What were the outcomes? what were the results? where are the changes and fixes? Whilst my most important question is why and how does midyear mayhem work like clockwork whilst Cyrodil is reminiscent of a terminal patient in a palliative care ward for the rest of the year?
It seems like theses tests had been going for just about nothing, I’ve see no drastic change other than 12 man max group sizes which if I recall correctly were changed prior to the cyrodil tests. It appears these were just a waste of time, or a diversion in an attempt to appear as though the dev team were actively doing something about cyrodil quality of life, whilst actually flicking a few tabs on and off once a week to just change things up. The idea that gameplay would become more balanced and the the performance would one day mystically and miraculously grossly improve has sort of been the driving factor of whats kept me playing this game and sticking it out whilst all my friends have long quit.
Upgrading to a newer console with an improved 60 FPS version of the game sounded like it was half of what the game needed and seeing similar performance on new hardware instantly crushed the idea performance was a hardware issue. The PvP tests seemed like the ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ Id been waiting for, a return to playable performance in peak time seemed like it was due. Then after months of obscure, weird changes it seems like the fix is just never coming. The devs could even make gameplay changes to directly combat lag and the people that use/abuse it their advantage like limiting players to small groups during peak time, limiting off heals and buffs to grouped players, capping the AOE spam a large group could do consecutively etc.
However nothing ever came and nothings going to come. ZOS talking about performance fixes is an elaborate rouse, the logic must be “people will be mad if we blatantly ignore the painfully obvious, so lets acknowledge it and label it as a permanent ‘work in progress’ fix, that way we never have to ever dedicate any actual time, effort and resources to it.