12 person group limit? Whaaaaaat?

code65536

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Hi everyone,

First, we wanted to thank you all for providing so much valuable feedback on the change to group sizes in this update. We understand there are situations where having a larger group size is desired and makes some activities more enjoyable.

As some of you have guessed, this change ultimately comes down to performance. We’ve been continually looking at ways to improve performance and stability across the game and we found reducing the group size was an effective way to ensure there would be fewer situations where you hit critical memory. Additionally, there’s a fair amount of data that has to be exchanged on the backend for every person in your group. By limiting the group size to 12, we’re introducing additional performance gains.

Thanks again for taking the time to share your thoughts with us on this topic. We appreciate it, and we hope this helps provide additional context for the change.

@ZOS_GinaBruno When people complain about performance, they're generally complaining about performance in Cyrodiil or in trials: two places where group sizes are already limited to 12.

This change extends that limit to places like Deshaan. When was the last time someone complained about performance in Deshaan? I can't recall any cases of this; can you?

lillybit

I don't remember anyone ever complaining about performance in overland to the extent that it needs this "improvement." I wonder if the real issue is that the game can't handle more than 6 companions in a group so they're making sure it can never happen.

DerAlleinTiger

merevie wrote: »

It will suck about 8 months.
Then it won't. Going by PvP...

-people value the spot -they turn up on time, they're prepared and you don't have 6 of them off afk needing catching up later

-voice coms are more relaxed -people can talk without it being impossible/they get to know each other

-the people who rock up late and have to find new friends are motivated to scroll through their friend's list -guilds grow -people step up and run things which takes pressure of crowns

-stuff takes much less time to do/less goes wrong

24 people is impersonal - 12 not so much - it'll grow on you, maybe

That's not how this works. Why would I want people, who would otherwise join my guild events, to have to go scroll through their friends list to play with other people all because the group is filled up? That's the exact opposite of the goal! The whole point is to get guild members involved with, you know, the guild and its events. I wouldn't be running the events otherwise! It's hard enough competing with other activities and events that might be going on at the same time. Now on top of that the game is actively crippling my efforts towards having a big turn out.

The inability to do that isn't something that will "grow on me," no. I misunderstood what you meant about the voice chat thing. So scratched off that section. (To be fair it's very hard to read accurately with how you structured the post.)
So replaced the part that wasnt relevant. Additionally, though:

Most of the time my events don't even use voice chat. In fact, most people I know actively do not want to use it, and it's often discouraged so that people actually pay attention to the in-game chat rather than whatever's going on in voice. Any activities that really require voice chat - PvP, trials, vet DLC dungeons (often not even those) - are already limited in group size. Your preference for something in an out-of-game third party should not determine the limitations of everyone else.

I don't know why I have to say that. If you prefer 12 person groups, limit your events to 12.
Have a cut-off or sign-up. That's on you if you want it. Nevermind that some people might actually really like the larger groups in a voice call. Some people love having a big party of guildmates hanging out together - chaos and all - and some people hate being in a voice chat altogether. You can't dictate what we will and won't like nor what we do or don't find best for our own groups and events.

Varana

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Hi everyone,

First, we wanted to thank you all for providing so much valuable feedback on the change to group sizes in this update. We understand there are situations where having a larger group size is desired and makes some activities more enjoyable.

As some of you have guessed, this change ultimately comes down to performance. We’ve been continually looking at ways to improve performance and stability across the game and we found reducing the group size was an effective way to ensure there would be fewer situations where you hit critical memory. Additionally, there’s a fair amount of data that has to be exchanged on the backend for every person in your group. By limiting the group size to 12, we’re introducing additional performance gains.

Thanks again for taking the time to share your thoughts with us on this topic. We appreciate it, and we hope this helps provide additional context for the change.

At this point, making the game less fun to play seems to be a regular result of changes to the game.

The only time when I can imagine performance being an issue with 24-man groups (i.e. in general overland and housing content) is the Alik'r dolmen train, and the world-event-du-jour farm. And in those, you'll get performance issues whether grouped up or not.

