We know how to END lagg

Einstein_

Not really completly i just wanted to make a clickbait title, but we acually observed a big source of lagg and it might be possible to reduce lagg by a good margin in cyro. I know that ZoS works on it (hopefully), but that will take alot time till finished and we can't/don't want to wait so long.

Introduction:
With "we" i mean our Guild Project Nova, but that thread should not be about ballgroups (no they dont "produce" lagg, its the sheer amount of "targets" in a area). But we play regulary in big fights with heavy lagg, so we have alot experiance when it comes to performance issues and bugs in cyro. We have good feeling what inceases lagg and how to self fix some bugs, but i will tell that maybe in a spoiler since that should be the main topic.

main:
We simply observed that the lagg is mostly dependen on the shere number of targets in a fight and with targets i also mean NPCs.

Two examples:
1. We fight in a keep with our group, when it flipps and the NPC respawn, the Lagg inceases by a hugh noticable margin. We startet to even focus and kill NPC to reduce lagg and it works....
2. When we have fight 12v30+ and we come close to a keep, not even atacking it the lagg kicks in. As soon as we are out of sight again, the lagg reduced even tho we have the same amount of enemys on us.
3. We almost never have really bad lagg when we fight away from any NPCs. Even tho we sometiems have the whole facton on us and multiple ballgroups arround.

PS: in Cyro primetime its awlays laggy, but i am talking about this unplayable lagg where you have 3s skill delay or more.

Solution:
Remove all targeble NPC in Cyro (Wolfs/Guards/Monsters) on GH. Only let the siege meargant and the 4 flag NPCs on resources stay. Players who want to quest can still do that in Blackreach or RW. The guards anyway dont prevent anybody from getting a keep because they are weak af. I cant imagin anyone missing them.

i encourage you all to observe this yourself since, i highly doubt that only because a few ppl on the forum suggest this ZoS is acually testing this. But maybe we can CRY loud enugh since PvPers doing that anyway only right ?

two Bugs and how to fix them:
1. Satus effects for 49000days, dieing is not helping, relogging will kick you out of cyro. But you can go into a delve and out and this counts as a zone change and removes it. Especially usefull if you cant springt because you have the "streakbug"
2. Beeing position desynced, where you cant use skills and you are acually stuck on a old position. Can be fixed if somebody is using a position changing ability on your old position. for exampel DC/pull/leap/meteor/knockbacks.....

we dont fight enemys, we fight the server mostly.....

BazOfWar

It is a possible cause and one that I will keep my eye on now that you mentioned it.

IMHO I still believe ball groups play a bigger part, I know I will get slated by the ball group squad but I see it every night and the server isn't even at capacity (ravenswatch no proc) I can be making my way to take a resource (haven't even reached the resource yet or aggro'd any NPCs) my fps will drop and my buff skills delay to activate and a few secs later a ball group will roll over me. 7+ player ball group rolling over 1 guy and they are constantly spamming buffs, heals and speed. Why is there a need to be constantly spamming these skills when I was just one guy?.

They do the same while running round the outer wall of keeps and fighting in compact spaces. It is always laggy as hell when they are in the vicinity.

Einstein_

BazOfWar wrote: »

It is a possible cause and one that I will keep my eye on now that you mentioned it.

IMHO I still believe ball groups play a bigger part, I know I will get slated by the ball group squad but I see it every night and the server isn't even at capacity (ravenswatch no proc) I can be making my way to take a resource (haven't even reached the resource yet or aggro'd any NPCs) my fps will drop and my buff skills delay to activate and a few secs later a ball group will roll over me. 7+ player ball group rolling over 1 guy and they are constantly spamming buffs, heals and speed. Why is there a need to be constantly spamming these skills when I was just one guy?.

They do the same while running round the outer wall of keeps and fighting in compact spaces. It is always laggy as hell when they are in the vicinity.

you dont need to have agro of the NPSs, i ment with getting close to them about 100-150 ig meters.

This is just a guess, but i have some programming knowlage. I Think it doesnt make a big diffrents to the game if its a player or a NPC in your area the checks and calculations a pritty similar.

- everytime you do a AOE Effect/buff/ability/heal the Game needs to check for targets arround you, it doesnt matter if NPC or players. Also NPC can have buffs/debuffs/get healed...the same checks as for Players
- NPC also move same as players
- Dmg from NPC to players also needs to get the same checks/calculations...

from what i understand is heaving 20 players arround you isnt that much diffrent then heaving 20 NPCs...just that the NPC cast less ofc... so in a fight 30v30 players + 30 NPCs its suddenly twice the possible targets...

