Yeah, there is still Godawful lag when the [Names Removed] spam train hit a keep on the other side of the map. All of the issues come from the fact that WE DON'T HAVE ANY MECHANICS TO DISCOURAGE AOE STACKING. We have Single target spells/abilities/melee covered with damage returns/reflects, but AOE goes unpunished. I mean, we even have discouragement for siege with the bubble! As such, everyone who doesn't have an issue with exploiting such holes in the mechanics will do so, and by doing so creates undue stress on the servers. It's a simple fix, but ZOS has been dropping the ball for months now. This game is already a ghost town due to incompetence in dealing with WoW/Console releases, missed holiday sales, and poor upkeep-development in order to maintain their player base. Whomever it is that stands to profit from this game is going to cash in their chips as soon as 1.6 and the subsequent console releases happen. No reason to fund development on a game that you never really worked on after you've already sucked all the money out of all possible sources.

/rant

Pre-craglorn we never had these kinds of problems frequently. Why is it that every patch re-introduces additional lag and the pop caps have to be lowered?

Population caps are NOT a fix. They are a stopgap.

By the time we get to update 6, are we going to have a 10 people per faction cap?

Don't know whether this is the right thread to bring this up, and it was also mentioned in other threads before by several people.

1. Most of us agree that the lag is probably server based, meaning it has little or nothing to do with our home machines. I do know that there's still fps drops but those are not significant enough to be the cause for the skill delay.
2. Particle system is a completely client side thing. The servers have nothing to do with any kind of graphics calculations. Those calcs are done client side and are based around information that has been there irrespective of the particle system mess.
3. At around the same time this particle system has been implemented, the "changes to detect Bots and cheaters" have also been implemented.
4. Those changes were quite effective and resulted in a significant drop of Bot train numbers.
5. Short of spy software client side (like the good old VAC or others), the most probable way of catching bots is behavioral analysis of command input. The probability of a watchdog software is low, since there's been no [snip] in regards to unwanted data exchange (especially sensitive here in EU).
6. If the bot detection is server side and based on command input evaluation, then this may be a better (or at least more sensible) reason for bad server performance.

If I am right with the above, I have no clue what we or ZOS could do about it except for what they are doing: Moving from AvAvA to 3-way arena.

Also: bla, bla, bla conspiracy theory, bla. It's just some thoughts, because blaming any kind of graphic UI changes for server side lag is pretty ridiculous. Servers do NOT care about the graphics displayed client side.

If the changes (like particle effect prioritization, lingering particle effect removal, etc.) helped with the lag (and I'm not talking about fps improvements), then the client computer was in fact not able to cope with the graphics settings and it would also have improved by lowering graphics settings.

Please don't start with the "fps can cause lag too" discussion. I do know that at some point, the speed of image processing can and will influence the lag situation. As said, this is just food for thought.

TL/DR: Maybe it's not the particle system that causes the lag but the anti cheat measures ZOS took against bots.

[Moderator Note: Edited per our rules on Cursing & Profanity]

Why can't a Dev just log into Thornblade on a Friday night at prime time and just tell Us about the wonderful experience ? Is that so hard ?

I guess the answer is: DONT JOIN IN

Since the company has better thing to do instead of working out a bit PVP issues.