What are your thoughts?

Deathztalker

What are your thoughts on the folowing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GV0wpelTkoc&t=22s

JayKwellen

It's just like the title says, it is indeed how to kill a game.

The video by Kristopher was good too. I've heard him disagree with changes before, but I've never seen him so...I'm not even sure the word to use. Somewhere between disappointed, angry, and hopeless. One of the few times I've heard him deliberately, strongly, and truthfully, chastise the entire ZOS team. I can't even quote it, because if I do I'm sure this post will be snipped for bashing.

It's honestly like watching someone do something really stupid, and you know it's going to hurt them, and you tried to warn them but they just wouldn't listen.

All we can honestly do at this point is pray the people pulling the strings don't make this become a reality. And I say it like that on purpose, because I honestly don't believe the devs want this. These changes would murder their game. I truly don't think anyone who works on ESO, from the developers to the artists to the community managers themselves, think this is a good idea.

How do I know this? Well, I work for a corporate hospital system. I'm all too acquainted with upper level executive management, folks who haven't ever done patient care and lack any training or education as a healthcare practitioner (first career MBA's, I'm talking about them), dictating to clinicians how to do their job. Writing policies they don't understand, modifying budgets for departments who perform work they csnt even comprehend, ordering low-budget equipment they don't know how to use, all the way down to telling us how to perform patient care when they couldn't find the right end of a thermometer and haven't even touched a patient once in their lives, and generally crippling their own institutions through their own myopia, saved only by the competence and oreserverence of the very people who's jobs they don't (and don't care to) understand. To them it's just lines in a budget. Can't afford more staff, that would would hurt the profit margin. Can't invest in appropriately training the staff we have, that would hurt the profit margin. Cant afford better and safer equipment, that would hurt the profit margin. Can't afford to make a better product because the product doesn't matter, only the profit. Oh what's that, the product is healthcare and people's lives? No it isn't. It's numbers on an income sheet, nothing more.

If these changes happen, it will be bad. At this point all we can hope is that this only ever comes to be as a test and nothing more. Doesn't hurt to kick up a fuss and make a lot of noise too though.

Cinbri

There is plenty of ways how it would be possible to overhaull stuff without actually killing it but with addressing issue.
For example burst heals - obviously being affected by cooldown or ramming cost will kill it, but it could be overhauled in addition to burst heal to have HoT ticking for Xsec, as compensation. HoTs are far stronger than burst heals in pvp, there is plenty of examples, most notorus is Vigor. So such change wouldnt kill burst skill as in exchange of cooldown it would get strong quxiliary effect that literally itself would punish you for spamming it.
I just afraid none have faith that zos is capable of such huge rework nowdays. Golden days of IC DLC, or Craglorn DLC are long in the past.

Tommy_The_Gun

I think that it is not the fault of AOEs. What ZOS is not telling us in their Upcoming AOE Tests announcement forum thread is that over the years they moved a lot of calculation form client side to server side. Gradually more things were calculated on the server. And I think this is the reason why we have worse & worse performance.

As for "why" they did this - I am not sure. Maybe to eliminate cheating. Or maybe to improve FPS (ESO is CPU heavy, so less calculation on client side - means more FPS).

It simply just so happens that AOEs are simply most taxing abilities, as they cause the most calculations. It was always like this. However in the past in Cyro PvP, People were spamming even more AOEs and somehow we had acceptable server performance.

Ideal solution imho would be to do a "audit" on all types of server calculation and move some of them back to the game client (If ZOS did this to eliminate cheating, they could move less essential ones).

Either way, I think that this "AOE Cooldown" is a "solution" - but worst possible solution. They should start with something simpler. Like reducing group size in Cyro. It is a "lesser evil" imho. If that does not help - reduce it even more. And if that does not help - Then maybe start considering adding cool-downs to more taxing AOEs (not all).

IonicKai

Tommy_The_Gun wrote: »

I think that it is not the fault of AOEs. What ZOS is not telling us in their Upcoming AOE Tests announcement forum thread is that over the years they moved a lot of calculation form client side to server side. Gradually more things were calculated on the server. And I think this is the reason why we have worse & worse performance.

As for "why" they did this - I am not sure. Maybe to eliminate cheating. Or maybe to improve FPS (ESO is CPU heavy, so less calculation on client side - means more FPS).

It simply just so happens that AOEs are simply most taxing abilities, as they cause the most calculations. It was always like this. However in the past in Cyro PvP, People were spamming even more AOEs and somehow we had acceptable server performance.

Ideal solution imho would be to do a "audit" on all types of server calculation and move some of them back to the game client (If ZOS did this to eliminate cheating, they could move less essential ones).

Either way, I think that this "AOE Cooldown" is a "solution" - but worst possible solution. They should start with something simpler. Like reducing group size in Cyro. It is a "lesser evil" imho. If that does not help - reduce it even more. And if that does not help - Then maybe start considering adding cool-downs to more taxing AOEs (not all).

Actually every client computation still needs to go to the servers regardless otherwise your interaction with other players can't be reflected on them. That said I doubt it's that it's moved to server side computation but rather it's the way these abilities calculate. A good example of where I think they took a non-optimal path is the target dummy. Right now on consoles blood for blood isn't registering in the damage calculation. To me that strikes as odd because they are tracking each individual source of damage in order to compute DPS instead of the aggregated sum of dummy health over duration to kill. Now there are reasons for this that make sense (each ability needs to be handled when computing it's damage tick because of modifiers like engulfing for flame) however to hold that data for an entire parse gets expensive computationally speaking. I personally hope they come up with a better way then just breaking the current combat system to make it clunky and slow but who knows.

relentless_turnip

Wouldn't the client do the calculation and send the result to the server?

This is how it can be manipulated and why it would be in their interest to move as much to server as possible. I also believe this is the case and loads of calculations were moved during harrowstorm to optimise stadia.

Tannus15

This is why everything has to be done server side.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwRXRm1Ni2I

here is a post from 2014

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/120395/eso-is-full-of-exploiters-and-hackers

All the work has to be done on the server otherwise you can hack the data the game client is sending to the server and change the values.

If it was left to the game client to work out who was in the AOE radius you could hack it and just say "everyone my client can see right now"

And for the last time This is a data collection exercise. None of these changes are permanent. It's all temporary and only in Cyro for 1 week per test to gather data so they can pin point the issue and fix it
They have tried tinkering at the edges with sprint changes and block changes and AOE cost increases and it does NOTHING.

They need solid data to work with otherwise they are fixing symptoms instead of root causes and nothing will ever improve.

newtinmpls

JayKwellen wrote: »

I work for a corporate hospital system. I'm all too acquainted with upper level executive management, folks who haven't ever done patient care and lack any training or education as a healthcare practitioner (first career MBA's, I'm talking about them), dictating to clinicians how to do their job. Writing policies they don't understand, modifying budgets for departments who perform work they csnt even comprehend, ordering low-budget equipment they don't know how to use, all the way down to telling us how to perform patient care when they couldn't find the right end of a thermometer and haven't even touched a patient once in their lives, and generally crippling their own institutions through their own myopia

I get you, sibling-in-arms.

I work in health care.

I come here to relax. I hope they don't kill it for me.

Time to go back to Morrowind TES III