Well Test 2 & 4 is an utter failure - Lag, disconnects, rubber banding, skills not firing!!!

nk125x

Lets move onto test 3 to get them out of the way

Well Test 3 has being OK - There's being a few lag issues, but overall it has worked OK and haven't really noticed issues with resources

Test 4 - back to Lag, disconnects, rubber banding, skills not firing!!! - Whats the bet its the cooldown calculations making everything worse

DUTCH_REAPER

Lol. Right! I was like okay let’s just move onto test 3. This one ain’t workin.

Casul

Ps4 guy here. Which test is this again? Is this individual AoE skill cooldowns. I know last week was a global cooldowns.

Vevvev

We also got more people now since the IC event is done. Last night in Cyrodiil was a blast in the Gray Host campaign since all three factions actually had people, but then came the lag, skills not firing, random disconnects, etc....

I don't think the problem is AoEs like ZOS thinks but the # of players all with their own calculations on sets, CP, crit chances, abilities, etc. Server just doesn't have the resources to keep up with all of that.

Vevvev

BuildMan wrote: »

Ps4 guy here. Which test is this again? Is this individual AoE skill cooldowns. I know last week was a global cooldowns.

Yep! We're now on each skill having its own cooldown.

Casul

Vevvev wrote: »

BuildMan wrote: »

Ps4 guy here. Which test is this again? Is this individual AoE skill cooldowns. I know last week was a global cooldowns.

Yep! We're now on each skill having its own cooldown.

Other then the lag does it feel more viable then global? From what I read most people couldn't do a buff rotation. I figured week 2 would solve that issue particularly.

DUTCH_REAPER

Last weeks test was awesome. No lag not once did I get desynced or crash. This week....it’s bad again.

Vevvev

BuildMan wrote: »

Other then the lag does it feel more viable then global? From what I read most people couldn't do a buff rotation. I figured week 2 would solve that issue particularly.

I personally found it more usable since all my AoEs are not really spammables. That being said if I miss with an AoE like Fire Breath it can really hurt since it means I can't immediately recast it. You can get proper buff rotations off but if you rely on spamming an ability like Jabs its still going to be a nightmare.

SidraWillowsky

BuildMan wrote: »

Vevvev wrote: »

BuildMan wrote: »

Ps4 guy here. Which test is this again? Is this individual AoE skill cooldowns. I know last week was a global cooldowns.

Yep! We're now on each skill having its own cooldown.

Other then the lag does it feel more viable then global? From what I read most people couldn't do a buff rotation. I figured week 2 would solve that issue particularly.

i haven't been onto the live servers, but I did head into the PTS when this test was there. On my warden DD, I honestly noticed almost no difference between "old" Cyrodiil and this test. Granted, there was no one around, so I took her into a delve and only fought NPCs, but really the only skills that I think would be more affected in actual PvP would be Enchanted Growth (NBD since I have other heals to use) and Winter's Revenge (since I can't recast immediately if someone moves out of its AoE). All in all not awful on the warden and I'd probably be OK if this went live.

Templar was a different story- had a very, very rough time doing a dolmen and it took probably 5x longer than normal because the spammable is considered an AoE, and it was pretty painful.

tl;dr this test seems to disproportionately affect certain classes, with some being almost unaffected and others being crippled.

nk125x

DUTCH_REAPER wrote: »

Last weeks test was awesome. No lag not once did I get desynced or crash. This week....it’s bad again.

maybe because everybody was in IC, which was a laggy mess

Alienoutlaw

not sure how a shield that only hits a players pet and the player is considered an AOE

danthemann5

What, one wonders, were people expecting with these tests?

The major contributing factors to the lag and desyncs are ball groups and poor programming, with a side of lack of server capacity.

These tests address none of these issues.

Ball groups are still free to run as before, and when they do, the whole server becomes unresponsive. When they log off, skills magically work again.

To the best of my knowledge, observations, or experience, no significant changes have been made to improve the programming since Update 25, when the desynchs really began in earnest.

The thought of ZOS adding server capacity is simply absurd on its face, as this would cost more money with little or no return, something highly frowned upon by the inventors who demand ever-increasing profits.

Unless these three items are addressed in some meaningful way, all the tests and data in the world won't improve performance one bit.

Shantu

These are tests. They're not meant to solve anything. They're designed to gather data that might be used toward adjustments and improvements in the system.

That being said, it's pretty obvious the problem is the number of players multiplied times the number of calculations applied to inadequate server resources. They've created a beautifully complex combat system that morphs into dysfunctional beast in some scenarios. I seriously doubt we'll see improvements without significant redesign of what they've created.

While we're a little far down the rabbit hole at this point, I've always felt PVP should be a completely different combat system built from the ground up to handle worst case scenarios.

SpiderKnight

I don't think it's this particular test, I don't think I'm the only one, but the desyncs, lag started happening on Sunday for me. This was both in pve and pvp areas.

TineaCruris

They still haven't told us what they did that improved things so much during the Midyear Mayem event.

Instead of fixing things on their end, like they should, they are throwing the problem on the shoulders of the people who've been pumping money into their business for six years and saying the lag is somehow the players fault, when it's not. AOE's have been spammed since inception of the game. The lag didn't begin to be game breaking until a couple years ago.

Again, what did they do that allowed us to play two to three fully pop locked cyrodiil campaigns with very little lag and pretty darn good performance during the MYM event? Why can't we just do what ever that was full time?

Dagoth_Rac

TineaCruris wrote: »

Again, what did they do that allowed us to play two to three fully pop locked cyrodiil campaigns with very little lag and pretty darn good performance during the MYM event? Why can't we just do what ever that was full time?

