Update 28 Game Performance Preview

Celephantsylvius_Bornasfinmo

Sounds like BS to me.

No server upgrade let's just not play.

Octopuss

It's 7:15, EU server, and it took 50 (that's FIFTY) seconds to get from logging in to see the list of my chars (despite U27 patch notes claiming this part of the login process being improved), so pardon me if I call any and all of your performance improvements a flat out lie.

Scaletho

"Our ideal server FPS is less than 30ms"... I read that and a sad smile slowly born in my lips. My best performance was 120 ping. I remember that day with emotion and happiness. But it's gone long, long ago. Now, my best days are 190 or 220 ping. Cyrodiil? HA! never below 250, and mostly 400-600 ping during sieges.

But, alas, I'm from Brazil. One of the ZoS' "non-existent" countries. We are destined to endure ridiculous lags, and no updates will ever address our serious gaming delays. We committed the crime to buy ESO and play it using EU or NA servers. Shame on us!

This is so frustrating.

silky_soft

You literally killed the spare time of hundreds, if not thousands of people.

-Upgrade the servers
-Upgrade the engine
-Remove aoe procs, but vd
-gcd on all procs, but vd

Until you do that, you'll keep losing more and more players base to mmo limbo. Just waiting for new world next year.

eovogtb16_ESO

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).

I feel as if you guys play a completely different game than the rest of us and its super frustrating.

The whole selling point of ESO was no cooldown based combat. If you are going to introduce cooldowns into any aspect of the game you're going to have a lot of unhappy people.

Why does wall of elements for example share the same cooldown as most HEALS. [snip]

[edited to remove bashing remarks]

Firstmep

I still find it baffling that people think they dont plan on implementing any of these solutions.

"This is just a test to see how aoes affect performance".

Ive heard this phrase a few too many times, even from a lot of content creators.

Reality is, if they just wanted to see the impact aoe skills have on performance, they couldve just did the same test with cooldown for 6-8 weeks straight.
What they were really testing, is to see which restrictions would yield the greatest results.
You dont do that if you are not planning to use those restrictions going forward.

Now, based on the overwhelmingly negative feedback on these crippling tests, they might decide not to implement any of them, but that doesnt mean it wasnt their plan originally.

EmEm_Oh

eovogtb16_ESO 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).

I feel as if you guys play a completely different game than the rest of us and its super frustrating.

The whole selling point of ESO was no cooldown based combat. If you are going to introduce cooldowns into any aspect of the game you're going to have a lot of unhappy people.

Why does wall of elements for example share the same cooldown as most HEALS. []

Oh they know what they're doing as they simply pair the most resource-using skills together, no matter if it doesn't make sense in a pvp situation. Putting a cooldown on rapids was the first indication they didn't care what they were doing...just that it made the servers calm down.

This wasn't a test at all. Just a public display to make it appear as if players had a voice. I figured the cooldowns were going to be perm. So, with that, I won't be playing in Cyro that much, if at all. If anything this was a test on my patients, and I'm discovering I don't have much left for this nonsense.

ZOS should have just avoided all this jerking around for the last 2 months by stating what they were going to do versus manipulating users into thinking they actually had a choice in the matter and conduct some of the most embarrassing testing on players I've ever experienced, not to mention the lack of control over those "tests".

We ask for more housing items to be used in homes, we get "Nope. Never. But here's a fancy little dude you can talk to in your home! Oh, and now you can make your limited mounts walk around! Yay!"

Wouldn't be surprised if we get another "test", only this time the forums will be affected and eventually they remove the forums just to give more fuel to their outdated equipment.

Eve Onlne is getting more of my attention these days.

[edited quoted content]

zaria

Firstmep wrote: »

I still find it baffling that people think they dont plan on implementing any of these solutions.

"This is just a test to see how aoes affect performance".

Ive heard this phrase a few too many times, even from a lot of content creators.

Reality is, if they just wanted to see the impact aoe skills have on performance, they couldve just did the same test with cooldown for 6-8 weeks straight.
What they were really testing, is to see which restrictions would yield the greatest results.
You dont do that if you are not planning to use those restrictions going forward.

Now, based on the overwhelmingly negative feedback on these crippling tests, they might decide not to implement any of them, but that doesnt mean it wasnt their plan originally.

I agree with you, just that they went even farther with the tests with cool downs and then added ramping cost on top show that they liked the idea.
The only thing who might stop them is fear of how much revenue will drop. Moved ESO+ to monthly payment myself.
On the other side they will get an double performance bonus as fewer people play.

