Vaulting Content

DestroyerPewnack

Calm down. I'm not suggesting that ZOS should go ahead and do this. 😂

I'm just curious. Is this one way that is guaranteed to solve the lag problem that has plagued this game since forever?

There are obviously other ways that should be tried and exhausted first, such as for ZOS to upgrade and invest in their hardware, redesign the way the game is coded, etc.

FluffyBird

I'm curious how, in your opinion, anyone on this forum could possibly know whether something thing is or isn't a solution for lag at all, let alone a guaranteed one.

Also, if the vaulting is that dumb crap that Destiny 2 does, where older content vanishes while you take a break, then heck no, I'll drop ESO faster than you say "performance improvement". Like, I paid money for my chapters, ok?

Edit: I may be wrong, but lag is more about how busy a zone's instance is, not how many zones there are, so removing zones would do nothing.

DestroyerPewnack

FluffyBird wrote: »

I'm curious how, in your opinion, anyone on this forum could possibly know whether something thing is or isn't a solution for lag at all, let alone a guaranteed one.

Also, if the vaulting is that dumb crap that Destiny 2 does, where older content vanishes while you take a break, then heck no, I'll drop ESO faster than you say "performance improvement". Like, I paid money for my chapters, ok?

Edit: I may be wrong, but lag is more about how busy a zone's instance is, not how many zones there are, so removing zones would do nothing.

I'm not sure why I think people on here might know, but I've heard some people talk about the "architecture of the code" and "server-side issues," so they clearly know more than I do, because I have no idea what those terms mean. xD

Vaulting is indeed what Destiny 2 does, and it has worked wonders for the performance of the game. Also needs to be said that not all game devs can be that brutally honest with their player-base, and have faith that they'll understand.

Again, I'm not suggesting anyone should take anything away from you. It's just a hypothetical discussion.

Maybe not zones, but what if they removed the older DLC dungeons, and added their loot to something like how, in the beginning of White Gold Tower, you can go to a room and use your keys to get random gear drops for IC keys?

Same thing with trials.

Maybe remove all battlegrounds playlists, and only have one available, on a weekly rotation?

You hear people say there's no room on the server for ZOS to add more animations for new classes. I have no idea if these people are joking (I mean, they're adding an entire new system with their silly card game,) or if adding new systems is stored differently, or... what?

Beilin_Balreis_Colcan

FluffyBird wrote: »

I'm curious how, in your opinion, anyone on this forum could possibly know whether something thing is or isn't a solution for lag at all, let alone a guaranteed one.

Also, if the vaulting is that dumb crap that Destiny 2 does, where older content vanishes while you take a break, then heck no, I'll drop ESO faster than you say "performance improvement". Like, I paid money for my chapters, ok?

Edit: I may be wrong, but lag is more about how busy a zone's instance is, not how many zones there are, so removing zones would do nothing.

Agreed. I'm really enjoying exploring all the content ESO has to offer, and I expect to spend many months if not a few years on it. If older content is removed, I would also leave and start playing something else.

WhiteCoatSyndrome

vsrs_au wrote: »

Agreed. I'm really enjoying exploring all the content ESO has to offer, and I expect to spend many months if not a few years on it. If older content is removed, I would also leave and start playing something else.

Older content is also pretty tied in to newer content, and the amount of rework it would need to reverse that would IMO be MUCH better spent either fixing bugs or adding something new. For example:

• Treasure Maps send you to most zones - so if they vaulted, say, Western Skyrim and you have a map for that? You’d be out of luck.
• Ditto for Surveys of all types.
• ZOS would be cutting themselves out of Skyshard sales for whatever zone(s) they dropped, because recall: you have to have found them all on at least one character before you can buy them on the rest. No new players can find them the first time = no new Skyshard sales from those players’ future alts.
• Some Antiquities have pieces scattered in multiple zones, so those would be unobtainable by anyone who didn’t have them going forward.
• Many if not all of the Prologue quests take you to base game zones, and those are the oldest.
• Have fun finishing the Psijic Skill line without Craglorn.