Ballgroups only make you think they produce lagg because they just atrackt faction stacks. But it doesnt matter if there is 20v40 PuGs or its a organized group 12v40 its the same lagg. Idk how often i have played on days where no ballgroup was raiding and the lagg was exactly the same if not worse because you had 40v40 fights.....
But please dont't make it a ballgroup thread we have planty of them, i really want to point out that NPCs play a hugh part in that equation.

MipMip

Thanks to the OP for posting... Agree: it totally feels like NPCs increase the lag - fighting in a keep full of NPCs or fighting in a keep where all or most of the NPCs have been killed usually feels really different in terms of lag, even when there are many players around. And yes the NPCs don't really serve any purpose, and it would be totally easy for ZOS to remove them.

BazOfWar

Makes sense I guess and you have the background and knowledge to back it up, my only question is wouldn't a developer/programmer at Zos have thought of this as a cause considering how long it's been going on?.

Thanks for taking the time to at least try and find solutions. 🙂

And0ssus

Definitly noticeable when guards are around.
It puts a huge Amount of lag on top of the existing Problems.
Of Course there are still other Sources/Problems which increasing Lag, but this would be a pretty fast and easy change i would say.

rbfrgsp

Not convinced, sorry. If you're *not* in a group, you can literally and reliably "feel" when a ball group or zerg is approaching because of rubberbanding, audio artefacts, slowdown on basic mechanisms like bar swap.

If you're inside a ball then sure - NPCs will be a bigger strain than no NPCs but then you're also starting from the initial point of being in the ball and having the associated slowdown as your standard experience.

Einstein_

rbfrgsp wrote: »

Not convinced, sorry. If you're *not* in a group, you can literally and reliably "feel" when a ball group or zerg is approaching because of rubberbanding, audio artefacts, slowdown on basic mechanisms like bar swap.

If you're inside a ball then sure - NPCs will be a bigger strain than no NPCs but then you're also starting from the initial point of being in the ball and having the associated slowdown as your standard experience.

OFC we have lagg around us because we have alot enemys around us.....and ofc its also laggy when its 30v30 PuGs...

and OFC LAGG WILL NOT BE GONE, BUT IT WILL REDUCE LAGG and make it somehow playable...

and would you miss NPS ?, or would you rather have a bit less lagg ?

hafgood

Not true, we do know what causes lag, the underlying server architecture. Zos have admitted that that is where the problem lies.

So NPC's spawning, ball groups, and all the other suggestions are manifestations of the underlying issue. You can remove everything from Cyrodiil and you will still end up with lag. Until the architecture is fixed lag is going nowhere.

xylena_lazarow

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/595442/eso-pvp-update-january-2022

Director Firor himself says they're fixing PvP performance as a year-long project. Relax yall.

Need a bot that links to that Firor post every time "performance" comes up here...

Krone23

Well as Nova member I can say it's definitely noticeable when the NPCs are around and not only in the Ball Group also when I play Solo its always gets super laggy when NPCs are around. And this is just a thing that is so easily fixable and wouldn't hurt anybody.

I would even say the NPCs are a little bit more server calculation than players since the servers have to calculate all the move actions and all other things while the server just has to process the actions and movement from the player. (This is all speculation since I don't know how ZOS did it just a thing I know from other games there the NPCs always takes super much server performance). But could also be that it's kinda the same since the player makes way more actions.

I think it should at least get tested like the 3-sec cooldown and the other things. Wouldnt hurt to test it for 3 Weeks with only the flag NPCs and the Siege Merchant. The NPCs are not doing much anyway.
At least in my Opinion

Einstein_

xylena_lazarow wrote: »

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/595442/eso-pvp-update-january-2022

Director Firor himself says they're fixing PvP performance as a year-long project. Relax yall.

Need a bot that links to that Firor post every time "performance" comes up here...

BuT that will take ez 1-2 years i guess. Deleting NPCs doesnt hurt anybody

hafgood wrote: »

Not true, we do know what causes lag, the underlying server architecture. Zos have admitted that that is where the problem lies.

So NPC's spawning, ball groups, and all the other suggestions are manifestations of the underlying issue. You can remove everything from Cyrodiil and you will still end up with lag. Until the architecture is fixed lag is going nowhere.