EmEm_Oh

NirnStorm wrote: »

The activity finder still suffers from MANY issues, especially in battlegrounds queue.
Players can sit for over an hour before finding a battlegrounds match at times, this happened to me and many guild members, friends and stream viewers multiple times this patch. Can happen anywhere from top MMR to lowbie BGs.
-
The dungeon finder is better, but not enough either. You can sometimes queue up with a group of four and still have to sit and wait for literally 10 minutes to get an instance for your group, and many times you can't even cancel your active queue.

The AoE Test have taught us a lot as well.
It's clear to see that in none of these tests we've reached the performance we want to see in the game (and so do you), even though some of these tests were incredibly extreme in terms of punishment for AoE usage.
Will you consider testing Cyrodiil's performance without cross-healing and aoe effects between groups at all while continuing to reduce the max group size until we notice the difference in performance?


Great job overall, the loadscreens have improved MASSIVELY, and we haven't had too many crash and FPS drops related issues. I really hope to see the performance in PvP improves as well and hopefully the right server side changes will be done as well as the client side fixes

Instead of narrowing down the add-ons being used in Cyro, and you guys should know what they are...everyone is now being punished for a small group of players who are taxing the system. In addition, how can you say GREAT JOB, when we don't have statistics on the numbers of players who actually wanted to stay in Cyro long enough to experience their cooldowns and get killed, time after time because they couldn't self-heal due to their skills being all locked together.

Sure, I can run around in Cyro and pretend everything is GREAT, but once I dismount and fight somebody, that's where the memes begin.

Toc de Malsvi

eovogtb16_ESO 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).

I feel as if you guys play a completely different game than the rest of us and its super frustrating.

The whole selling point of ESO was no cooldown based combat. If you are going to introduce cooldowns into any aspect of the game you're going to have a lot of unhappy people.

Not quite. That is only for some players coming from other MMOs.

ESO has always had a huge selling point as an MMO based in Elder Scrolls lore/world.

Additionally, ESO has had a selling point of “play as you want”, encouraging mixing spells, weapon types, and even roles. ESO has shirked, but not eliminated, the trinity of tank, healer, and dps.

stevusbeefus

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Hi everyone,

Below is our next quarterly game performance preview. This time, we are starting with a recap of Update 27 performance improvement effectiveness and next steps, followed by a preview of what’s coming for Update 28 in November. As with our last game performance preview, this includes details from our Engineering team.

Thank you, and if you haven’t yet had a chance, we also encourage you to check out the Update 28 Combat Preview here.


Update 27 Retro

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). However, there is still work to be done as the performance gains, though substantial, are not enough to make the overall experience as smooth as we would like it to be. We will be running more combinations of tests right after this last round completes, and providing a more comprehensive summary of this round of tests. Stay tuned for more info soon!

Here are a couple general notes about the AoE ability testing:

• Our ideal server FPS is less than 30ms. Anything over 50ms and players will see noticeable delays in abilities firing. The global cooldown test brought server FPS in high-intensity situations down almost 25%, but it still spikes above 50 in large battles.
• Population remained consistent during peak hours for these tests. (i.e. – On PC EU, Ravenwatch was still pop-capped for all three Alliances)

Trial & Dungeon Performance on the Server: We had some issues with configuration settings when we first launched these initial changes that are now resolved. In the past few weeks, things have been stable and running smoothly. We identified a few more adjustments that we need to make, and those should be in for Update 29.

Database Improvements – Activity Finder: We are happy with how well these changes have gone thus far. Getting into dungeon groups is a much quicker and more reliable experience than it has been in the past. There are still a few edge-case bugs we’re tracking, but overall things have vastly improved.

Intermittent Load Screens: The fixes we implemented to address intermittent load screen issues have performed remarkably well. There has been a significant drop in intermittent load screens across the board, in all zones. For example – in Cyrodiil (which was one of the worst offenders) we have seen a 95+% decrease in intermittent load screens randomly popping up in the zone. (We went from approx. 50k a day down to under 3k a day).

Overall Client Stability (critical memory system & Havok physics engine hardening): We have seen an improvement in overall stability due to these initiatives. We have not fixed all the crashes and still have work to do, but our crash rate on consoles has decreased dramatically since U27 launch.


Update 28 Preview
For Update 28, we have the following initiatives coming:

• Large-Scale Combat Performance Improvements:
  • These include optimizations for how the client updates visual effects and should result in a higher framerate when participating in mass-scale combat with lots of abilities being cast (client FPS improvements).
• Frustum Culling & Render Thread Optimizations:
  • 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.

