere in 2014, roughly 6 years

What servers are now used?
Are there currently better servers?
Can the game easily be moved to a different server?
What servers do other games use?

ESO may already be the state of the art game, and only needs some little segregation.

We do not know what they are using now. They showed pictures of PC EU back in 2014, and it was not hard to tell what ZOS was using for their hardware platform. I doubt they will ever update us or show new pictures. These pictures are still available on the ESO website.

Based on the pictures, they were using Hewlett Packard Enterprise servers at launch, and that is probably still the case. Once that decision is made, there really isn't much of a reason to switch to a different company after only 6 years, unless the company stops selling, and that is not the case. These can be upgraded in-place without needing to switch suppliers.

http://files.elderscrollsonline.com/uploads/blogs/72d25c7769c29b3b467796da4b101a3d.jpg

The above picture shows a portion of the EU server, circa 2014. We do not know how much larger the EU server might be. This picture represents up to about 270 Hewlett Packard commercial servers. Each of these servers are one or two Intel Xeon server CPUs, multi-core and multi-thread, probably a couple hundred gigabytes of RAM, and an SSD for the OS and software.

The actual number of servers will probably be less than 270. It is hard to tell from the back what is installed. Fully populated, it is 272 servers.

The little green light, third tower over, second enclosure down, on the right, by itself, next to the white power cable. That is the power light for the Grey Host campaign server on PC EU. I jest, of course.



Wider image, also from 2014, showing the Frankfurt data center and the EU server. Anyone who seriously thinks that ZOS is so cheap that they are running the server on some Windows 95 machine with an Intel 386 out of Lambert's office should probably rethink. This not a cheap megaserver.

When people say that Grey Host is lagging on PC/EU and that ZOS should upgrade the servers rather than wasting time on 3 second cooldowns, this makes no sense to me. With all the hardware that is running this game, hundreds of server computers, the portion of it that is running Grey Host, even across all six megaservers, is relatively tiny. I have to think that the cost to upgrade that little part is much cheaper than what they are spending in developers, and losing in revenue, working on game play fixes. To think that they have not done that, before spending more on other solutions, is [snipped].

Some pictures from 2014. The serves are shrouded in mist (Vampires involved). Some transparency would be needed, to prevent unnecessary speculations from us. Possibly it is policy to keep it a secret.

Elsonso

Tigor wrote: »

Some pictures from 2014. The serves are shrouded in mist (Vampires involved). Some transparency would be needed, to prevent unnecessary speculations from us. Possibly it is policy to keep it a secret.

These pictures were shown for promotional reasons, I am sure. They were proud of their latest child and wanted people to see it. It also helped to dispel the "EU server is still the NA server" mentality.

I can think of no reason why they would want to update us. Pictures from 2020 are unlikely to look much different. The server is pretty compact, but even what they show from 2014 has a ton of room to grow without being obvious. They can probably add hundreds of servers to the megaserver before the bottom picture changes enough to notice.

(Edit: they could have replaced the whole megaserver with updated equipment and those pictures would be largely unchanged.)

Firstmep

Honestly, i dont even care if they destroy templar, i just want them to put that 3 second cd in bgs too, so all those absolute skill-lord spamming aoes in a ball will have to learn how to actually play.

technohic

Ok I have to ask as I keep hearing streamers and everyone say they like test 2 and test 3 options best. Particularly option 3 over test 4? Why would you prefer a GLOBAL cooldown on all AOEs rather than just an individual one? I mean the global does mean its a cooldown of the original AOE you cast as well. I don't get it or I am missing something.

MCBIZZLE300

zDan wrote: »

Listen, I'm all for reducing lag in cyrodiil... It's a long time coming, but this... this is beyond stupid! I cannot comprehend how you will think this is a good idea for pvp combat, this will kill off the game for good, which is extremely saddening.

My thoughts entirely, I'm still in shock to be honest. Pretty much the same feeling i had when they suggested the idea of changing light and heavy attack because some people cant press buttons fast enough. It truly shows they are out of touch with the playerbase. I'd rather have the poor performance than the proposed changes.

ParaViking

Looks like this now

ParaViking

SpiderKnight

ParaViking wrote: »

Pull all the red and blue wires and Cyrodiil is fixed.

Elsonso

ParaViking wrote: »

I found the problem. One of the yellow cables and one of the green cables are loose. Plug them back in and we should be good to go.

P.S. - Ignore the loose orange cable. That one is not used by Cyrodiil. That one is the "run on top of mounts" cable, and they decided not to fix it.

robs

Sorry about my bad english
I am confused with all that reasons from the opening post regarding lag in cyrodiil. As i remember there was in the first years nearly no lag even with more population as it is now. PVP is also unplayable with no CP campaigns so the reason with enabled CP's as one of the reasons for lag i can not confirm.
Also there are tons of players in Alik'r and there is nearly no lag and those people are spamming aoe's like there is no tomorrow.
Why not try as Test 5, 6 and 7 disabling styles, colours and costumes, also most but 3 mounts, also you could try removing half of the different gear so there is not soo overwhelming lots of different gear in PVP. That might help and could be better than crippling the Combat in itself.

nml

@Zenimax:

Are you also putting a 3 second cooldown on 2H "Forceful" passive? It's AOE, so why not? Unless your aim is to keep stamina builds eternally at an advantage?