The whole point of this "valuable" (hahaha, much valued) feedback was that this change will hurt activities that don't rely on peak performance exceptionally. And together with the quoted statements you yourself made that limiting group size did not result in a noticeable improvement in Cyrodiil (where performance actually matters), introducing this change with the same reasoning - sorry, but I can't help but feel played for a fool.

[Edited to remove Baiting]
Edit: I hope to have re-phrased that without "baiting".

ajkb78

It's clear that some people, for legitimate reasons, have found groups larger than 12 useful.

We'll have to take ZoS's word for it that groups of larger than 12 somehow impact performance because of calculations done between each member of the group.

OK. So what compromise might suit everyone?

On console each guild has a number of voice chat channels. (Voice chat is a core game feature on console; I realise that's not the case on PC.)
But why couldn't each guild have a number of text chat channels too, which you could join or leave in the same way as you join or leave the existing console voice chat channels? That way RP events (which I'm gathering from the discussion are typically the kind that require lots of text-channel group discussion) could just grab guild chat 2 or guild chat 3 or whatever and carry on with no limit (or a really high limit, at any rate) to channel size, so GMs would be happy. It doesn't even seem like it would require much new functionality in the game, text chat is already there as a feature. It wouldn't require heavy computation among channel members as they wouldn't actually be grouped, so ZoS would be happy.

Varana

Oh, having an alternative with multi-group text channels or things like that would alleviate many of the problems with this decision, and may well lead to an even better system in the future when functionality gets added.

The problem is that this won't happen in this patch. We're in the last cycle of the PTS, the new update has been feature-complete for weeks or even months now. So whatever might happen in the future, they're taking large groups away now, without adding an alternative solution.

So thinking about for an alternative is certainly a good thing but doesn't change the fact that we'll lose the functionality for the foreseeable future.

Thrudra_Magia

Sadly, it will affect guild events, at least for my guilds.

Savina

While having a few extra chat channels would help, it doesn't address the problem of where the event/group lead is on the map for the additional crowns needed when you break into multiple groups. Our guild already runs multiple groups for several of our events, and we deal with the challenges regularly. We need a way for the addition groups crowns to see the actual event lead on the map.

The logistics of running more than one group multiplies with each additional group you run. You need people willing to try and follow a lead they can NOT see on the map. You need people willing to keep track of where their 11 people are on the map, and direct them through whispers or chat while not interfering with the direction and coordination coming from the actual event lead. There will need to be players willing to switch groups to share quest. The fact is that with each addition groups the problems and inconveniences multiply. If you don't have people willing and capable, you end up with chaos and attendees of the event don't have a lot of fun.

This change is going to make a lot of things more difficult and some groups/guilds will make it work and be just fine. Others such as the RP guilds and smaller social guilds could face a great deal of problems that will kill their event attendance and the leaderships desire to even run events. The social aspect of all types of groups are going to suffer from this change.

This is a bad decision on ZoS's part. Anything that puts these kind of road blocks on social activities in a MMO is just a bad idea.

dvonpm

I haven't even noticed lag in overland content. Cyrodiil and trials yes, a bit at Alik'r dolmens, but this seems like serious overkill. Plus we already know it didn't much improve performance and they had already said something about mysterious behavioral changes.

I'm not saying overland lag doesn't exist, but this sounds like the cure is worse than the problem. I wouldn't make that trade.

Though I mostly pvp and even with a high end comp it's really, really bad so my bar for what intolerable lag is may be way off lol.

Group chats where group crowns enter the channel for the group would really help. As would some kind of squad lead marker.

Jaraal

lillybit wrote: »

I don't remember anyone ever complaining about performance in overland to the extent that it needs this "improvement." I wonder if the real issue is that the game can't handle more than 6 companions in a group so they're making sure it can never happen.

It's the Elder Scrolls' version of Skynet. Think about it........ at some point, Companions will be the only ones left.



"Performance improvements" will only become complete when there is no one left to complain about it.

JoeCapricorn

code65536 wrote: »

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Hi everyone,

First, we wanted to thank you all for providing so much valuable feedback on the change to group sizes in this update. We understand there are situations where having a larger group size is desired and makes some activities more enjoyable.

