Update 28 Game Performance Preview

jad11mumbler

Can we have a test where PVE content is removed from the main cyro campaigns?
Block the caves, remove the pve town quests and useless NPC's and have it as a true war zone

Jaraal

techyeshic wrote: »

virtus753 wrote: »

Jaraal wrote: »

Orpheaus wrote: »

Additionally this question is directed at someone who has knowledge of this industry that I don't, is there a specific reason that ZOS can't upgrade their servers to create better performance? Or is this a situation where the hardware literally won't help and that's a pointless request?

The data has to go through a DDoS scrubber service (Akamai) that monitors and filters it before it gets to the servers. You can have the best servers in the world, but if you're bottlenecked at a remote firewall, it makes no difference. Reducing the amount of data that has to be calculated might be your only option.

Cyrodill ran much more smoothly with more players casting the same skills years ago, before Akamai.

Do they just cancel Akamai for the week or two to get PvP working better for Midyear Mayhem, then?

Genuinely curious. Something improves substantially during PvP events, and I can’t imagine it’s less data, given how packed both the usual and ad hoc campaigns are. If the current performance is bottlenecked at Akamai, what happens during the event that improves it?

If they got Akamai; they must have felt the need for security. I doubt we'd ever know if they turned it off officially. Just could guess if someone traces during the event

There can also be different levels of filtering with variable impact on data flow.

Ascarl

Is the test sequence completed or will there be another test starting tomorrow?

virtus753

Ascarl wrote: »

Is the test sequence completed or will there be another test starting tomorrow?

Two more weeks:

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/544305/details-for-aoe-testing-in-cyrodiil#latest

Yukonicus

Cyrodiil AoE Ability Testing: The AoE ability performance tests in Cyrodiil are wrapping up, with the final round of tests concluding on October 19. Out of the first three weeks of tests, the global cooldown test resulted in the greatest performance gains when compared to the others (roughly 25% increase in server performance).

As far as the testing has gone, PvP has remained the same. The week of testing where skills did not effect members not in the group was a step in the right direction for combating the issues in Cyrodil. I do have to say though, saying the first three weeks was the best is a bit of a stretch. When you look at the population of Cyrodil campaigns at that time, campaigns never got locked. Cyrodil was, in a sense, abandoned by the community. Another problem about those weeks was the Imp City event. Everyone was in those not just because it was the event but also because we could use abilities like normal. I would like to state that during that time period where IC was jam packed and no cds. It had great performance on my part. I never had the kind of issues I have in Cyro. I'd recommend possibly looking at why. Why did IC during a triple locked period still have better performance than Cyro? Was it the size of that map? Was it that the area is better optimized? Differences between 2 things can sometimes lead to great discoveries.

SaucyMcSauceface

It feels like you can only claim that the shared AOE cooldown was a success if you control for population.

Having tested the shared AOE cooldown, my experience was that it killed the very thing that made ESO combat fun. The number of skills that ended up on cooldown, particularly on a Templar made the shared AOE cooldown painful to say the least.

The fact that they are running two additional tests with the shared cooldown indicates that it is something that they are genuinely considering. That seems to indicate a fundamental lack of understanding regarding what people like about the game.

Ruder

RMerlin wrote: »

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Out of the first three weeks of tests, the global cooldown test resulted in the greatest performance gains when compared to the others (roughly 25% increase in server performance).

The first test results are totally invalid since you ran it at the same time as the Imperial City event. I remember the Gray Host campaign never got population locked during that week, maybe only during the weekend nights. It was pretty much a ghost town the whole week.

1 hour of pop lock during weekend nights is all they need to evaluate peak drops in server performance.

Ruder

TheMightyRevan wrote: »

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Kingslayer513 wrote: »

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

FYI: Just corrected a typo in the post. Originally one of the bullet points stated the global cooldown test brought server FPS in high-intensity situations down almost 45% - this should've said 25%, and has been corrected in the original post.

Pretty sure that should say "ping" or "latency" instead of FPS. FPS makes no sense in that context and you don't measure FPS in milliseconds.

In this case, we're using FPS to refer to server frames.