As is, if a player loses access to a zone it’s because they stopped their ESO+, which means there is always the potential for that person to sub again later or buy that zone DLC outright, which leads to more sales for ZOS. Vaulting would just add to a pre-vault spike in activity and a great deal of ill will afterwards. If they want that, they’re better off making an Event for the zone in question, which would also be less work since they already have the infrastructure in place for that and might drive people to buy that DLC.

Vrienda

No word of a lie, if they do this I am done. It is a disgusting and abhorrant practice and I refuse to even touch Destiny 2 as a result. No amount of performance is worth gutting content people PAYED FOR from the game.

I realise this is a hypothetical discussion, but whether it works or not just doesn't matter to me, because I would quit outright.

FluffyBird

DestroyerPewnack wrote: »

Maybe not zones, but what if they removed the older DLC dungeons, and added their loot to something like how, in the beginning of White Gold Tower, you can go to a room and use your keys to get random gear drops for IC keys?

Same thing with trials.

Maybe remove all battlegrounds playlists, and only have one available, on a weekly rotation?

You hear people say there's no room on the server for ZOS to add more animations for new classes. I have no idea if these people are joking (I mean, they're adding an entire new system with their silly card game,) or if adding new systems is stored differently, or... what?

I've only ran Unhallowed Grave a hundred times, but if anything happened to it... Y'know. I'm afraid mods won't appreciate the rest of that meme

From a ton of achievements that would become unobtainable for new players to cutting down already poor repeatable content, I don't think it's a good idea.

Also, animations and classes are loaded always for everyone, but zone is only loaded for people in that zone, so I don't think these work the same way.

ArchangelIsraphel

Vaulting content your customers have paid to have access to is a phenomenally bad idea.

Don't give ZOS more bad ideas. They've already implemented enough of them with U33.

VaranisArano

DestroyerPewnack wrote: »

FluffyBird wrote: »

I'm curious how, in your opinion, anyone on this forum could possibly know whether something thing is or isn't a solution for lag at all, let alone a guaranteed one.

Also, if the vaulting is that dumb crap that Destiny 2 does, where older content vanishes while you take a break, then heck no, I'll drop ESO faster than you say "performance improvement". Like, I paid money for my chapters, ok?

Edit: I may be wrong, but lag is more about how busy a zone's instance is, not how many zones there are, so removing zones would do nothing.

I'm not sure why I think people on here might know, but I've heard some people talk about the "architecture of the code" and "server-side issues," so they clearly know more than I do, because I have no idea what those terms mean. xD

Vaulting is indeed what Destiny 2 does, and it has worked wonders for the performance of the game. Also needs to be said that not all game devs can be that brutally honest with their player-base, and have faith that they'll understand.

Again, I'm not suggesting anyone should take anything away from you. It's just a hypothetical discussion.

Maybe not zones, but what if they removed the older DLC dungeons, and added their loot to something like how, in the beginning of White Gold Tower, you can go to a room and use your keys to get random gear drops for IC keys?

Same thing with trials.

Maybe remove all battlegrounds playlists, and only have one available, on a weekly rotation?

You hear people say there's no room on the server for ZOS to add more animations for new classes. I have no idea if these people are joking (I mean, they're adding an entire new system with their silly card game,) or if adding new systems is stored differently, or... what?

With the rearchitecture, ZOS is basically rewriting code.