The Update 28 game performance work noted above is live on the PTS right now and will go into the game in November.

Thank you all for your patience waiting for this quarter’s game performance preview, and we hope this helped illustrate how the Update 27 work went and what we’re working on for Update 28.

its absolutely terrible, you have broken the game again and again. I'm so sick of this! will not be buying crowns at all in the future unless things change

Drammanoth

Don't know why, but it appears that after patch 28 our laptops suddenyl began overheating... Ant idea wht that is? Had that on PTS, have it now, even though I don't have Markarth...

relentless_turnip

Drammanoth wrote: »

Don't know why, but it appears that after patch 28 our laptops suddenyl began overheating... Ant idea wht that is? Had that on PTS, have it now, even though I don't have Markarth...

You say "our laptops" who is included in that statement? I haven't noticed any overheating on my laptop. If you have ESO + you have Markarth and also even if you don't have the dlc everyone is effected by changes made by its release. Not having a dlc only prevents access.

Ramber

kill all the ads

Sergykid

there's a "ghost" queue in which you can enter and wait for a few minutes. If you join the queue as tank or healer and a group doesn't pop in 10 seconds, just rejoin the queue until it pops. This ghost queue also happens when 4 people join and are "queued", and the solution just like earlier mentioned is to simply rejoin. Most people don't know that if they don't get a group in 10 seconds as heal or tank then most likely they are in the ghost queue and are going to wait for a few minutes.

N_L

Ever since like a month ago I've been having long requesting character load (which I don't think is client side) and loading screens. I tested with addons, without, addons do add a bit but not as much because I often get stuck in loading while everyone loads in, sometimes logging in the game takes few minutes from character screen.
Tried with and without addons, deleted that shader file, ran as administrator, no antivirus etc, nothing helped and it used to be fine.

Banana

I'm upgrading some of my hardware. How about you guys to.

Jaraal

N_L wrote: »

Ever since like a month ago I've been having long requesting character load (which I don't think is client side) and loading screens.

In all my years playing, loading screens are longer now than they have ever been. Skill delays and crashes are at an all time high. Playstyle options have been neutered (No choice of Battlegrounds, skills limited to group only, earned skills taken away, etc).

If this is the year of performance, I am dreading to imagine what state the game will be in a year from now.

Brovah

Zos should upgrade their hardware instead of running the gameplay and mechanics to gain some shred of better ping..

Uninstall.. unsubscribe..

Contact me when they actually know how the world of eso works and start to listen to their playerbase

Knockmaker

Didn't the majority of players voted against 12-member groups already? Why is zos implementing it this patch? No, it will not destroy ball groups because they use voice chat for coordination. On the other hand, it will make sieging and capturing keeps nearly impossible with 12-member groups since not every player is experienced, skilled, long-time pvp players. And those regular groups can't coordinate like ball groups because they are mainly pugs and not everybody knows each other outside eso.

I agree that cross-healing might help with lag to a small extent, but reducing group size in nonsense. I never saw anything about it improving things, in fact, most of people voted against it as far as I remember. How did they decide doing that?

virtus753

Knockmaker wrote: »

Didn't the majority of players voted against 12-member groups already? Why is zos implementing it this patch? No, it will not destroy ball groups because they use voice chat for coordination. On the other hand, it will make sieging and capturing keeps nearly impossible with 12-member groups since not every player is experienced, skilled, long-time pvp players. And those regular groups can't coordinate like ball groups because they are mainly pugs and not everybody knows each other outside eso.

I agree that cross-healing might help with lag to a small extent, but reducing group size in nonsense. I never saw anything about it improving things, in fact, most of people voted against it as far as I remember. How did they decide doing that?

I’m not sure how we can claim that the majority of players voted against this change. The vast majority of players aren’t on these forums, and most people who are on the forums don’t respond to player-generated polls. ZOS conducts some surveys via email, but I can’t recall them asking about group sizes in Cyro or sharing any such results with us.

At any rate, ZOS is not obligated to go with the majority even if they did oppose the change. The game is not a democracy. The devs did admit that none of the test parameters resulted in the kind of performance improvements they were looking for. They said only that the smaller group size resulted in behavioral changes that they (the devs) liked. Who knows what those behavioral changes were, exactly? The devs didn’t specify. A lot of people I know just didn’t play Cyro during the testing — perhaps they like fewer people playing Cyro? Or fewer people grouping? Fewer people at sieges? They’ve left it very unclear. I had hoped they’d be more specific, but perhaps they don’t want to encourage contrarian behavior.