Milliseconds is not the unit for FPS, FPS doesnt have a unit, its a dimensionless quantity, in this case. So writing: our ideal server fps is less than 30 ms, is just wrong. if you want to use a unit for FPS use either nothing or hertz

Server FPS is the times per second that the data between Server-client is transferred/synced.

The Higher the server FPS the more accurate the player positioning and actions will be presented to the client (player screen) and more responsive the game becomes.

However running on higher server FPS in scenarios where there are 100+ people at one place is resulting in hardware compute power bottleneck, because each client should be synced with the rest of the 99 clients data 60 times per second.
This results in fluctuating server FPS which we know as Lag spikes (or constant lag in most cases in Cyro).

There are 2 ways to reduce the lag spikes(without involving hardware upgrade).
1) Limit the amount of data transferred/synced (like AoE global CD so there is less data do sync between the players and server).
2) Limit the times per second the data is synced (for example reduce from 60 to 30fps),
Don't get me wrong this will help dramatically but it will hugely impact the Melee combat in a negative way, because your enemy position wont be accurate, you will miss hits, you wont be able to use some skills because the target will be out of range, even if you see it next to you.

Sarannah

Since AOE's seem a problem, and the servers worked fine during midyear mayhem(most likely because there were more solo players). Maybe another idea to reduce lag is to allow a maximum number of guilds/players from one guild in Cyrodiil, this could be done in various ways. So the PvP guilds spread out over multiple PvP-servers.

It worked during MYM, so why not try it.

virtus753

SaucyMcSauceface wrote: »

It feels like you can only claim that the shared AOE cooldown was a success if you control for population.

Having tested the shared AOE cooldown, my experience was that it killed the very thing that made ESO combat fun. The number of skills that ended up on cooldown, particularly on a Templar made the shared AOE cooldown painful to say the least.

The fact that they are running two additional tests with the shared cooldown indicates that it is something that they are genuinely considering. That seems to indicate a fundamental lack of understanding regarding what people like about the game.

That first test was painful indeed as a stamplar. (I can’t speak for other classes.) Especially as a solo player running Extended Ritual for purge/purify and supplemental heals for myself and allies, the lack of both incoming and outgoing cross-healing in the later tests (compounded by the ramping cost on the off-stat) was also a showstopper. The fact that both restrictions are on the docket for the next two tests makes me glad to have finally gotten general this week. I may not be much longer for Cyrodiil after 3.5 years if gouging combat so severely ends up being embraced as a solution to the lag.

For Templar in particular they will have to make an exception for certain core skills (particularly jabs, but also things like repentance) or risk its identity as a class. Repentance, for one, is highly time-sensitive, and putting that on a 3-second cooldown (even individually) significantly interferes with the ability to repent corpses when they’re available. But the idea of putting a spammable on a 3-second cooldown is even worse. Making jabs single-target to get around the AoE restriction would be an easy solution but not the right one: it would throw the class-defining skill under the bus in both PvP and PvE for the sake of their inability to get Cyrodiil to perform properly absent a veritable straightjacket’s worth of restrictions. With stamplar especially so heavily dependent on jabs, which outshines other class skills in large part because they’re just so lacking, any changes to that spammable without a substantial rework of the class are fraught with risk. Putting jabs — along with almost every other usable class skill — on a 3-second cooldown feels like a nice big “Stamplars Not Welcome” sign. If they do implement these cooldowns, especially global ones, they need to consider very carefully what each class needs to remain viable while retaining its identity.

novemberhhh

cyro is just a meme at this point, stam procsets online ffs

Stinkyremy

Improved framerate in situations where there are many individual objects visible, such as crowded areas with many players or within player housing that has a high volume of placed furnishings.
This was done by reducing the workload on the rendering system by caching data and eliminating unnecessary commands.
Note: These optimizations are console ONLY.


Can we get rid of the god damn maw of infernal. no one needs to see it at all other than the guy who has it proc on his own set, it is just a complete annoyance to everyone and is doing exactly what you are trying to counter here!

zaria

Sarannah wrote: »

Since AOE's seem a problem, and the servers worked fine during midyear mayhem(most likely because there were more solo players). Maybe another idea to reduce lag is to allow a maximum number of guilds/players from one guild in Cyrodiil, this could be done in various ways. So the PvP guilds spread out over multiple PvP-servers.