There was downtime without a patch right before and after Midyear Mayhem. That was not the case for recent Imperial City event. So, they can start and stop events without downtime. Why the downtime before and after Midyear Mayhem? I feel like something got changed on the backend that improved things, and then got undone after Midyear Mayhem ended. They leased more server resources or moved around existing server resources to give more to Cyrodiil. Or something. Something that would cost a lot of money to do 24/7/365, but is within budget to do for a couple of weeks.

Whereas the development team is a sunk cost. They are already paying the developers, so might as well put the burden on them to re-develop the combat in a way that their standard server resources can handle.

hollywood

No need to worry about the cooldown on skills if they don't work anwyay. Test 2 didn't improve lag one bit. Higher pops since IC event is over plus less punishing cooldown on skills means blobs are back at Cyro.

ItsMeToo

TineaCruris wrote: »

They still haven't told us what they did that improved things so much during the Midyear Mayem event.

Instead of fixing things on their end, like they should, they are throwing the problem on the shoulders of the people who've been pumping money into their business for six years and saying the lag is somehow the players fault, when it's not. AOE's have been spammed since inception of the game. The lag didn't begin to be game breaking until a couple years ago.

Again, what did they do that allowed us to play two to three fully pop locked cyrodiil campaigns with very little lag and pretty darn good performance during the MYM event? Why can't we just do what ever that was full time?

For me, MYM was worse for lag than now.

Banana

I'm hoping none of these tests show any improvement so they have to spend some money elsewhere.

BigBragg

Why do people treat these as pass/fail tests for something to implement instead of ways to gather targeted data sets?

ItsMeToo

BigBragg wrote: »

Why do people treat these as pass/fail tests for something to implement instead of ways to gather targeted data sets?

Because it's fun to.

forthwinds

Tonight's pvp (if you can call it that) was atrocious. Probably close to the worst performance I have ever seen, light attacks wouldn't even go off. The cooldowns have obviously not solved anything. Do we really have to wait another whole week to move on to the next test?

Mayrael

BigBragg wrote: »

Why do people treat these as pass/fail tests for something to implement instead of ways to gather targeted data sets?

Because we know ZOS, they test solutions.

And this time I'm really full of appreciation to ball groups. Lag the h*ll out of the server, send it to place where the sun doesn't shine, so this tests will became total failure. There will be no performance upgrade without upgrading the servers.

Ps. ZOS don't try to fix the performance with coding, last time you tried it (first performance patch this year, remember? The block changes) it got only worse, like 2x worse. Don't, just don't.

Thornen

DUTCH_REAPER wrote: »

Last weeks test was awesome. No lag not once did I get desynced or crash. This week....it’s bad again.

Everyone was in IC that's why

Ruder

Thornen wrote: »

DUTCH_REAPER wrote: »

Last weeks test was awesome. No lag not once did I get desynced or crash. This week....it’s bad again.

Everyone was in IC that's why

Not entirely true, on PC EU both Main CP and Main No-Cp are always pop-locked during prime time, and they had almost no lag during phase 1.

relentless_turnip

I agree, test 1 was a lot better for performance. It was also really fun if you could put together a ST build.

I think it is the ballgroup style of play that needs targeting. It is an abuse of an otherwise amazing combat system imo. There is nothing wrong with being in an organised group, but everything wrong with being in a group where you are assigned to one button. Fighting an organised group can be fun, fighting a ballgroup makes me want to log out...

I outlined some ideas here that I think would greatly tackle this problem:
https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/545458/i-like-less-aoe-an-opinion-formed-by-the-cyrodill-tests/p1

Firstmep

danthemann5 wrote: »

What, one wonders, were people expecting with these tests?

The major contributing factors to the lag and desyncs are ball groups and poor programming, with a side of lack of server capacity.

These tests address none of these issues.

Ball groups are still free to run as before, and when they do, the whole server becomes unresponsive. When they log off, skills magically work again.

To the best of my knowledge, observations, or experience, no significant changes have been made to improve the programming since Update 25, when the desynchs really began in earnest.

The thought of ZOS adding server capacity is simply absurd on its face, as this would cost more money with little or no return, something highly frowned upon by the inventors who demand ever-increasing profits.

Unless these three items are addressed in some meaningful way, all the tests and data in the world won't improve performance one bit.

The point is that whoever is in charged, tasked the combat balance "team"(that are also the pvp devs) with fixing cyro lag.

So from that point it makes sense to fiddle with combat mechanics.

Yes the company is too cheap to take the time and resources to make large scale pvp playable, by investing into better infrastructure or having a dedicated team rewrite the games code.

It is what it is. I do find it a bit angering considering how well ESO does at the moment, and looking at other mmos like WOW, where they constantly update their engine.

But at the end of the day if all they want to focus on is to churn out content and nothing else, its on them.

If/when an mmo with better or comparable pvp comes out, i wont think for a second about leaving the game.

Then again, they probably would be happy if pvp died at this point.

UrbanMonk

Well, whatever data comes out of these tests, results are already clear, the dumb aoe chnages are not doing anything to help reduce the lag.

alainjbrennanb16_ESO

my main issue is single target skills with no aoe on cool down, and no word from zos as to why

gatekeeper13

DUTCH_REAPER wrote: »

Last weeks test was awesome. No lag not once did I get desynced or crash. This week....it’s bad again.

Last week was as bad as this one.

Lag, desyncs and server kicks all the time.

Ruder wrote: »

Not entirely true, on PC EU both Main CP and Main No-Cp are always pop-locked during prime time, and they had almost no lag during phase 1.

I play in the no-CP campaign and everyone in chat zone was reporting lag during phase 1.

tplink3r1

Know what would definitely reduce lag? Killing ball groups. Why is this still a thing, again?
Just get rid of the AOE damage reduction when you hit 6+ players and SIGNIFICANTLY buff the damage of siege when it hits let's say 6+ players and that's it.