Sergykid

stop assuming that it is a hardware problem. How do you know this? What makes you so sure it's this?
maybe it's a transfer data problem, a unnecessarily complex coding problem, a bandwidth problem, etc.

imagine you have 10 trucks of water coming, 10 barrels, and 5 pipes. You shift the pipes from a barrel to another, in the meantime the trucks keep the water on them. People say "you keep water in the trucks, get more barrels to unload it", while you need better or more pipes.

sean.plackerb14_ESO

I really don't think "buy better/more servers" would just magically fix everything.

I'm pretty darn sure that if they could throw like $12,000-$20,000 in server hardware at the problem and have the performance in PVP drastically improve or fix completely they would. Wouldn't that be WAY cheaper than having to pay networking engineers, and programmers dedicated to optimizing the server-side code. It would def be cheaper overall than continuing to pay people to keep working on this for quite a while.

Maybe I'm wrong but I'd be shocked if throwing server hardware at it would fix everything. It's got to be the server-side code needing as much optimization as possible. And keep in mind I'm sure the people that were at ZOS when the game was being created and the people that originally wrote most or all the server-side code have moved on to other jobs. So, its people working on code they didn't originally write.

Knockmaker

virtus753 wrote: »

Knockmaker wrote: »

Didn't the majority of players voted against 12-member groups already? Why is zos implementing it this patch? No, it will not destroy ball groups because they use voice chat for coordination. On the other hand, it will make sieging and capturing keeps nearly impossible with 12-member groups since not every player is experienced, skilled, long-time pvp players. And those regular groups can't coordinate like ball groups because they are mainly pugs and not everybody knows each other outside eso.

I agree that cross-healing might help with lag to a small extent, but reducing group size in nonsense. I never saw anything about it improving things, in fact, most of people voted against it as far as I remember. How did they decide doing that?

I’m not sure how we can claim that the majority of players voted against this change. The vast majority of players aren’t on these forums, and most people who are on the forums don’t respond to player-generated polls. ZOS conducts some surveys via email, but I can’t recall them asking about group sizes in Cyro or sharing any such results with us.

At any rate, ZOS is not obligated to go with the majority even if they did oppose the change. The game is not a democracy. The devs did admit that none of the test parameters resulted in the kind of performance improvements they were looking for. They said only that the smaller group size resulted in behavioral changes that they (the devs) liked. Who knows what those behavioral changes were, exactly? The devs didn’t specify. A lot of people I know just didn’t play Cyro during the testing — perhaps they like fewer people playing Cyro? Or fewer people grouping? Fewer people at sieges? They’ve left it very unclear. I had hoped they’d be more specific, but perhaps they don’t want to encourage contrarian behavior.

I am not sure if you were trying to defend zos there, but let me add a few things. You are right about majority of players not even being on forums. Though, I do recall mods (or someone else from zos) saying that they actually play the game from time to time, and if they do that, they surely know those non-forum-user players are also displeased about several things and there are constant complaints about that in zone chat in almost everywhere but especially in Cyrodiil. So, that doesn't change things much.

It may not be democracy, I wasn't criticising the management system. However, there is something called common sense. And if any game devs continue to ignore their player-base, they will eventually have to shut down. We don't want that to happen to eso, but what do you expect to happen when tes vi or New World or some other immersive game hits the market? People simply don't want this game to die abruptly, but it will happen with all these beatings around the bush. I simply repeat what I said about group size change: How is that supposed to not affect the overall teamplay negatively(the 12-member group size in sieges)? When I was talking about not making changes to core combat/teamplay mechanics, this was exactly what I was referring to. Zos just needs to reach their pockets for once and fix their codes or upgrade servers. Such changes will and are (as we will see) killing this game.

Jaraal

sean.plackerb14_ESO wrote: »

It's got to be the server-side code needing as much optimization as possible.

The server side code worked great years ago when the population cap in Cyrodiil was much higher. People were spamming AOEs, healing people not in their groups, and wearing proc sets back then as well, so these aren't the culprit, either.

virtus753

Knockmaker wrote: »

virtus753 wrote: »

Knockmaker wrote: »

Didn't the majority of players voted against 12-member groups already? Why is zos implementing it this patch? No, it will not destroy ball groups because they use voice chat for coordination. On the other hand, it will make sieging and capturing keeps nearly impossible with 12-member groups since not every player is experienced, skilled, long-time pvp players. And those regular groups can't coordinate like ball groups because they are mainly pugs and not everybody knows each other outside eso.