It worked during MYM, so why not try it.

During midyear mayhem it was an huge influx of casuals, yes they was solo but lots grouped up in pugs or rode with the pugs.
However the influx pushed out many of the PvP guilds who wanted to play together out on the overflow servers, so it was fewer fights between large pvp guilds. It large long lasting fights between large groups who overload servers.
An fight between an pvp guild and casuals don't last long

zaria

Daviiid_ESO wrote: »

On test #5, October 5-12, the performance seemed a lot better for a lot of people. Better than any of the tests performance wise and is the least intruding in terms of gameplay. Why not provide data or mention those before introducing new tests? @ZOS_GinaBruno

Rather introduce this test to live that actually improved performance, and then balance pvp, after the fact, than adding a GCD and putting a lot of uneccessary restrictions on players as in the new tests.

Going into PVP as a new player with all these restrictions will be a very jarring experience I'm sure, compared to their experience in PVE.

Edit:
Also it would be cool if you could include some sort of reference to server load to previous patches as these numbers mean nothing to us as they are by themselves. How was the server load on your side pre-summerset for example - in terms of "server FPS"? - The game worked a lot better in PVP back then (especially in terms of positional desyncs, which started in summerset and became worse patch after patch.)

Note that if they add global cooldowns on AoE they will be added to all the game not only Cyrodil.

Sounds fun? People who complains about low dps in pugs has not seen anything yet. The snipe spammers are the only winners here.

After that they have to rebuild classes like templar to get them somehow playable.
Khajiit vampire in Night Mother's Embrace and Darloc Brae might be the new meta for group dungeons

virtus753

zaria wrote: »

Daviiid_ESO wrote: »

On test #5, October 5-12, the performance seemed a lot better for a lot of people. Better than any of the tests performance wise and is the least intruding in terms of gameplay. Why not provide data or mention those before introducing new tests? @ZOS_GinaBruno

Rather introduce this test to live that actually improved performance, and then balance pvp, after the fact, than adding a GCD and putting a lot of uneccessary restrictions on players as in the new tests.

Going into PVP as a new player with all these restrictions will be a very jarring experience I'm sure, compared to their experience in PVE.

Edit:
Also it would be cool if you could include some sort of reference to server load to previous patches as these numbers mean nothing to us as they are by themselves. How was the server load on your side pre-summerset for example - in terms of "server FPS"? - The game worked a lot better in PVP back then (especially in terms of positional desyncs, which started in summerset and became worse patch after patch.)

Note that if they add global cooldowns on AoE they will be added to all the game not only Cyrodil.

Sounds fun? People who complains about low dps in pugs has not seen anything yet. The snipe spammers are the only winners here.

After that they have to rebuild classes like templar to get them somehow playable.
Khajiit vampire in Night Mother's Embrace and Darloc Brae might be the new meta for group dungeons

Have they said it will be game-wide? I keep seeing people repeat this but can’t find anything from the devs about it. They did warn us strongly that the combat experience in “ESO PvP” might be changed, but so far everything they’ve posted seems to be Cyro- (or at least PvP-)specific. Any class or skill changes they make as a result would be game-wide, yes, but I’m not seeing anything about the cooldowns. Am I missing something?

Jaraal

virtus753 wrote: »

zaria wrote: »

Daviiid_ESO wrote: »

On test #5, October 5-12, the performance seemed a lot better for a lot of people. Better than any of the tests performance wise and is the least intruding in terms of gameplay. Why not provide data or mention those before introducing new tests? @ZOS_GinaBruno

Rather introduce this test to live that actually improved performance, and then balance pvp, after the fact, than adding a GCD and putting a lot of uneccessary restrictions on players as in the new tests.

Going into PVP as a new player with all these restrictions will be a very jarring experience I'm sure, compared to their experience in PVE.