OFC its a server proplem that its laggy, but its a fact that its LESS laggy if there are not 100 targets in a area....And less lagg is also nice

TiberX

I agree with the removal of npc's but knowing how u work I would like to suggest the ones that remain should have alot more health and constantly cast negate as their only skill. About others as wolfs and lions by all means remove them!

Qrähe

If you loose sight of the keep and the lag goes away why would most npcs matter if they exsist or not? I think maybe your solution doesn't match your own supposed data.

As for keeps flipping, I can understand that being a source because its more than the guards, but the keep transitus actually swaps out completely, walls change, doors, etc. A lot happens there.

It's interessting that the removal of npcs is the solution even though they only have an effect on the server if your group can see them? But they are still loaded and pulling resources....

Einstein_

Qrähe wrote: »

If you loose sight of the keep and the lag goes away why would most npcs matter if they exsist or not? I think maybe your solution doesn't match your own supposed data.

.....

because mostly fights are close to keeps and not somewhere in the Open.
And Everybody would be happy to have less lagg and nobody needs this NPSc anyway they do no dmg and they die super fast. But OFC you not gonna walk arround the keep and kill NPCs over and over again only to reduce lagg...

vgastel

Very interesting observation.... In principle, the npcs and players contribute equally to the number of possible pair interactions. But as opposed to players, some encounter-algorithm is required for npcs to determine their action. I wonder, could it be that this code is not optimized for Cyrodiil-sized encounters and contribute to the lag?

I remember, long ago, zos removed the deer from Cyrodiil, because they contributed to lag as well. That is completely in-line with your observations about the npcs...

AJones43865

Isn't the fix for the lag to lease enough server capacity to support the game?

What did ZOS used to do to fix cyrodiil up for the MYM events? They can do it if they try. We know because they've done the fix repeatedly in the past for the MYM events. (not last year though, and probably not this year either)

BazOfWar

xylena_lazarow wrote: »

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/595442/eso-pvp-update-january-2022

Director Firor himself says they're fixing PvP performance as a year-long project. Relax yall.

Need a bot that links to that Firor post every time "performance" comes up here...

Forgive me if I don't believe a word he says, that statement from Mr firor conveniently appeared after growing anger of a certain developers attitude towards the community.

They have been promising to fix performance for years and nothing has changed.

Wolfpaw

Einstein_ wrote: »

Not really completly i just wanted to make a clickbait title, but we acually observed a big source of lagg and it might be possible to reduce lagg by a good margin in cyro. I know that ZoS works on it (hopefully), but that will take alot time till finished and we can't/don't want to wait so long.

Introduction:
With "we" i mean our Guild Project Nova, but that thread should not be about ballgroups (no they dont "produce" lagg, its the sheer amount of "targets" in a area). But we play regulary in big fights with heavy lagg, so we have alot experiance when it comes to performance issues and bugs in cyro. We have good feeling what inceases lagg and how to self fix some bugs, but i will tell that maybe in a spoiler since that should be the main topic.

main:
We simply observed that the lagg is mostly dependen on the shere number of targets in a fight and with targets i also mean NPCs.

Two examples:
1. We fight in a keep with our group, when it flipps and the NPC respawn, the Lagg inceases by a hugh noticable margin. We startet to even focus and kill NPC to reduce lagg and it works....
2. When we have fight 12v30+ and we come close to a keep, not even atacking it the lagg kicks in. As soon as we are out of sight again, the lagg reduced even tho we have the same amount of enemys on us.
3. We almost never have really bad lagg when we fight away from any NPCs. Even tho we sometiems have the whole facton on us and multiple ballgroups arround.

PS: in Cyro primetime its awlays laggy, but i am talking about this unplayable lagg where you have 3s skill delay or more.

Solution:
Remove all targeble NPC in Cyro (Wolfs/Guards/Monsters) on GH. Only let the siege meargant and the 4 flag NPCs on resources stay. Players who want to quest can still do that in Blackreach or RW. The guards anyway dont prevent anybody from getting a keep because they are weak af. I cant imagin anyone missing them.

i encourage you all to observe this yourself since, i highly doubt that only because a few ppl on the forum suggest this ZoS is acually testing this. But maybe we can CRY loud enugh since PvPers doing that anyway only right ?

two Bugs and how to fix them:
1. Satus effects for 49000days, dieing is not helping, relogging will kick you out of cyro. But you can go into a delve and out and this counts as a zone change and removes it. Especially usefull if you cant springt because you have the "streakbug"
2. Beeing position desynced, where you cant use skills and you are acually stuck on a old position. Can be fixed if somebody is using a position changing ability on your old position. for exampel DC/pull/leap/meteor/knockbacks.....

we dont fight enemys, we fight the server mostly.....