As some of you have guessed, this change ultimately comes down to performance. We’ve been continually looking at ways to improve performance and stability across the game and we found reducing the group size was an effective way to ensure there would be fewer situations where you hit critical memory. Additionally, there’s a fair amount of data that has to be exchanged on the backend for every person in your group. By limiting the group size to 12, we’re introducing additional performance gains.

Thanks again for taking the time to share your thoughts with us on this topic. We appreciate it, and we hope this helps provide additional context for the change.

@ZOS_GinaBruno When people complain about performance, they're generally complaining about performance in Cyrodiil or in trials: two places where group sizes are already limited to 12.

This change extends that limit to places like Deshaan. When was the last time someone complained about performance in Deshaan? I can't recall any cases of this; can you?

The only time I had a serious performance hit, that I can remember, was when there was an event where an absolutely HUGE number of players were all gathered in one spot.

I did the Alik'r Dolmen Grind shortly after the start of Jester's Festival on my baby Warden, and there were so many people at each dolmen that the frame-rate would go down to around 15. I very much doubt it was because there were several full 24-player groups going around, because a lot of people just ran between dolmens. I only grouped up initially to get the wayshrines easily! Once I knew the order of dolmens I just went.

It was still playable though. I didn't lag out or crash. It wasn't unstable like it would have been in Cyrodiil.

In the past, the only other zone that I encountered zone-wide lag was Craglorn. But even then that was during peak hours, and it was one or two years ago. I've been in zones with a similarly large number of players that haven't suffered from lag, so the issue going on in Craglorn at the time must have been fixed in the meantime. And they didn't need to reduce group sizes to do so!

@ZOS_GinaBruno So I implore you, please do not implement this change. This will not just make some activities difficult to do, but nearly impossible. It will hurt many many guilds. It will impact players with disabilities. I know you are a community manager and not necessarily someone who makes the decisions, but this is something that must not go live! It is so important that in this instance our feedback is more than just taken into consideration, but a driving force behind the decision.

gariondavey

Jaraal wrote: »

lillybit wrote: »

I don't remember anyone ever complaining about performance in overland to the extent that it needs this "improvement." I wonder if the real issue is that the game can't handle more than 6 companions in a group so they're making sure it can never happen.

It's the Elder Scrolls' version of Skynet. Think about it........ at some point, Companions will be the only ones left.



"Performance improvements" will only become complete when there is no one left to complain about it.

They are adding companions so when we all get sucked into the game log horizon style, we have more npcs to befriend

Jaraal

gariondavey wrote: »

Jaraal wrote: »

lillybit wrote: »

I don't remember anyone ever complaining about performance in overland to the extent that it needs this "improvement." I wonder if the real issue is that the game can't handle more than 6 companions in a group so they're making sure it can never happen.

It's the Elder Scrolls' version of Skynet. Think about it........ at some point, Companions will be the only ones left.



"Performance improvements" will only become complete when there is no one left to complain about it.

They are adding companions so when we all get sucked into the game log horizon style, we have more npcs to befriend

Elder Matrix Online.


Will you take the fun pill, or the performance pill?

DreadDaedroth

Please don't reduce the social aspect and guild interaction of this game for mere performance improvements.

TheAlphaRaider

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Hi everyone,

First, we wanted to thank you all for providing so much valuable feedback on the change to group sizes in this update. We understand there are situations where having a larger group size is desired and makes some activities more enjoyable.

As some of you have guessed, this change ultimately comes down to performance. We’ve been continually looking at ways to improve performance and stability across the game and we found reducing the group size was an effective way to ensure there would be fewer situations where you hit critical memory. Additionally, there’s a fair amount of data that has to be exchanged on the backend for every person in your group. By limiting the group size to 12, we’re introducing additional performance gains.

Thanks again for taking the time to share your thoughts with us on this topic. We appreciate it, and we hope this helps provide additional context for the change.

I agree with it. Do what you need to do to fix the servers? Idk how this limits anyone severly or more than an inconvenience.