I agree that cross-healing might help with lag to a small extent, but reducing group size in nonsense. I never saw anything about it improving things, in fact, most of people voted against it as far as I remember. How did they decide doing that?

I’m not sure how we can claim that the majority of players voted against this change. The vast majority of players aren’t on these forums, and most people who are on the forums don’t respond to player-generated polls. ZOS conducts some surveys via email, but I can’t recall them asking about group sizes in Cyro or sharing any such results with us.

At any rate, ZOS is not obligated to go with the majority even if they did oppose the change. The game is not a democracy. The devs did admit that none of the test parameters resulted in the kind of performance improvements they were looking for. They said only that the smaller group size resulted in behavioral changes that they (the devs) liked. Who knows what those behavioral changes were, exactly? The devs didn’t specify. A lot of people I know just didn’t play Cyro during the testing — perhaps they like fewer people playing Cyro? Or fewer people grouping? Fewer people at sieges? They’ve left it very unclear. I had hoped they’d be more specific, but perhaps they don’t want to encourage contrarian behavior.

I am not sure if you were trying to defend zos there, but let me add a few things. You are right about majority of players not even being on forums. Though, I do recall mods (or someone else from zos) saying that they actually play the game from time to time, and if they do that, they surely know those non-forum-user players are also displeased about several things and there are constant complaints about that in zone chat in almost everywhere but especially in Cyrodiil. So, that doesn't change things much.

It may not be democracy, I wasn't criticising the management system. However, there is something called common sense. And if any game devs continue to ignore their player-base, they will eventually have to shut down. We don't want that to happen to eso, but what do you expect to happen when tes vi or New World or some other immersive game hits the market? People simply don't want this game to die abruptly, but it will happen with all these beatings around the bush. I simply repeat what I said about group size change: How is that supposed to not affect the overall teamplay negatively(the 12-member group size in sieges)? When I was talking about not making changes to core combat/teamplay mechanics, this was exactly what I was referring to. Zos just needs to reach their pockets for once and fix their codes or upgrade servers. Such changes will and are (as we will see) killing this game.

I was not defending ZOS. I was pointing out that your initial rationale for criticizing their decision with respect to group size in Cyrodiil was flawed. That doesn’t mean I disagree with your conclusion. On the contrary, while group size doesn’t impact me personally, as I only run solo or with a friend in Cyro, I certainly sympathize with people whom this change will negatively impact. My own player experience in Cyro is immensely affected by the restriction on ally effects, and I don’t think that either change should have been put in place if it wasn’t going to improve performance significantly, which ZOS has already said it won’t. I have also already said that I think ZOS’ reasoning for the decision here could stand to be much more transparent — currently it’s not much more than a fancy way of saying it’s arbitrary, adding to the list of arbitrary decisions that have caused a marked negative impact on player morale (as attested through forum threads and in chat in game). I would agree that arbitrary decisions with negative impact on player morale are not a positive thing for the health of the game.

My point was that criticism needs to be logically sound in order to be as effective as possible. Otherwise it’s easy to dismiss the conclusion out of hand, even when it’s one that should be heard. I do believe there’s plenty of sound criticism to be given, as you will see from most of my posts here on the forums.

Zabagad

Jaraal wrote: »

sean.plackerb14_ESO wrote: »

It's got to be the server-side code needing as much optimization as possible.

The server side code worked great years ago when the population cap in Cyrodiil was much higher. People were spamming AOEs, healing people not in their groups, and wearing proc sets back then as well, so these aren't the culprit, either.

There was a huge performance change from U24 to U25. I don't think they downgraded the server and so the software had a big impact.
I guess every thing they switch from client to the server could be a big issue. Like block within U25.

Destai

Now when you say you're happy with the changes, it's time to ask us how it was viewed from our end. How are you measuring community satisfaction during these tests? Ultimately the goal is to have a better experience for the clients, not the personal achievement of ZOS staff.

Berchelous

Game became an utter trash after this update

newtinmpls

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Database Improvements – Activity Finder: We are happy with how well these changes have gone thus far. Getting into dungeon groups is a much quicker and more reliable experience than it has been in the past. There are still a few edge-case bugs we’re tracking, but overall things have vastly improved.

<snippage>

The Update 28 game performance work noted above is live on the PTS right now and will go into the game in November.

I would be very curious to see the assessments of players, as ZoS tends to over-estimate the success of their "fixes".