Yes please, 100% support this even if it increases performance by just a little.

vgastel

It would probably even have a nice side effect of spreading out the population, because all resources would 100% have to be defended by players.

Einstein_

vgastel wrote: »

It would probably even have a nice side effect of spreading out the population, because all resources would 100% have to be defended by players.

like i mentioned above, i guess they should let the 4 flag NPCs stay.

EF321

But then, how will vampires feed while in cyro?


Also fast and discreet ulti gen that won't make you stuck in combat for three hours

Einstein_

EF321 wrote: »

But then, how will vampires feed while in cyro?


Also fast and discreet ulti gen that won't make you stuck in combat for three hours

the potions are so cheap, its basicly free

and you can still get ulti at the 4 flag NPCs

ShalidorsHeir

The NPCs dont cause any problems at all. The lag is related to player activity, especially since players have much more complicated calculations due to sets, mundus, buffs, food, CP etc in both damage dealing and receiving, same goes for healing. I, for instance, dont have any lag when 100 people kill the same dragon + adds. But in the alliance locked campaign 10 visible players cause imense lag since there are more players fighting each other in the same map cluster.

Einstein_

ShalidorsHeir wrote: »

The NPCs dont cause any problems at all. The lag is related to player activity, especially since players have much more complicated calculations due to sets, mundus, buffs, food, CP etc in both damage dealing and receiving, same goes for healing. I, for instance, dont have any lag when 100 people kill the same dragon + adds. But in the alliance locked campaign 10 visible players cause imense lag since there are more players fighting each other in the same map cluster.

idk where you take your facts from, but we acually observed it multiple times !

why did they delete deer in cyro then, because of performance ?

even Alike is laggy when ppl farm dolmens aswel as dragons when there is a event.

on top of this its a hugh diffrent between 40players vs 1Boss or 40players vs 30 trash mobs which dont die in a instant.

xylena_lazarow

BazOfWar wrote: »

Forgive me if I don't believe a word he says, that statement from Mr firor conveniently appeared after growing anger of a certain developers attitude towards the community. They have been promising to fix performance for years and nothing has changed.

This is the first time they've specifically said they're going to dial back on releasing new content in order to fix underlying server problems, and he admitted it's a year long project so players should not expect any immediate improvements. Their plans to do so were in the works well before the referenced devstream outburst.

AJones43865

xylena_lazarow wrote: »

BazOfWar wrote: »

Forgive me if I don't believe a word he says, that statement from Mr firor conveniently appeared after growing anger of a certain developers attitude towards the community. They have been promising to fix performance for years and nothing has changed.

This is the first time they've specifically said they're going to dial back on releasing new content in order to fix underlying server problems, and he admitted it's a year long project so players should not expect any immediate improvements. Their plans to do so were in the works well before the referenced devstream outburst.

Where and when did they say they were dialing back new content?

The problem is they are forcing us to accept, at minimum, another year of "we're working on it" without any improvements. The problem now is they expect us to believe what they say after so many years of not doing what they say they are doing.

xylena_lazarow

AJones43865 wrote: »

Where and when did they say they were dialing back new content?

Firor's post that I linked, it's sticked under General Discussion. Properly fixing the performance is a pretty massive investment for them, and this is the first time I've ever heard anything like this from the lead dev himself.

I'm actually with the OP that we don't need wolves and goblins in Cyrodiil, but if deleting the deer and torchbugs didn't impact the performance, I can't imagine the other non-faction NPCs would make much difference either.

BazOfWar

xylena_lazarow wrote: »

AJones43865 wrote: »

Where and when did they say they were dialing back new content?

Firor's post that I linked, it's sticked under General Discussion. Properly fixing the performance is a pretty massive investment for them, and this is the first time I've ever heard anything like this from the lead dev himself.

I'm actually with the OP that we don't need wolves and goblins in Cyrodiil, but if deleting the deer and torchbugs didn't impact the performance, I can't imagine the other non-faction NPCs would make much difference either.

No disrespect to you or your optimism intended but isn't all very convenient for them to say again they are working on it, it will take a year (how convenient) and they won't be adding any new pvp content in he meantime (how convenient) it seems to me they are just buying themselves time so that in a years time they can say "oh, it didn't work" we will work on something else but it will take time.