Edit:
Also it would be cool if you could include some sort of reference to server load to previous patches as these numbers mean nothing to us as they are by themselves. How was the server load on your side pre-summerset for example - in terms of "server FPS"? - The game worked a lot better in PVP back then (especially in terms of positional desyncs, which started in summerset and became worse patch after patch.)

Note that if they add global cooldowns on AoE they will be added to all the game not only Cyrodil.

Sounds fun? People who complains about low dps in pugs has not seen anything yet. The snipe spammers are the only winners here.

After that they have to rebuild classes like templar to get them somehow playable.
Khajiit vampire in Night Mother's Embrace and Darloc Brae might be the new meta for group dungeons

Have they said it will be game-wide? I keep seeing people repeat this but can’t find anything from the devs about it. They did warn us strongly that the combat experience in “ESO PvP” might be changed, but so far everything they’ve posted seems to be Cyro- (or at least PvP-)specific. Any class or skill changes they make as a result would be game-wide, yes, but I’m not seeing anything about the cooldowns. Am I missing something?

Based upon their efforts to reduce calculations across the board, I can hardly picture them adding a completely new variable to how skills work in different scenarios..... unless it's something they can squeeze into the blanket Battle Spirit nerf without additional data load.

paganslyer

i dont understand. ZOS completely ignore the player community . and the players has to decide what gonna happen because the players are who actually play this. and the customer always right...
100% of the community dont want this "solution" all of us prefer anything almost but do not bring us CD
there is other and better solutions like separate servers and buy better servers. limit the players can be in servers and so on

if global AOE CD is The chosen solution ........many of us, ESO players will leave the game for sure...Think about it in your considerations...
because players who like ESO PVP mainly like the fast combat ....if AOE CD in cyro is the "solution"
its mean AOE CD eventually goes into all kind of activity (BGS,IC and PVE)
and if its happen ....i see no reason to Keep playing ESO

virtus753

Jaraal wrote: »

virtus753 wrote: »

zaria wrote: »

Daviiid_ESO wrote: »

On test #5, October 5-12, the performance seemed a lot better for a lot of people. Better than any of the tests performance wise and is the least intruding in terms of gameplay. Why not provide data or mention those before introducing new tests? @ZOS_GinaBruno

Rather introduce this test to live that actually improved performance, and then balance pvp, after the fact, than adding a GCD and putting a lot of uneccessary restrictions on players as in the new tests.

Going into PVP as a new player with all these restrictions will be a very jarring experience I'm sure, compared to their experience in PVE.

Edit:
Also it would be cool if you could include some sort of reference to server load to previous patches as these numbers mean nothing to us as they are by themselves. How was the server load on your side pre-summerset for example - in terms of "server FPS"? - The game worked a lot better in PVP back then (especially in terms of positional desyncs, which started in summerset and became worse patch after patch.)

Note that if they add global cooldowns on AoE they will be added to all the game not only Cyrodil.

Sounds fun? People who complains about low dps in pugs has not seen anything yet. The snipe spammers are the only winners here.

After that they have to rebuild classes like templar to get them somehow playable.
Khajiit vampire in Night Mother's Embrace and Darloc Brae might be the new meta for group dungeons

Have they said it will be game-wide? I keep seeing people repeat this but can’t find anything from the devs about it. They did warn us strongly that the combat experience in “ESO PvP” might be changed, but so far everything they’ve posted seems to be Cyro- (or at least PvP-)specific. Any class or skill changes they make as a result would be game-wide, yes, but I’m not seeing anything about the cooldowns. Am I missing something?

Based upon their efforts to reduce calculations across the board, I can hardly picture them adding a completely new variable to how skills work in different scenarios..... unless it's something they can squeeze into the blanket Battle Spirit nerf without additional data load.

Haven’t they already done just that in testing, though? Only Cyro has gotten the 3-second cooldowns. They have not been implemented anywhere else. And I see no indication from the devs that they intend to implement them game-wide. Everything they’ve posted has been Cyro-specific. Unless they were being disingenuous? Which would seem just to compound the PR issues at play.

novemberhhh

These 3 second cooldowns would be maybe almost semi-tolerable (except not, they are actually game breaking) if they actually improved on the awful lag in pvp. Unfortunately, despite any claims to the contrary, they do not have any noticeable effect on lag whatsoever. Just less players, lagging out as hard as always, in cyro now.

techyeshic

I've noticed my best Cyrodiil ping response has gone from 100-110 to 130-150 lately. Ability delay doesn't always happen at the high end, nor does it always seem better at the low end but certainly is more likely. To work than when you see spikes of 300-500+ that still seems to happen with these tests

nk125x

I propose another test - Only allow Light and Heavy Attacks with Proc sets doing all the work.