DerAlleinTiger

TheAlphaRaider wrote: »

I agree with it. Do what you need to do to fix the servers? Idk how this limits anyone severly or more than an inconvenience.

You're free to agree with it if you like, but if you genuinely don't understand how it's a major issue for a lot of people after 10 pages of people explaining the numerous problems then I don't know how else it can be explained. Alternatively you just didn't bother reading them and you're being willfully ignorant/dismissive. Either way, "Do what you need to do to fix X" is a dangerous mentality to apply in a blanket manner, especially when it eventually comes at the expense of a feature you personally do use and enjoy.

Coorbin

TheAlphaRaider wrote: »

Idk

Therein lies the problem.

You do not know.

The fact that you don't know (ignorance) does not mean that this is not a problem.

The fact that something doesn't affect you does not mean that it doesn't affect (many) other people.

If you'll do us a favor, scroll up through this thread and read the hundreds of posts from people -- guild leaders, roleplayers, socialites and lovers of ESO, almost all of us paying customers -- who are pleading for this decision to be reversed.

We give specific reasons why we believe it is going to be harmful to us. We cite specific examples of events that would not have been possible, or would be much more difficult to coordinate, if group sizes were reduced.

If you read all of these facts and you still think this is not a problem, that just suggests a total lack of empathy or care for the situations of people who do things differently than you, or have different preferences and tastes than you.

Elder Scrolls Online has a lot of players. Not all of them are going to play in exactly the same way. Not all of them are going to get the same thing out of playing the game. That is the reality. A developer who wishes to be a responsible steward of this community would take as many different perspectives and play styles into account as possible before making these sorts of decisions that tread on some peoples' entertainment.

Clearly, from the response of ZOS, it is clear that they are not such a developer, and have no interest in being a responsible steward of the community. So I guess I shouldn't blame you for your ignorance, when even @ZOS_GinaBruno would probably agree with you if she were to respond to your post.

But mark my words, being on the "same side" as the developers here is not a good thing. Supporting this measure is actively harming the health of the ESO community. That can only have one result: the acceleration of the demise of the game.

Microsoft WILL stop operating Elder Scrolls Online once it is no longer profitable. I absolutely and positively guarantee you that. If players leave or withdraw their monetary support due to their play style or social environment being bulldozed by the developers, the game's profit source will dry up, and the game will close.

So if you want to see ESO close, keep on talking the way you are now. Otherwise, open your mind to the fact that other people have different preferences than you, and we deserve to be able to play the game the way we want to, as paying customers.

As has been said dozens of times, there IS NO performance problem. The performance problem that will exist in the future is because of the Companions, which for some reason ZOS felt they had to introduce. They are voluntarily putting double the load on their servers by doubling the number of characters involved in every fight.

The wound is self-inflicted, and their "cure" is to purge players who want to be social with each other rather than tote around an extra NPC who adds NO value to the game whatsoever. Can you not see how absurd this is?

gariondavey

Around 300 replies, over 10k views

tyran404_ESO

By the unfortunate looks of things i'll be feed backing this on live soon enough too, every day. I'm already scrambling to try and figure out how to save my guild events now with this terrible change. Bleh.

peacenote

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Hi everyone,

First, we wanted to thank you all for providing so much valuable feedback on the change to group sizes in this update. We understand there are situations where having a larger group size is desired and makes some activities more enjoyable.

As some of you have guessed, this change ultimately comes down to performance. We’ve been continually looking at ways to improve performance and stability across the game and we found reducing the group size was an effective way to ensure there would be fewer situations where you hit critical memory. Additionally, there’s a fair amount of data that has to be exchanged on the backend for every person in your group. By limiting the group size to 12, we’re introducing additional performance gains.

Thanks again for taking the time to share your thoughts with us on this topic. We appreciate it, and we hope this helps provide additional context for the change.

Much appreciation to Gina for responding!

Personally I still feel that changing this core aspect of ESO (groups of 24) is not worth the potential performance gains unless it is so dramatic that no one ever crashes or lags again. It's going to decimate community events and this has been quite excellently illustrated by many of you. Yes, this is not a democracy, but a business, but it still seems like someone out there in ZOS-land should be able to understand that there is a balance between quality of life/fun (which = enjoyment in the game) and performance/avoidance of crashes (which = frustration when not being able to play the game properly) and there is NOTHING to be gained by improving performance to the point that fun is eliminated. There is no game if too many people leave because they are not having fun.