Silversmith

Einstein_ wrote: »

Not really completly i just wanted to make a clickbait title, but we acually observed a big source of lagg and it might be possible to reduce lagg by a good margin in cyro. I know that ZoS works on it (hopefully), but that will take alot time till finished and we can't/don't want to wait so long.

Introduction:
With "we" i mean our Guild Project Nova, but that thread should not be about ballgroups (no they dont "produce" lagg, its the sheer amount of "targets" in a area). But we play regulary in big fights with heavy lagg, so we have alot experiance when it comes to performance issues and bugs in cyro. We have good feeling what inceases lagg and how to self fix some bugs, but i will tell that maybe in a spoiler since that should be the main topic.

Yes, ball groups produce lag. They produce more lag than other groups. NPCs create very little lag, newer games put unrendered assets/npcs in "stasis" when a player isn't in render distance or in the camera's field of view. Some games have two layers of stasis to improve latency.

As someone with knowledge of networking, and coding, and gridlocking, and processing in game development; i want to explain this to people in super simple terms without getting turbo nerd about it.

Every player is an entity and any action they perform or interaction they have must be processed. The more players and actions you have creates more of a work load for the game to process. Every heal/dot/proc/buff/debuff has to be processed. When you have a bunch of players spamming abilities, refreshing buffs and putting hots on each other and ground effects the game must constantly process these interactions. If a player is wearing a set that procs then the game has even more of a work load to process. If ESO has any kind of network logs, they know that the CPU-PER-USER for a ball group player is higher than a non ball group player.

The following are real ways to lower latency in ESO. You and others may not like it but it doesn't change the fact that the following will help latency in PVP.

Reduce Player Population
Less people, Less actions to process. It sucks to do this when you promise a big faction war but if your engine cannot process it then you just *** people off.

Longer Buffs
ESO has short buffs that need to constantly be reapplied. It's tedious and process heavy. Other MMOs get around this by having long lasting buffs (normally 30mins - 2 hours) and only need to be processed when first cast, expires, or if a player leaves the group with the player who applied the buff. The fix would be longer lasting buffs for things like Major Savagery to 10 minutes.

Remove the majority of Procs and Proc Sets
Procs cause latency. A lot of MMOs don't have procs in their sets because they know this. Sets giving flat bonuses or altering an ability is kinda boring but you make up for it with less processes and better latency.

Dont bottleneck interactions (Mostly damage) in ticks and give priority to healing/defense processes
Simply put, this is why several of your GCDs can be countered by a roll dodge/shield/heal even if the player didn't roll/cast at the correct time to counter the attack but they rolled/cast before the tick processed so the game counts it. This is a tricky one to fix and requires the engine to be optimized for PvP interactions and have things processed in real time and not gated.

Slower Players
The faster a player entity moves, the more the game has to process it's location and update it back and forth between both clients and the server to see if an attack is able to connect or not. This also affects LOS. This also causes render lag and desync. Everyone reading this has at one point had their skill light up like a player is in range, push the button, and have nothing happen because by the time the game processed the distance the targe is no longer valid and within range. Most MMOs cap all classes at a base speed with a few minor speed increasing skills to a few classes. ESO lets all players zoom up to 200% speed constantly.

Change States on how Procs Proc.
Simply put, Procs should only check when they are allowed to Proc. For a random example: Random ability procs off damage 10% of the time and can only proc every 30 seconds. The ability procs and cannot proc again for 30 seconds but the game keeps checking to see if it could proc every time you deal damage. This adds more processes and is wasteful. What should happen is that when the ability procs the game puts a state change and doesn't even allow a check for a chance to proc for 30 seconds. With big AOE skills you would cut down on all the checks and improve latency.

Remove Doodads and Terrain Clutter.
Less things to render. Game won't look as pretty but you get better performance.

Kwoung

xylena_lazarow wrote: »

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/595442/eso-pvp-update-january-2022

Director Firor himself says they're fixing PvP performance as a year-long project. Relax yall.

Need a bot that links to that Firor post every time "performance" comes up here...

OMG really, they have made a "we are fixing it" post every year for the past 4 years that I am aware of. Heck, we even endured a year of useless testing only to find out, they just looked at the data last month and they "think" they can do something. Feel free to hold your breath though.

As for the NPC thing, they already removed a large portion of the MOBs from Cyro long ago.