That where they want to go with all the buffing of proc sets and at times in Cyrodiil it feels like that, so lets go there now....



BTW I am taking the **** - I am starting to believe they want to kill Cyrodill and only have PvE and Arena's. I am an officer in one of the leading DC guilds on PC/EU, I stopped playing last week until these tests are over - I checked our discord server tonight in prime time and only 4 people were connected on the raid chat. We used to have 16 to 24 every night at that time. I feel for Lars, our guild leader, as he has to be there every night - It must be sole destroying for him.

In the words from Meet the Fockers..

"Focker Out!"

P.S. If anyone from ZOS reads this - I have spend a ton of money in your crown store (Which at the moment I am regretting) like a lot of people who play PvP in Cyrodiil do (every other person has the latest mounts). If you kill Cyrodiil I believe you will loose a lot of revenue. So please be careful with your decisions - For me GCDs on skills is a deal breaker for me. If you want to remove a tonne of calculations, remove Proc sets from PvP. Hell let everybody have standard sets and let skill decide the outcome.

LarsS

In fact its hard to find any pvp guild on pc/eu gray host regardless of alliance during these global cooldown tests. ZOS should note this the risk is big that pvp will go extinct if global cooldown or ramping costs are forced on us.

renne

Everyone: hey so global cooldowns are really not the answer, we would rather keep PvP as broken as it is than have global cooldowns
ZoS: So... global cooldowns look like the best result, guys! Everyone gets them!

ZoS, please. Just because something "looks" like the best result when you plug it into your spreadsheet doesn't actually mean it's the best result for your playerbase. You know, the people who are your clients? The people the game is for?

Zabagad

nk125x wrote: »

I propose another test - Only allow Light and Heavy Attacks with Proc sets doing all the work.

That where they want to go with all the buffing of proc sets and at times in Cyrodiil it feels like that, so lets go there now....

Can we change Sheer Venom for that test to proc on LA/HA please?
Otherwise I would miss the 80% uptime on me

ParaViking

So I gather from reading all the posts the GCD stink, and no one wants it. This makes since to me because the game was not designed to be played that way.

The other factors that players seemed to think helped performance was "Group Size Limits" and "Cross healing"

Okay I will just say it... I know "large scale PVP" Players will hate me. I am just tossing it out there though.
What if they were to limit group sizes even more (4 or 8 man groups), and maintain healing/buffs within those group?
...or possibly creating more organization with the larger groups. Breaking a 12-16 man group into 4 "Squads" still able to communicate as a team, but limiting there ability to stack as they have been...

I am sure there are a lot of players out there with more keen incite into this, as well as , all the mechanics involved. Feel free to dog pile me. Just trying to get a since of what is happening, and where things might go.

Best Regards

AgaTheGreat

Console performance is getting worse with each update. All the work Zeni supposedly did is useless on PS4

ZarkingFrued

Flamingfunk wrote: »

Could the widespread usage of proc-sets have a negative effect on the server?
In my logic, proc-sets are handled by the server and therefor put a substantial load on the server.
These tests have felt like testing medications against bacteria infections in a patient after you've introduced a viral infection.

How about a test where proc-sets are turned off, group size is max 12 and no cross healing between groups?

100% second these tests. There is absolutely no way Proc sets are not a huge factor in the lag. Every player runs them in huge groups and performance is worse than ever. The group changes seemed to be the best option with lowest impact, and I imagine if it was paired with a proc sets turned off test the performance would look much better.

Firstmep

Ruder wrote: »

TheMightyRevan wrote: »

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Kingslayer513 wrote: »

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

FYI: Just corrected a typo in the post. Originally one of the bullet points stated the global cooldown test brought server FPS in high-intensity situations down almost 45% - this should've said 25%, and has been corrected in the original post.

