Just make ball groups in cyro bannable already

TequilaFire

Why do small scalers want the whole game to themselves?
Why can't they be happy with dueling and BGs which is the only thing that has been added to PvP since launch?
Can't Cyro be the one place for people who want to group and fight?
It isn't like you can't still play small scale in Cyro.
Yes it is harder to be a superhero and wipe out groups in a single bound, but aren't they looking for a challenge in the first place? /s
Blaming the lag on organized groups is just a smoke screen for those that want this to be a solo only online game instead of the MMO it was supposed to be.

Drdeath20

We should have ball groups. We need elite and committed players. Its not their fault that the game cant even handle 25% of 1 of their already shrunken campaigns.

Iselin

Cyrodiil is made for large coordinated groups - that's what RvR is supposed to be all about. Not a bunch of confused lemmings who just find themselves accidentally congregating in one place.

They weren't a problem back in 2014 and 2015 and Cyrodiil performance was actually better back then.

They should be asking themselves what changed to make it worse and fixing that. (Hint: AOE existed back then too.)

thegreat_one

How about,
"A skill cannot be applied to a player whom already has it. it must expire before being able to be reapplied."

zaria

Sanctum74 wrote: »

Cyrodil used to have a much bigger population with much less lag. The problem is years of buggy patches they never fix and server issues. Stop with the toxicity blaming other players when Zos is at fault.

Pretty much the same as the dungeon finder who has been an mess for years and break down hard on load.
During the launch of the new dungeons it did not only not work, it did not let us leave group after porting in manually and cleared the dungeon.

And the dungeon finder is an way way much easier code, finder is just an queue of players wanting to do various dungeons.
Its task is to match them create groups and send them into dungeons. Yes you need to keep track of them so they can ask queue for replacements and give random reward for random dungeon.

I could make that, not sure how to multi tread it well however. But create group would be another tread from finding members.
I would probably drop the ready check as it don't work, simply port with an option to abort who would bump you back in queue a bit. If AFK well group can clear trash and then kick.

Now combat calculations, no idea how to code efficient. But has plenty of +10 year old spaghetti code I have to debug to see how work

ScruffyWhiskers

Groups are fine. Organized play is great. They win campaigns. Balls of players running around following the crown with their heal bots spamming one or two buttons and the rest dumping ultimates on pugs while running around the top floor of a keep that isn't even flagged anymore is silly and lag inducing.

YandereGirlfriend

@MincVinyl I think that those are very sensible suggestions.

You also mentioned how the design of Cyrodiil itself creates many of the player-stacking incentives and I very much agree with that as well.

Ideally, you would want both compelling AvA as well as individual player incentives to spread out forces on the map, with smaller groups coordinating with one another to achieve larger goals.

At present, it seems as though the Keep Resources, Outposts, Towns, and other existing map features are highly under-utilized as prizes to capture for any reason other than a Mission Board quest. Sometimes groups will take the Farm before assaulting a Keep, but other times they will simply swarm the front door without having taken any Resources at all. That all screams "missed opportunity" to me.

Some suggestions that I would make:

• Tie the Max Siege offensive allowed at Keeps directly to how many Resources are controlled by a given side. Start with 5 siege as the baseline for attackers and ramp up to the current ceiling of 20 (so 5 Max Siege per Resource) if all relevant Resources are controlled. This would make it imperative to control the surrounding Resources before mounting a serious assault on a Keep.
• Give control over the six Outposts additional AvA implications. Controlling an Outpost grants an additional 10 defensive Max Siege slots (e.g. 30 potential Max Siege for defenders) to any Keep that is connected to it by the Transitus Network (e.g. one Keep potentially buffed for the outer Outposts and 2 Keeps potentially buffed for the inner Outposts). Similarly to taking Resources, this would prioritize securing and holding Outposts as a means to soften up any connected Keep's defenses.
• Increase Keep door and wall strength by 25% for any active Transitus Network link between it and another friendly map location (e.g. Keep, Outpost, Town). This would create defensive strong points and place additional value on flagging multiple linked locations while on offense.
• Give control over the three Towns (Bruma, Vlastarus, Cropsford) additional AvA implications. Controlling a Town would act similarly to controlling a Farm and would globally increase the Health, Resistances, and Penetration of any friendly AI soldiers on the map, stacking up to three times (to account for the three Towns). This would make Resources, Outposts, Towns, and other outlying objectives more difficult to capture while further incentivizing small groups to spread out over the map since solo-capturing objectives would be that much more difficult.
• Make some of the outlying Map Locations (e.g. Wilminn's Winery, Ancestor Moth Temple, Weynon Priory, Abbey of the Eight, Chorrol, Cheydinhal, etc.) AvA-controllable and provide small, setting-appropriate global buffs to the Alliance that controls them (e.g. a set bonus of Stamina Recovery for Willminn's Winery, a set bonus of Magicka for Ancestor Moth Temple, a set bonus of Health for the Abbey of the Eight, etc.). This would give further incentive for taking and holding more remote portions of the map that players rarely, if ever, have reason to visit.
• Increase the AP and Alliance War Score values for Resources, Outposts, and Towns to make them more attractive for contesting.
• Enlarge the "Keep Battle Area" to include the Keep's Resources so that defenders there may gain their fair share for holding those Resources and assisting in the overall Keep siege effort.
• Share the AP generated from large battles with any players in map locations that are connected via the Transitus Network to where the conflict is going on (e.g. share battle AP with those at any adjacent Keeps, Outposts or Towns) since those players are also doing their part to assist in the overall siege and reduce the incentive for AP-greedy types to flock to the main siege area.