They describe it as such:

"In short – just like we did for the client a year or so back when we introduced multithreaded rendering to increase client frame rates – we are going to rearchitect our server. The version of ESO in 2022 is many magnitudes larger and more complex than the ESO that launched in 2014. So, in order to give everyone a good play experience in high-intensity situations like PvP and Trials, we need to essentially rewrite some of the foundational server code to account for it. This should dramatically increase server performance, but obviously we will need to test and evaluate as we go along."
https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/595442/eso-pvp-update-january-2022/p1


From what I've heard, the problem with new animations is due more to older consoles. Matt Firor alludes to this about 11 minutes in when he's talking about why we might see targeted graphic upgrades, but nothing sweeping. https://youtube.com/watch?v=jqU7KjfGNsw&feature=youtu.be

In addition, from something Rich Lambert has said on his stream, we know it's less taxing to add NPC animations than it is player animations, because players have to queue up all the animations so as to not get t-posing.

So the animations thing is probably a separate issue to due with memory limits on consoles (and probably some older PCs as well, to be fair.) I wouldn't expect to see a solution to that until older consoles aren't supported anymore. And I really would not expect ZOS to vault content for players on newer PC/Consoles.

coop500

I'm with everyone else. I don't threaten to quit lightly, but if they did this? I would be 100% done, uninstall, never look at again.
There comes a point where you gotta question, how much of the game are you willing to gut for performance? When does it stop being worth it?
This IMO is the limit.

Lumenn

Horrible idea. That kind of thing can set off bad feelings not just about the company but the actual project/general managers and anyone involved in it. I can remember a few games that totally flopped BEFORE they were even RELEASED just because of WHO was brought on the team.

K9002

Vaulting overland zones would just funnel the players from these zones into other zones. Busy zones like alliance capitals and Craglorn already function with multiple different instances. The system is set up to create more instances as the previous ones reach their population limits. As long as there are players online, they have to be in some instance or other.

Vaulting dungeons wouldn't help one bit because for the servers it doesn't matter which dungeon a group gets into, it still needs exactly one dedicated instance. It would make a much bigger difference if it was impossible to enter a dungeon without a full group. 4 people each farming solo force the servers to run 4 parallel instances. Most of the MMOs I played lightened the load by designing group dungeons for 5 or 6 man parties. The ones that featured solo-able dungeons pushed majority of instance calculations client-side. ESO was originally designed that way too, but a plague of cheating caused the dev team to move just about everything server-side.

ESO is also the only MMO I played that typically has a lot of lootable containers (mostly food bags/crates) in almost every dungeon and delve. So again, that's inherent to certain design choices, not the amount of different dungeons released over time. I think this is also why recent DLC zones have far less lootable containers for furniture farmers. The abysmal drop rates push people to spend hours hopping characters and running the same container circuits over and over, which is not insignificant for the server load. But instead of improving the drop rates or adding furnishing plans as rewards in different kinds of content (quests, treasure chests), ZOS opted to stop placing as many lootable containers as before. I think it is a factor because even if a player doesn't interact with any containers, the server still has to calculate if they will spawn as empty or not. Every time we merely pass through some place without even thinking about looting, the server has to crunch these extra numbers anyway.

DestroyerPewnack

I'm sorry to say this, but the only people who had helpful things to say were @VaranisArano and @K9002.

This was meant to be a hypothetical, abstract conversation. I didn't need anyone to convince me that vaulting is a bad, less-than-ideal solution. I already know that.

I just wanted to know, if everything else fails, would this be a final option to fix the game (which, by the way, I also paid to be able to play)? And it seems like the answer to that is no.

vivisectvib16_ESO

Vaulting content should have zero effect on lag since almost everything that needs heavy lifting in this game is instanced.

LordRukia

Reading the title immediately made me laugh . I feel for the destiny players that bought content only to have it literally deleted from the game. Genius move tbh 🤣

Jaimeh

DestroyerPewnack wrote: »

Maybe not zones, but what if they removed the older DLC dungeons, and added their loot to something like how, in the beginning of White Gold Tower, you can go to a room and use your keys to get random gear drops for IC keys?

There's gotta be a number of other 'last' resorts they could try than start deleting content. Not to mention that since year-long stories were introduced, the quests in the dungeons have been tied to them. I do hope they will got through with what they said about fixing the code, seems to be the best and most beneficial way in the long term for the game's health and performance. Stop taking away things, but fix them from the ground up.