Yes, I have seen and know PvP'ers that quit because of Cyro performance issues and PvE raiders that quit because of trial bugs and performance issues. But people ALSO quit when they don't have the basic features of an MMO, and in some ways this is more detrimental because we're now talking about guild leaders and community leaders that keep folks engaged with the game. Save for some kind of change that drastically reduces end game performance even further, I'd wager a guess that most of those end game folks are here to stay despite the issues (because otherwise they'd already be gone) and we are at a tipping point in our community where preserving some of the things that make ESO, ESO is more important than the oft-repeated "improve performance" goal. It feels like ZOS can't see the forest for the trees anymore.

By the way, for all the people saying "just have two groups of twelve"... if the point is to reduce back end data exchanged due to group size, ultimately wouldn't this cause the exact same amount of performance problems? Surely by that logic the only way to fix things is to further reduce the amount of people that can be logged in at one time. I can see the logic of "critical memory" for the individual player but, as others have pointed out, individuals aren't really experiencing issues in PvE when in these 24 man groups.

VaranisArano

peacenote wrote: »

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Hi everyone,

First, we wanted to thank you all for providing so much valuable feedback on the change to group sizes in this update. We understand there are situations where having a larger group size is desired and makes some activities more enjoyable.

As some of you have guessed, this change ultimately comes down to performance. We’ve been continually looking at ways to improve performance and stability across the game and we found reducing the group size was an effective way to ensure there would be fewer situations where you hit critical memory. Additionally, there’s a fair amount of data that has to be exchanged on the backend for every person in your group. By limiting the group size to 12, we’re introducing additional performance gains.

Thanks again for taking the time to share your thoughts with us on this topic. We appreciate it, and we hope this helps provide additional context for the change.

By the way, for all the people saying "just have two groups of twelve"... if the point is to reduce back end data exchanged due to group size, ultimately wouldn't this cause the exact same amount of performance problems?

A minor caveat to this: if the problem is intra-party communication wherein data from all group members is broadcast to all group members, then 24 person groups are akin to (24 X 24), which is greater than two groups of 12: ((12×12) + (12x12)). Just using those as placeholder numbers, 24-person groups are at 576, whereas two 12-person groups are only at 288. On the face of it, ZOS has slashed data exchange.

This doesn't take into account that some social groups will use other channels to coordinate two groups. Some of those may be more taxing for ESO: say, emote, yell, or zone chat. If PC guilds turn to Discord, etc, it may be less taxing for ESO.

Additionally, most social groups will decide that 12 + 12 is too much effort, and will only run the one group. Bingo, ZOS has slashed data exchange even further!


The caveat to my caveat is that dropping to 12-person groups didin't result in tangible improvements to performance in Cyrodiil. From that, I surmise that having masses of players in the same place, like the Alikr Dolmens, is still going to cause issues.


I'm not in favor. To me, this seems like ZOS is cannibalizing core aspects of gameplay to chase minor gains in performance.

Varana

VaranisArano wrote: »

I'm not in favor. To me, this seems like ZOS is cannibalizing core aspects of gameplay to chase minor gains in performance.

Except this is, as you assumed, actually about Companions, and a group of 12 players + 12 companions would eat more resources than 24 players, for some internal reason, so they feel like they need to prevent that from happening.

Okay, this is veering into the territory of wild speculation, but what can you do when ZOS refuses to communicate with honesty.

VaranisArano

Varana wrote: »

VaranisArano wrote: »

I'm not in favor. To me, this seems like ZOS is cannibalizing core aspects of gameplay to chase minor gains in performance.

Except this is, as you assumed, actually about Companions, and a group of 12 players + 12 companions would eat more resources than 24 players, for some internal reason, so they feel like they need to prevent that from happening.

Okay, this is veering into the territory of wild speculation, but what can you do when ZOS refuses to communicate with honesty.