Taken together, I think that these modifications would help spread players out over the entire map of Cyrodiil as well as provide new opportunities for strategic play that would reward well-coordinated, small-group attacks and indirectly punish the current faction-stacking meta.

squinceybones

i also hate spheres, a lot. everyone in ball group does the teabag on me and i am upset. please help.

Ackwalan

A couple years ago ZOS accidentally fixed the problem of ball groups and also increased the need for cooperative game play. This accidental fix had the side affect of reducing lag which increased the PvP fun for everyone. What was this accidental fix? It was a buff to fire and oil siege damage. This caused people to spread out, no longer could they stack on a ram spamming siege shield and heals. Keeps could be defended, ball groups running around a wall couldn't stack purge and heals fast enough. Keeps could still be taken but team work and a strategy more then one dimension was needed. Sadly that only lasted one week because people (ball groups that just wanted to farm AP) cried louder then the folks cried about the change to how rapids was earned.

TX12001rwb17_ESO

Why not just add Friendly Fire? people will still beable to form large groups but will not beable to Ball Group because they will need to keep their distance less they kill eachother with their own attacks.

alainjbrennanb16_ESO

electriczzz wrote: »

I wouldn't give a damn about them if they wouldn't make the entire game unplayable for everyone with all their resto staff spamms and aoes left and right.
I see that the tests so far don't make a difference and the moment one ball group enters the field it's nearly unplayable for almost everyone involved, why can't ZOS see that it's not the individual players who cause the lags but connect it to the so called"organized groups"? I love cyrodiil but the state it's in every day past a certain hour is emberassing.
They should've placed tests in place to prevent big groups from stacking and spamming the same stuff instead of putting cooldowns on aoes. It's so infuriating having to wait 3-10 seconds after using a leap/charge ( if they even go off) for the damage to arrive and in the meantime can't deal damage because everything is locked until the damage registered.

its not just ball groups, it is zergs and also how peeps play, even 3-5 on 1 can lag the 1 person and certain skills can cause lag/de-sync players

SamanthaCarter

Defile = desynch since 3 years+

gatekeeper13

Ball groups actually exist not because they are based on skilled playstyle but because they take advantage of a design flaw in the gameplay: endless aoe spamming, crossheals and shields. A player who cannot stay alive for 10 secs on his own, becomes immortal in a ball group. Most people I talk with in the campaign actually hate ball groups and want them disappear from Cyro.

Another big issue with ballgroups is that they make servers melt. I dont have to see a ball to know it's there. Sudden severe lag tells me there is one in close distance.

Also, it has nothing to do with Cyro being a zone of massive battles instead of 1v1. If you want to play like that, just join a group and play like normal people do. Ball group is actually mindless 1-2 skill spamming.

This is not pvp. It's an abomination. And I wonder when ZOS will do sth about it.

DjinnAeternam

MincVinyl wrote: »

@DjinnAeternam well he is not entirely wrong there that an well organized group can contribute more to lag than a larger group of disorganized players.

It is all calculation density and say if that 12man organized group is running heavily calculation dense abilities all at once like proxy bombing with timed aoe dot+effects, then yeah they could potentially cause a spike.

If you played during any of the mym events when boat loads of pve'ers come in you would see that for some reason the server doesnt lag as much even when pop locked. So what gives? Well the thought would be that those players are new to pvp and arent running with a pvp meta group/zerg playstyle.

---

Not saying they should prevent 12 man organized groups from taking down 50man groups, but they definitely play a role. We should really be looking for measures to take that would limit how much strain groups in general can put on the server.