Dagoth_Rac

Vaulting would be an even bigger problem in ESO than in other games. With ESO's everything-is-CP160 design, you don't really have obsolete out-leveled content that can be purged without affecting too many people. The base game dungeons are hugely popular and get run all day long as pledges. They likely see more activity than newer dungeons. Same thing with base game zones, which are heavily populated. It doesn't seem to matter which zone it is, I can almost always find a player in a guild to travel to if I want to go there. Again, base zones are probably more popular than newer zones. Outside of events, zones like Murkmire and Clockwork City and Hew's Bane are harder to find a travel-to guildie than base game zones.

Ragnarok0130

Vrienda wrote: »

No word of a lie, if they do this I am done. It is a disgusting and abhorrant practice and I refuse to even touch Destiny 2 as a result. No amount of performance is worth gutting content people PAYED FOR from the game.

I realise this is a hypothetical discussion, but whether it works or not just doesn't matter to me, because I would quit outright.

Same here, vaulting paid content is exactly why I refuse to ever play Destiny 2. I find vaulting anti-consumer, borderline theft and I'd drop ESO the moment they implemented vaulting. The only way vaulting could be a thing is if all content was free in a game from the very beginning and they brought it back periodically. Obviously with 8 years of paid content there is no way ESO could ever change course to vault expansions - not to mention that later story content relies on earlier story content and the base game for context.

wolfie1.0.

I mean if you want to vault something to improve performance imperial city would be the first logical place.

Cryodill would be the second, then create an off plane and server steady location to move pvp to. Someplace with limited and I mean limited pve and smaller than current cyrodill. Then move ap and tel var generation there.

kargen27

DestroyerPewnack wrote: »

I'm sorry to say this, but the only people who had helpful things to say were @VaranisArano and @K9002.

This was meant to be a hypothetical, abstract conversation. I didn't need anyone to convince me that vaulting is a bad, less-than-ideal solution. I already know that.

I just wanted to know, if everything else fails, would this be a final option to fix the game (which, by the way, I also paid to be able to play)? And it seems like the answer to that is no.

Everybody else also answered your question. They said no vaulting in their opinion would not be an option. Some said it quite clear.

ArcVelarian

The only thing old DLC/Expansion content needs is to be in larger bundles in the game store.

DestroyerPewnack

Jaimeh wrote: »

There's gotta be a number of other 'last' resorts they could try than start deleting content. Not to mention that since year-long stories were introduced, the quests in the dungeons have been tied to them. I do hope they will got through with what they said about fixing the code, seems to be the best and most beneficial way in the long term for the game's health and performance. Stop taking away things, but fix them from the ground up.

I hope so too. This game has everything going for it, except performance. And that's a big deal, in PvE, but especially in PvP.

DestroyerPewnack

kargen27 wrote: »

Everybody else also answered your question. They said no vaulting in their opinion would not be an option. Some said it quite clear.

They didn't, though. With the two exceptions I mentioned, one person called vaulting disgusting, and the others threatened to quit the game if this ever happened.

Mind you, both of these responses to vaulting are valid, and I respect them. But that still wasn't what I was asking.

There's a difference between "it's not an option" because it won't fix performance, and "it's not an option" because I will quit.

Vevvev

DestroyerPewnack wrote: »

kargen27 wrote: »

Everybody else also answered your question. They said no vaulting in their opinion would not be an option. Some said it quite clear.

They didn't, though. With the two exceptions I mentioned, one person called vaulting disgusting, and the others threatened to quit the game if this ever happened.

Mind you, both of these responses to vaulting are valid, and I respect them. But that still wasn't what I was asking.

There's a difference between "it's not an option" because it won't fix performance, and "it's not an option" because I will quit.

It won't fix performance due to ESO's megaserver technology.