Pretty sure that should say "ping" or "latency" instead of FPS. FPS makes no sense in that context and you don't measure FPS in milliseconds.

In this case, we're using FPS to refer to server frames.

Milliseconds is not the unit for FPS, FPS doesnt have a unit, its a dimensionless quantity, in this case. So writing: our ideal server fps is less than 30 ms, is just wrong. if you want to use a unit for FPS use either nothing or hertz

Server FPS is the times per second that the data between Server-client is transferred/synced.

The Higher the server FPS the more accurate the player positioning and actions will be presented to the client (player screen) and more responsive the game becomes.

However running on higher server FPS in scenarios where there are 100+ people at one place is resulting in hardware compute power bottleneck, because each client should be synced with the rest of the 99 clients data 60 times per second.
This results in fluctuating server FPS which we know as Lag spikes (or constant lag in most cases in Cyro).

There are 2 ways to reduce the lag spikes(without involving hardware upgrade).
1) Limit the amount of data transferred/synced (like AoE global CD so there is less data do sync between the players and server).
2) Limit the times per second the data is synced (for example reduce from 60 to 30fps),
Don't get me wrong this will help dramatically but it will hugely impact the Melee combat in a negative way, because your enemy position wont be accurate, you will miss hits, you wont be able to use some skills because the target will be out of range, even if you see it next to you.

This is already happening since update 25, positional desyncs are everywhere not just cyro.
I'm pretty sure they reduced server fps times, Beacuse a lot of issues, like massive delays in cc break, dodging or blocking failing etc started to get more problematic after that update.
I actually called this out back then, although I didn't use the term fps, just that server - client communications were reduced in frequency.

zaria

virtus753 wrote: »

Jaraal wrote: »

virtus753 wrote: »

zaria wrote: »

Daviiid_ESO wrote: »

On test #5, October 5-12, the performance seemed a lot better for a lot of people. Better than any of the tests performance wise and is the least intruding in terms of gameplay. Why not provide data or mention those before introducing new tests? @ZOS_GinaBruno

Rather introduce this test to live that actually improved performance, and then balance pvp, after the fact, than adding a GCD and putting a lot of uneccessary restrictions on players as in the new tests.

Going into PVP as a new player with all these restrictions will be a very jarring experience I'm sure, compared to their experience in PVE.

Edit:
Also it would be cool if you could include some sort of reference to server load to previous patches as these numbers mean nothing to us as they are by themselves. How was the server load on your side pre-summerset for example - in terms of "server FPS"? - The game worked a lot better in PVP back then (especially in terms of positional desyncs, which started in summerset and became worse patch after patch.)

Note that if they add global cooldowns on AoE they will be added to all the game not only Cyrodil.

Sounds fun? People who complains about low dps in pugs has not seen anything yet. The snipe spammers are the only winners here.

After that they have to rebuild classes like templar to get them somehow playable.
Khajiit vampire in Night Mother's Embrace and Darloc Brae might be the new meta for group dungeons

Have they said it will be game-wide? I keep seeing people repeat this but can’t find anything from the devs about it. They did warn us strongly that the combat experience in “ESO PvP” might be changed, but so far everything they’ve posted seems to be Cyro- (or at least PvP-)specific. Any class or skill changes they make as a result would be game-wide, yes, but I’m not seeing anything about the cooldowns. Am I missing something?

Based upon their efforts to reduce calculations across the board, I can hardly picture them adding a completely new variable to how skills work in different scenarios..... unless it's something they can squeeze into the blanket Battle Spirit nerf without additional data load.

Haven’t they already done just that in testing, though? Only Cyro has gotten the 3-second cooldowns. They have not been implemented anywhere else. And I see no indication from the devs that they intend to implement them game-wide. Everything they’ve posted has been Cyro-specific. Unless they were being disingenuous? Which would seem just to compound the PR issues at play.

They stated that they will implement changes based on this tests and it will not only be in Cyrodil.
Now out of group healing and buffing will probably still work overland as its very nice for stuff like dragons and harrowstorms who people tend to do ungrouped.