WreckfulAbandon

nml wrote: »

@Zenimax:

Are you also putting a 3 second cooldown on 2H "Forceful" passive? It's AOE, so why not? Unless your aim is to keep stamina builds eternally at an advantage?

Next update:

"Light/heavy attacks with a 2h will now adhere to AoE cooldown standards. As there is no cost associated with them your entire stamina bar will be depleted if you attempt to swing your weapon more than once every 3 seconds."

(You have been playing the game wrong all along and now you will be punished)

Demonhunter

robs wrote: »

Sorry about my bad english
I am confused with all that reasons from the opening post regarding lag in cyrodiil. As i remember there was in the first years nearly no lag even with more population as it is now. PVP is also unplayable with no CP campaigns so the reason with enabled CP's as one of the reasons for lag i can not confirm.
Also there are tons of players in Alik'r and there is nearly no lag and those people are spamming aoe's like there is no tomorrow.
Why not try as Test 5, 6 and 7 disabling styles, colours and costumes, also most but 3 mounts, also you could try removing half of the different gear so there is not soo overwhelming lots of different gear in PVP. That might help and could be better than crippling the Combat in itself.

I strongly disagree, I was there the 1st day ESO launched and there was alot of lag back then with fewer people playing it compared to now. Even the subsequent years that followed when more an more people joined the game, the lag got worse and worse. The LAG issue was always there from the beginning and they haven't fixed it entirely, now some say that it has improved a little simply because there are thousands of players more now compared to 5 years ago which should of make the game unplayable to say the least. Now some might argue that the game is unplayable, then why are you still playing? Because the lag spikes occur on certain conditions that has been stated.

RobZha

ParaViking wrote: »

ESO music composer after taking inspiration from the server wires :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BD_uBLfysz0

phbell

ZOS is not doing this testing to prove the problem [everyone knows that Ball Groups are the main component here], but rather to identify a solution that costs the least amount of money. No question that Ball Groups are killing PvP performance, but the solution is not to ruin the component skills of character builds.

Would it not be smarter to create a new class of character with skills [that do not lead to these problems] and then make this the only character allowed in cryodiil? It would be easy enough to design in the large variety of skills and passives necessary to create roles (e.g.Tank, DPS, Healer) that individuals prefer. It would level the playing field and greatly reduce the number of "Nerf threads" as everyone would be playing the same base character with access to all the same skills. It would allow ZOS to identify and correct defects and exploits in Cyrodiil more quickly, efficiently, and fairly without ruining one class over another, patch after patch after patch.... It would eliminate the need for "Combat Leveling" that gives resource and damage buffs to low-level characters.

It would have the added benefit of making it easier to identify the cheaters that normally hide behind "Learn-2-Play and Get-Gud" responses.


For the nearly 40 years that I have been an engineer I have never solved a problem by hiding its symptoms, and that is what this solution testing is looking to accomplish.

Elsonso

phbell wrote: »

For the nearly 40 years that I have been an engineer I have never solved a problem by hiding its symptoms, and that is what this solution testing is looking to accomplish.

Band-aids. Yes. I see the same thing happening.

If the disease will take longer to kill the patient than the patient is likely to live, is it really a benefit to cure the patient? Make the patient comfortable and control the symptoms.

Here, we see the ZOS end game policies for ESO are starting to appear. It makes me wonder if they have set the end-of-service date for development. The game can run for a long time after that, but we all know that ZOS is going to move on and stop doing new content, eventually.

(Edit: not saying that ZOS is at end game. Maybe we are at the early stages. Maybe we are not. This is how I envision that ZOS will handle it when that time comes.)

phbell

Elsonso wrote: »

phbell wrote: »

For the nearly 40 years that I have been an engineer I have never solved a problem by hiding its symptoms, and that is what this solution testing is looking to accomplish.

Band-aids. Yes. I see the same thing happening.

If the disease will take longer to kill the patient than the patient is likely to live, is it really a benefit to cure the patient? Make the patient comfortable and control the symptoms.

Here, we see the ZOS end game policies for ESO are starting to appear. It makes me wonder if they have set the end-of-service date for development. The game can run for a long time after that, but we all know that ZOS is going to move on and stop doing new content, eventually.

(Edit: not saying that ZOS is at end game. Maybe we are at the early stages. Maybe we are not. This is how I envision that ZOS will handle it when that time comes.)

Hmmm.... Perhaps... I hadn't considered this.

Rungar

You guys dont get it. They are migrating everything critical serverside. Block is serverside now and position will be soon.

They have no choice but to slow down the game given the same hardware limitations. The cheating....err ah..performance..... must really be out of control to take steps like that. Its a good sign though as far as im concerned.