For sure, I do think that Companions play into this. They are the new factor in the equation, and since we know from PVP that there wasn't a tangible performance improvement from dropping groups, I'm kinda skeptical that overland PVE is going to see many gains from this.

But leaving that aside, I wanted to address why, if ZOS is doing this for the stated reasons, they do cut down on intra group data exchange moving from one 24 person group to two 12-person groups. And unfortunately, they cut even more communication with the hassle of trying to coordinate two groups of 12 players mean that guilds quit trying and only run one group. (That's not to say that there aren't other causes of data exchange involved, but rather that ZOS seems to be targeting intra-group data exchanges.)

Ultimately, ESO will keep on trucking because most players will carry on.

TheWorldsLastChance

Stating insight credibility:
I am the owner of a large ESO community, to my knowledge it is the third largest ESO-related Discord. I GM five guilds that hit 150-175 online each in peak hours.

I am predicting that the annoyance of this change will likely do more net damage to your playerbase's experiences than the minimal lag that you're preventing.

As it sits, ESO's infrastructure for guild events (and more) is already a problem. We need to break our parties up into several groups with 24 member caps as-is, not to mention how we need to farm instances for an hour or more to get one group of 12 people (in the same in-game group) in the same public dungeon or delve. Lastly, gear farming is a pain when we have a group of 12+ as not everyone will get loot. We do 30+ events weekly with 60-80 attendees and peaking at 110-115 for our world boss tours. Every event, every participating player will see us enduring the pain of this change. Some individuals, particularly the co-leaders, will feel its wrath personally.
My point is: something that was already a problem is now going to become a worse problem and its awkwardness is going to be widely felt.
(As a response to the guy above, our events aren't impersonal. We're silly, and with so many people being silly, it gets.. entertaining. We genuinely have fun. Don't knock it until you try it.).

It's not just in my guild; if you read above, other guild leaders have communicated the same concerns.

Allow me to make another point, from a perspective of a player and not a guild leader.
Due to major pain points that can be discussed elsewhere, players are flocking out of ESO's endgame PvE and PvP populations. The majority of the population that is currently active in ESO isn't part of either of these groups - they are players who haven't quite committed to either PvE or PvP. Some day they likely will, but for now, they mostly do casual or social content. Either way, their exposure from group content has to come from somewhere. This is an MMO, right? One of those M's is multiplayer, right?
Let's say I was just a casual player, maybe I work long hours or I'm taking many credit hours at university. Maybe a family on the side (I just described maybe 70% of my playerbase.). I probably won't have the energy to commit to endgame PvE or PvP; however, say I wanted to socialize, contribute to some random guild I'm in, or do group content- the group events listed below are of the most accessible and visible options to me. My hypothetical presence there might not be significant to anyone else, but it would definitely be significant to me as this would be the peak of my capacity of exposure to ESO's social/group/pve encounters. If it doesn't go well because the event coordinators are fighting such an awkward system, and this is the only experience that I have, would you understand if I said I had a really bad taste about ESO in my mouth?
Players interested in the points below will be negatively effected when they assemble:
-Guild events
-Roleplay events
-Dolmen/Public Dungeon Groups
-World boss groups
-Zone clears (skyshards/lorebooks/etc)
-Fishing events
-Gear farms
-Events correlated with multiple guilds/communities (particularly RP guilds and server-wide events)

Rhetorical question: are the improvements in performance coming from making your roleplayer/social populations just not play?

I just ask that in the future, especially if this goes through, you make changes to do something nice for guilds. They fight ridiculously hard to survive, especially against ZOS-imposed limitations. This is a bad quality-of-life change, it's going to sting, and we're going to need some fatty ice cream to distract us from it!

I also appreciate the time you guys are taking to think up solutions to latency issues- I took so many weeks to respond because it didn't sound innocuous to me. But the more I anticipated its reality, the more I wanted to come here and voice my insight.
Despite what you guys choose to do, we will continue to support you.