Each zone and instance is a separate shard on the much larger megaserver, and loading characters between different zones is basically a shard transfer. Performance goes down when an instance starts getting overloaded which is why Cyrodiil suffers so immensely from performance issues, and why a fight on the other side of the map adversely effects your duel.

Vaulting content is not the answer here.

DestroyerPewnack

Vevvev wrote: »

It won't fix performance due to ESO's megaserver technology.

Each zone and instance is a separate shard on the much larger megaserver, and loading characters between different zones is basically a shard transfer. Performance goes down when an instance starts getting overloaded which is why Cyrodiil suffers so immensely from performance issues, and why a fight on the other side of the map adversely effects your duel.

Vaulting content is not the answer here.

Interesting. I always thought Cyrodiil was made up of different, mini-instances because of the sudden loading screens you sometimes get, when moving from keep to keep.

If that were the case, then it's the fact that there are so many instances that is the problem, and not necessarily how many players are in an instance (although, that can contribute to lag as well, but I thought it would only affect those in that particular instance.)

I'll have to read a bit about sharding. New term for me.

Danikat

I don't understand the purpose of asking about something you already know is a bad idea.

I mean, randomly banning 2/3 of players would probably help with server stability and lag as well because there would be far less demand on the servers. But there's absolutely no point discussing exactly how effective it would be, because it's otherwise an obviously terrible idea.

How is this any different? Does it matter what effect deleting 1/2 the game would have on the servers if it would cause so many other problems that it's not worth discussing?

Arunei

DestroyerPewnack wrote: »

kargen27 wrote: »

Everybody else also answered your question. They said no vaulting in their opinion would not be an option. Some said it quite clear.

They didn't, though. With the two exceptions I mentioned, one person called vaulting disgusting, and the others threatened to quit the game if this ever happened.

Mind you, both of these responses to vaulting are valid, and I respect them. But that still wasn't what I was asking.

There's a difference between "it's not an option" because it won't fix performance, and "it's not an option" because I will quit.

Except that's still an answer that explains why it wouldn't work. What good is a performance boost if it drives off a majority of your players because you're removing content they paid for? What good is improving performance of the game is going to tank because so few people are left playing?

Craglorn is old content but it's where I go to farm mats and do certain Endeavors, and a slew of people farm exp at Spell Scar and Skyreach. Remove these conveniences and myself and many others will play considerably less, which won't do ZOS any favors.

IC is old content, but some very popular sets drop from the dungeons and the sewers offer a decent reward in the Alchemy satchels. Some people also just really like the content. Remove that and many people will play considerably less.

Orsinium is old content, but it's probably one of the best zones in term of the main quest, plus you get a couple solid recipes for one of the side quest chains. It also looks really nice. Remove that and many people who enjoy doing things there or running alts through the quests will likely play considerably less.

Remove enough content that a lot of people enjoy and suddenly a lot of people aren't going to be playing nearly as much, if at all. Who cares about performance if the content that would have benefitted is gone, if the content they enjoyed is gone and thus the stuff they don't care about has a performance boost? I don't PvP so if a bunch of PvE content got removed and PvP therefore got a boost in performance why would that matter to me? And whose going to care about performance if there's the ever-lingering fear of "will the next thing that gets removed be something I like"?

So yes, the people saying they would quit or otherwise voicing their opinion that it's a bad idea are valid reasons as to why this wouldn't work. If no one is here to play then performance doesn't matter.

Amottica

FluffyBird wrote: »

I'm curious how, in your opinion, anyone on this forum could possibly know whether something thing is or isn't a solution for lag at all, let alone a guaranteed one.

Also, if the vaulting is that dumb crap that Destiny 2 does, where older content vanishes while you take a break, then heck no, I'll drop ESO faster than you say "performance improvement". Like, I paid money for my chapters, ok?

Edit: I may be wrong, but lag is more about how busy a zone's instance is, not how many zones there are, so removing zones would do nothing.