Ashtaris

So @ZOS_RichLambert, whatever happened to the Champion System revamp? We all know that also has a significant impact on performance but as far as I know, nothing yet has been done to fix the issues surrounding that system. Perhaps it might be better to tackle that than to try and force AOE cooldowns that would just slow down the PVP gameplay?

Elsonso

Ashtaris wrote: »

So @ZOS_RichLambert, whatever happened to the Champion System revamp? We all know that also has a significant impact on performance but as far as I know, nothing yet has been done to fix the issues surrounding that system. Perhaps it might be better to tackle that than to try and force AOE cooldowns that would just slow down the PVP gameplay?

I think they are afraid to talk to us about what they are thinking. This whole "fix Cyrodiil" thing would make for a good time to start, though.

phbell

Ashtaris wrote: »

So @ZOS_RichLambert, whatever happened to the Champion System revamp? We all know that also has a significant impact on performance but as far as I know, nothing yet has been done to fix the issues surrounding that system. Perhaps it might be better to tackle that than to try and force AOE cooldowns that would just slow down the PVP gameplay?

Yeah, I don't know about this. I play both CP and No CP campaigns and performance is equally poor in both campaigns. I think blaming CP is a mis-direction.

Banana

I'm hoping the test settings make no difference to the rubbish performance so they have to spend some money on the server and not ruin gameplay.

SpacemanSpiff1

phbell wrote: »

Ashtaris wrote: »

So @ZOS_RichLambert, whatever happened to the Champion System revamp? We all know that also has a significant impact on performance but as far as I know, nothing yet has been done to fix the issues surrounding that system. Perhaps it might be better to tackle that than to try and force AOE cooldowns that would just slow down the PVP gameplay?

Yeah, I don't know about this. I play both CP and No CP campaigns and performance is equally poor in both campaigns. I think blaming CP is a mis-direction.

agreed. non-cp was a cluster last night:
abilities not going off, or going very slowly.
position desyncing where we'd be dead from stuff/players that hadn't visually hit us yet.

this was happening for 4 people on 3 different continents.

Zer0oo

not sure how useful a test is if ~90% of all skills do not work especial in the cooldown weeks.

how about not disabling so many skills but instead introducing a real hard aoe cap of 1 for testing.
@ZOS_RichLambert , @ZOS_BrianWheeler

Cuyler

I assume with millions of players and everyone I know spending $100s if not $1000s on this game, that ESO has become a very profitable venture...can't ZOS afford to hire a zerg of QA testers to do phased troubleshooting 'events' on the PTS of the historically bad lag issues that plague this game, and fix the problem before pushing this garbage out to live?

Your paying customers are expected to pay to test your half ass lagged product? Its borderline false advertising that you're selling a completed game when you do this imo.

It's just such a cheap cheap cheap business policy for a product that's generated so many profits to date, just saying..hire a larger engineering team with all those crown crate profits ffs.

Demonhunter

Cuyler wrote: »

I assume with millions of players and everyone I know spending $100s if not $1000s on this game, that ESO has become a very profitable venture...can't ZOS afford to hire a zerg of QA testers to do phased troubleshooting 'events' on the PTS of the historically bad lag issues that plague this game, and fix the problem before pushing this garbage out to live?

Your paying customers are expected to pay to test your half ass lagged product? Its borderline false advertising that you're selling a completed game when you do this imo.

It's just such a cheap cheap cheap business policy for a product that's generated so many profits to date, just saying..hire a larger engineering team with all those crown crate profits ffs.

Even though Zenimax is independent, the rights to ESO belongs to Bethesda which takes decisions on money and development of the game. And it's never a cheap policy to try to fix a problem like stability and performance.

Cuyler

Demonhunter wrote: »

Even though Zenimax is independent, the rights to ESO belongs to Bethesda which takes decisions on money and development of the game.

Obviously... I just didn't feel that calling out every company involved or their subsidiaries was necessary to get the point across but apparently it's not the point you're interested in...

Demonhunter wrote: »

And it's never a cheap policy to try to fix a problem like stability and performance.

Again you missed the point, it's obviously not cheap to fix the problem...it is however cheap to expect your paying customers to test your fix.

Demonhunter

Cuyler wrote: »

Demonhunter wrote: »

Even though Zenimax is independent, the rights to ESO belongs to Bethesda which takes decisions on money and development of the game.

Obviously... I just didn't feel that calling out every company involved or their subsidiaries was necessary to get the point across but apparently it's not the point you're interested in...

Demonhunter wrote: »

And it's never a cheap policy to try to fix a problem like stability and performance.

Again you missed the point, it's obviously not cheap to fix the problem...it is however cheap to expect your paying customers to test your fix.

Paying customers should participate in the fix, or get lost. It's in their incentive to have a better game on performance and stability.

Ecfigies

I think these 'testings' are not addressing the real issue and only creating more problems.

This is the laziest way I've seen of trying to reduce problem instead of fixing it.

After I saw cooldowns on a main DPS spam I had a stroke, I'm just concerned about the mental health of the people who works at Zenimax.

Are you guys ok? Too bad they can't talk truly with us, which leads me towards me asking, does the company wants to remove PvP or at least reducing cost with it because it doesn't generates much money for the company?