In case you want to background check the integrity of my word, the guilds are (PC/NA)
The Gaming Council
The Gaming Council II
The Gaming Council IIl
The Gaming Council IV
The Trading Council
discord.gg/tgc
userid: @Chance_25

Jaraal

TheWorldsLastChance wrote: »

I am predicting that the annoyance of this change will likely do more net damage to your playerbase's experiences than the minimal lag that you're preventing.

Unfortunately it doesn't seem to matter to them. They would rather sacrifice player enjoyment for something they stated had no significant impact on performance.

Who knows what they will take away from us next, for whatever changing reasons. What is certain, though, is that they would rather dilute the player experience than find ways to maintain and expand on what has already been in place for years.

RedMuse

ajkb78 wrote: »

It's clear that some people, for legitimate reasons, have found groups larger than 12 useful.

We'll have to take ZoS's word for it that groups of larger than 12 somehow impact performance because of calculations done between each member of the group.

OK. So what compromise might suit everyone?

On console each guild has a number of voice chat channels. (Voice chat is a core game feature on console; I realise that's not the case on PC.)
But why couldn't each guild have a number of text chat channels too, which you could join or leave in the same way as you join or leave the existing console voice chat channels? That way RP events (which I'm gathering from the discussion are typically the kind that require lots of text-channel group discussion) could just grab guild chat 2 or guild chat 3 or whatever and carry on with no limit (or a really high limit, at any rate) to channel size, so GMs would be happy. It doesn't even seem like it would require much new functionality in the game, text chat is already there as a feature. It wouldn't require heavy computation among channel members as they wouldn't actually be grouped, so ZoS would be happy.

The problem is that none of this solves non-guild or cross guild events, no matter their nature. How do I communicate with 20 other people only five of which I share a guild with? In the current way of things I can make a group, post change I simply can't. Which means far fewer interactions on the whole and am going to hurt any social activity that happens outside or cross guilds immensely and RP most of all. Which in turn will hurt guilds because a cutdown to social activities on the whole will mean less overall activity in the game, which in turn means less guild activities.

What I would like to know is how much improvement does ZOS keep as benchmark for keeping this change? Like how high, or low, does it need to be before they're willing to scrap it and reverse it. If they're not willing to do that which steps are they going to take to alleviate the harm this will do on the overall health of the community and make it easier for us to make social activities in the game that takes place out-of-guilds or cross-guilds? Or in-guild for that matter as that's going to be a major pita with this too? How will ZOS make life easier for guilds that aren't about hard core PvP or PvE?

Extinct_Solo_Player

don't know why you care about group caps when you should actually be asking for zos to fix the damn horrible performance with the huge delay in casting skills and such lol.

VaranisArano

Extinct_Solo_Player wrote: »

don't know why you care about group caps when you should actually be asking for zos to fix the damn horrible performance with the huge delay in casting skills and such lol.

Out of curiosity, where in overland PVE are you experiencing a huge delay in casting skills and such horrible performance?

RedMuse

VaranisArano wrote: »

Extinct_Solo_Player wrote: »

don't know why you care about group caps when you should actually be asking for zos to fix the damn horrible performance with the huge delay in casting skills and such lol.

Out of curiosity, where in overland PVE are you experiencing a huge delay in casting skills and such horrible performance?

Only place I can think of that happening is Alik'r dolmen runs, Southern Elsweyr dragons and Harrowstorms. Two of these three activities do not usually have groups, certainly not large groups, running them. You see the performance impact regardless of group, or lack of it, because there's a lot of people there fighting simultaneously. It has Jack all to do with groups.

Savina

Extinct_Solo_Player wrote: »

don't know why you care about group caps when you should actually be asking for zos to fix the damn horrible performance with the huge delay in casting skills and such lol.

With all due respect, your skill delay issues have little to do with this thread’s topic. There are 100’s of threads on these forums that address your issue and I’m sure you’ve posted in several of them. This thread, which has remained on topic (group size) and has much constructive feedback, is clearly not about skills firing or delays in casting.

The truth is with very few exceptions (dolmen trains, and DLC world bosses), the people in groups larger than 12 are usually asked by their organizer to not use skills, or are engaged in activities that are non-combat related, consequently skill delay is not an issue in most larger groups.