• if dots/hots didnt stack
• if ally buffs/skills only affected group members
• group sizes limited to 12
• make aoe damage scale with number of players hit
• remove large sources of cheap cc spammables EX: bombard

I agree with you to an extent, but the solution is improve code/server performance, not reduce ability to play with the pretext that it's the only solution to fix the game.

In the past we've seen way higher concentration of players in Cyrodiil (player cap was a lot higher), bigger and longer battles, and even more active ballgroups fighting at the same locations, and there was minimum lag compared to nowadays.

Every group ran a lot of AoE/Buffs, and sometimes even more than nowadays (like 12+ ballgroups), still game had enough performance for all to have fun.

So, what gives?

I agree that a coordinated group has high APMs for high uptime of buffs, heals and damage, but it has been like that since the first year of the game, when the first ballgroups started to run.

Even after "some" calculations moved to server side because of cheat-engines, performance was not as bad as this, and population in the server was higher.

ZoS needs to test and experiment, but the solution is not imposing limits on how players can play, or what skills should they use, thats the opposite of how they sell ESO - Play how you want.

DjinnAeternam

Ackwalan wrote: »

A couple years ago ZOS accidentally fixed the problem of ball groups and also increased the need for cooperative game play. This accidental fix had the side affect of reducing lag which increased the PvP fun for everyone. What was this accidental fix? It was a buff to fire and oil siege damage. This caused people to spread out, no longer could they stack on a ram spamming siege shield and heals. Keeps could be defended, ball groups running around a wall couldn't stack purge and heals fast enough. Keeps could still be taken but team work and a strategy more then one dimension was needed. Sadly that only lasted one week because people (ball groups that just wanted to farm AP) cried louder then the folks cried about the change to how rapids was earned.

Actually a lot of players reported that as a bug, because it was a bug. If it was an intended move we had notes for that, thats why people talked bad about that "change".

A good group would just adapt to it, don't think you would be able to fix lag by concentrating siege fire on a group, the problem is how calculations are done, and i should remind you that siege fire is also AoE.

From that perspective, removing sieges would also help lag..

DjinnAeternam

gatekeeper13 wrote: »

Ball groups actually exist not because they are based on skilled playstyle but because they take advantage of a design flaw in the gameplay: endless aoe spamming, crossheals and shields. A player who cannot stay alive for 10 secs on his own, becomes immortal in a ball group. Most people I talk with in the campaign actually hate ball groups and want them disappear from Cyro.

Another big issue with ballgroups is that they make servers melt. I dont have to see a ball to know it's there. Sudden severe lag tells me there is one in close distance.

Also, it has nothing to do with Cyro being a zone of massive battles instead of 1v1. If you want to play like that, just join a group and play like normal people do. Ball group is actually mindless 1-2 skill spamming.

This is not pvp. It's an abomination. And I wonder when ZOS will do sth about it.

Do you understand that a group has builds and setups exactly for group play?

Or do you feel a better player if you 1v1 a healer and he dies?

You clearly have no idea how a coordinated group runs, or you wouldn't say that.

Check some videos from good guilds, maybe you learn something.

Imagine blaming people for playing in a team and actually doing *TEAMWORK*..

LarsS

Based on the experience from the test weeks, I think one can conclude that aoe is not the problem in cyro.

gatekeeper13

DjinnAeternam wrote: »

Do you understand that a group has builds and setups exactly for group play?

Or do you feel a better player if you 1v1 a healer and he dies?

You clearly have no idea how a coordinated group runs, or you wouldn't say that.

Check some videos from good guilds, maybe you learn something.

Imagine blaming people for playing in a team and actually doing *TEAMWORK*..

Do you understand that the reason you kill enemy players while yourself are unkillable is not because of your builds but because spammed crossheals and shields outheal incoming dmg?

Do you understand that you kill enemy players not because you are playing with skill but through spamming AoE endlessly, while having infinite sustain?

Do you understand that 80% of the time, you kill enemy players because the moment you approach them everything freezes for them and cant use their skills or move?

Where do you see healers 1v1 in Cyro? 100%% of players I ve met are all in a DD role, not trying to kill me with a resto staff but with destro, 2H, dw or bow.

I know perfectly how a coordinated group runs since I got in ball groups when I was still new to Cyro. And I found it so silly I left them for good after 2-3 runs.

You can perfectly form a group and still have healers and tanks but play like normal people. Not like bots that do the same thing and move at the same time to the same location, spamming same skills and crossheals that make you unkillable.

This is not pvp. This is a greedy attempt to farm AP through exploiting a design flaw.

ZOS_ConnorG

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