As for the the global cooldown, I do not believe its something they will implement. How will healing in trials work for one.
Took one of my tanks on overland build into Cyrodil to get some skyshards during the night, entered an delve, again overland build so focus on AoE, did not bother killing the delve bosses so horrible was it.

If I was to go after AoE I would probably make abilities who is primary single target into single like Jabs, force pulse and staff HA. Perhaps change some others from being an ground based or spamable into an AoE who put an dot on enemy like cave or arrow spray, this will cut down the number of AoE calculations.
On the other hand AoE cooldown will have an double effect, less calculations and less players playing less.
That will impact the bottom-line however as in why I doubt it will be implemented.

virtus753

zaria wrote: »

virtus753 wrote: »

Jaraal wrote: »

virtus753 wrote: »

zaria wrote: »

Daviiid_ESO wrote: »

On test #5, October 5-12, the performance seemed a lot better for a lot of people. Better than any of the tests performance wise and is the least intruding in terms of gameplay. Why not provide data or mention those before introducing new tests? @ZOS_GinaBruno

Rather introduce this test to live that actually improved performance, and then balance pvp, after the fact, than adding a GCD and putting a lot of uneccessary restrictions on players as in the new tests.

Going into PVP as a new player with all these restrictions will be a very jarring experience I'm sure, compared to their experience in PVE.

Edit:
Also it would be cool if you could include some sort of reference to server load to previous patches as these numbers mean nothing to us as they are by themselves. How was the server load on your side pre-summerset for example - in terms of "server FPS"? - The game worked a lot better in PVP back then (especially in terms of positional desyncs, which started in summerset and became worse patch after patch.)

Note that if they add global cooldowns on AoE they will be added to all the game not only Cyrodil.

Sounds fun? People who complains about low dps in pugs has not seen anything yet. The snipe spammers are the only winners here.

After that they have to rebuild classes like templar to get them somehow playable.
Khajiit vampire in Night Mother's Embrace and Darloc Brae might be the new meta for group dungeons

Have they said it will be game-wide? I keep seeing people repeat this but can’t find anything from the devs about it. They did warn us strongly that the combat experience in “ESO PvP” might be changed, but so far everything they’ve posted seems to be Cyro- (or at least PvP-)specific. Any class or skill changes they make as a result would be game-wide, yes, but I’m not seeing anything about the cooldowns. Am I missing something?

Based upon their efforts to reduce calculations across the board, I can hardly picture them adding a completely new variable to how skills work in different scenarios..... unless it's something they can squeeze into the blanket Battle Spirit nerf without additional data load.

Haven’t they already done just that in testing, though? Only Cyro has gotten the 3-second cooldowns. They have not been implemented anywhere else. And I see no indication from the devs that they intend to implement them game-wide. Everything they’ve posted has been Cyro-specific. Unless they were being disingenuous? Which would seem just to compound the PR issues at play.

They stated that they will implement changes based on this tests and it will not only be in Cyrodil.
Now out of group healing and buffing will probably still work overland as its very nice for stuff like dragons and harrowstorms who people tend to do ungrouped.

As for the the global cooldown, I do not believe its something they will implement. How will healing in trials work for one.
Took one of my tanks on overland build into Cyrodil to get some skyshards during the night, entered an delve, again overland build so focus on AoE, did not bother killing the delve bosses so horrible was it.

If I was to go after AoE I would probably make abilities who is primary single target into single like Jabs, force pulse and staff HA. Perhaps change some others from being an ground based or spamable into an AoE who put an dot on enemy like cave or arrow spray, this will cut down the number of AoE calculations.
On the other hand AoE cooldown will have an double effect, less calculations and less players playing less.
That will impact the bottom-line however as in why I doubt it will be implemented.

This is my question: where and when did they say these tests would be implemented *outside* of Cyro/PvP? Everything I’m reading has been Cyro- or PvP-specific.

I haven’t found anything from the devs to support any claim they’ve said otherwise. And we can’t go around claiming it as a fact without actual evidence. But maybe I’ve missed it. Where is the text?

Edited: outside of Cyro/PvP