I agree that we, players here in the forum, have no idea of what is really happening behind the scenes or how anything is designed leaving any suggestion we offer as nothing more than a mere guess.

I will note that server lag is more about requests to the server and how much work the server needs to do for each request. Yes, more players doing things leads to more requests but that does not mean player capacity is the real issue.

Rich recently commented on one aspect that has increased the load and that is the systems they have added to the game over the years. It is why they are reorganizing the server-side of the game, similar to what they did with the client recently. It is a plausible issue and course of action.

With that, I doubt vaulting will do anything as the game is already instance-based and we can get load screens when in the same zone indicating a possible change to which instance we are in.

DestroyerPewnack

Arunei wrote: »

Except that's still an answer that explains why it wouldn't work. What good is a performance boost if it drives off a majority of your players because you're removing content they paid for? What good is improving performance of the game is going to tank because so few people are left playing?

Craglorn is old content but it's where I go to farm mats and do certain Endeavors, and a slew of people farm exp at Spell Scar and Skyreach. Remove these conveniences and myself and many others will play considerably less, which won't do ZOS any favors.

IC is old content, but some very popular sets drop from the dungeons and the sewers offer a decent reward in the Alchemy satchels. Some people also just really like the content. Remove that and many people will play considerably less.

Orsinium is old content, but it's probably one of the best zones in term of the main quest, plus you get a couple solid recipes for one of the side quest chains. It also looks really nice. Remove that and many people who enjoy doing things there or running alts through the quests will likely play considerably less.

Remove enough content that a lot of people enjoy and suddenly a lot of people aren't going to be playing nearly as much, if at all. Who cares about performance if the content that would have benefitted is gone, if the content they enjoyed is gone and thus the stuff they don't care about has a performance boost? I don't PvP so if a bunch of PvE content got removed and PvP therefore got a boost in performance why would that matter to me? And whose going to care about performance if there's the ever-lingering fear of "will the next thing that gets removed be something I like"?

So yes, the people saying they would quit or otherwise voicing their opinion that it's a bad idea are valid reasons as to why this wouldn't work. If no one is here to play then performance doesn't matter.

Those are some excellent points, and I'm sure whoever suggested that ZOS should vault Craglorn, IC and Orsinium would find them convincing. If I ever find them, I'll let them know.

I, however, merely wanted to know what effect vaulting content would have on the performance of the game, to satisfy my own curiosity.

I don't care what type of content gets vaulted, I'm not in favor of vaulting, and I don't care what the other consequences of vaulting are, or how many players will quit. I just wanted to know what effect it would have on the game's performance.

It's really that simple.

bmnoble

Didn't even know vaulting content was a thing before reading the OP.

After looking into it, seems like one of the stupidest things a developer could do to a game, screwing over those that paid for content and screwing over those that bought the game later on at the same time.

Considering how interconnected the games zones are, even the dungeons and PVP zones and battlegrounds, for things like guild traders, collectibles/achievements, leads, surveys, treasure maps, quest story lines, different currency's and vendors etc.. I just don't see any viable way to remove any content from the game it would be more trouble than its worth.

The only performance improvement I see it having for the game, would be a result of people leaving the game.

Dark_Lord_Kuro

I dont think it will change much

If i understand correcty in destiny much more thing are client side you even host dungeon if im not mistaken
This resulted in the size of the game being much bigger despide being smaller in term of actual gameplay. Before they vaulted content i thing the game was 15gb to 20gb bigger than eso. As i understand the stability came from a reduced file size

Eso as much more on server side so i dont think we would see the same kind of improuvement

I need to give something to bungie tough. They managed to make their community accept this vaulting to the point of defending it. I remember when it was annouced i posted on their forum that vaulting wasnt a nessesary thing, taking games like eso and ff14 as exemple and they called me an idiot and such😆 as it was nessesary so the game dont reach 200gb!

This would obviously end badly for eso