Explain why we can't do this anymore?

NadiusMaximus · January 2015

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DV9TwsosyI

We used to be able to have pretty epic battles going on. 100s v. 100s, but now your lagged out if more than 50 are in any location at the same time.

None of us have downgraded our rigs, so it's not on our end.
Got That? NOT ON OUR END.

Something you guys did has drastically degraded the game play. It's not our fault, it's something you did.

"We are working on it" is not an answer. Reducing the population, is not an answer.

Go back read the forums, track down the time all of us began talking about this and see what major change is causing the problem. Or revert everything back to scratch, because it did work better back in April.

It's pretty discouraging to know that huge advances are coming in the future
(ie. Soon) when parts of the major update will be almost impossible to play due to the lag it will cause.

I'm talking about Imperial city.
In the footage I've seen, a good chunk of battles will happen in a separate setting. We all know that 20man fights in close quarters already generates lag like a MO for, so why not fix what ever is causing it now instead of releasing something that will only make it even worse.

ToRelax · January 2015

Count the AoE skills used please, shouldn't be that hard

.

Columba · January 2015

too many pulsing chimps now.

KBKB · January 2015

Price we pay for pretty lights...

NadiusMaximus · January 2015

If it's aoe then, fix it. If it's something else fix it.

Pulsing chimps? If everyone is using the same set up, there must be a reason. Could it be possible to get rid of it altogether. You tried saying lag was caused by forward camps one time too. Those are gone, lag isn't. Aoe spam has been reduced, lag hasn't. Settings have been reduced, lag is the same.

It wasn't like this when I bought it. Below, lots of aoe spam, yet not much lag. Nothing like it is now 8 months latter.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEtIVgSbgng

ToRelax · January 2015

NadiusMaximus wrote: »

If it's aoe then, fix it. If it's something else fix it.

Pulsing chimps? If everyone is using the same set up, there must be a reason. Could it be possible to get rid of it altogether. You tried saying lag was caused by forward camps one time too. Those are gone, lag isn't. Aoe spam has been reduced, lag hasn't. Settings have been reduced, lag is the same.

It wasn't like this when I bought it.

What, wait.
When was AoE spam reduced, please?
And what do the settings have to do with lag...

Roechacca · January 2015

I have no idea N I'd be throwing out arm chair Dev bs if I did . But I can say I enjoyed pvp more back then . There were still a lot of crashes during that time too .

NadiusMaximus · January 2015

Everyone blames or says lag is only on your rig. Lower the settings and it will reduce lag. I say it's not on our end.

Aoe spam comment was sarcasm..

Crashes, yup still happen just as much. The only things I see fixed are falling through bridges, weapon swap, and doors can used much more reliably.

RinaldoGandolphi · January 2015

I think they would have re-write huge parts of the game engine to fix it. The lag I believe is fully related to the particle effects in game. I think particle effects are still present even if you can't see them.

Furthermore, losing sound is a symptom of faulty garbage collection, a buffer is full and can't take any more data in, hence it can't process any more sound effects. A few minutes after a battle or death, all the sounds play at once. All the symptoms.

I still say the lighting update is the root cause, after that update, cyrodiol performance went to pot, its clearly a regression, but for whatever reason ZOS will not roll back the software and remove it.

If they would go back to an older build, without the lighting, and just patch in bug fixes, it would probably be a lot better, but they will not do this for whatever readin, and thus far haven't been able to fix it.

AllPlayAndNoWork · January 2015

Ok - In the case of Thornblade EU (where our guild guest from time to time) I have watched AD purposefully balling up into a tight group (30-40) and spamming healing springs and batswarm (and other AoE effects) to lag the server out (going from 100 ping to 800 ping and beyond). I watched them lose a scroll outside a keep and then perform the AD lag dance to prevent enemy players using keep doors so they could get it back.

In the last week alone it has been responsible for 99.999999% of the really bad server lag.

AoE spamming is still a massive problem. I would go so far as to call it an exploit of really bad coding and game mechanics.

KBKB · January 2015

woodsro wrote: »

I still say the lighting update is the root cause, after that update, cyrodiol performance went to pot, its clearly a regression, but for whatever reason ZOS will not roll back the software and remove it.

If they would go back to an older build, without the lighting, and just patch in bug fixes, it would probably be a lot better, but they will not do this for whatever readin, and thus far haven't been able to fix it.

Pride I'm guessing, but yes I still recall when 1.3 hit DC had an exodus of good and bad players. Worst part was PvP was unplayable short of soloing/ganking for 2 weeks and we didn't get an apology let alone free time! all we got was 3 fixes that didn't work and a final fix that albeit made the game playable but permanently damaged compared to it's prior state.

NadiusMaximus · January 2015

woodsro wrote: »

I think they would have re-write huge parts of the game engine to fix it. The lag I believe is fully related to the particle effects in game. I think particle effects are still present even if you can't see them.

Furthermore, losing sound is a symptom of faulty garbage collection, a buffer is full and can't take any more data in, hence it can't process any more sound effects. A few minutes after a battle or death, all the sounds play at once. All the symptoms.

I still say the lighting update is the root cause, after that update, cyrodiol performance went to pot, its clearly a regression, but for whatever reason ZOS will not roll back the software and remove it.

If they would go back to an older build, without the lighting, and just patch in bug fixes, it would probably be a lot better, but they will not do this for whatever readin, and thus far haven't been able to fix it.

Agree.

Now what can we do to fix it ourselves?
Lots of people use esb, or whatever graphics enhancements to change little things go for better looks.

Would a reverse of this work? Could we remove the particle effects ourselves somehow? I know the answer is no, but anything too help others play would be great.

Etaniel · January 2015

Not only lag, but fps drops. A lot of people with high end computers are getting crap fps (10-25) is medium/large fights. Lowering the settings barely helps. I ran this game with 60+ fps in cyro during the beta, now i've upgraded by gpu, and i get 50 fps in cyro, with lower settings, and down to 12 fps in big fights, while someone in my group with a lower end pc is getting 30 fps on the same exact fight.

Rylana · January 2015

I miss the group drop bug, the crashes, and broken doors. I legit want them back, because back then you didnt have FPS tanks to 10 or less for no reason, latency delays over 10 seconds for no reason.

The game was more stable as a whole back then.

ThyIronFist · January 2015

Reason why good PvP is barely non existant anymore is because most people already quit, and the only organized guilds are made out of mindless *** that bunch up in a train and spam AoE skills and farm AP, the only thing they care about is AP. They say its a bomb group (which is incorrect because a 24-man lag train is not a bomb group).

Performance in Cyrodiil has been an abosolute joke since the 1.2 patch where everyone had to suffer 1 fps for a month.

Hopefully 1.6 will be good else this game will be uninstalled from my PC and wont bother looking at ESO ever again.

Laggus · January 2015

Because the original dev team is long gone and the ones there now just don't have the same grasp on the code.

Bouvin · January 2015

Healing Springs? Impulse?

Cathexis · January 2015

Turn off shadows. Im also a firm believer its particles.
I've noticed over time that when laggier skills become more popular or are used in concentrated manners in concentrated fights, I have to redux shaders and lighting effects.

Impulse is just particularly bad because players have been using it to force fights to be unplayable and or to crash servers by overloading the server with requests (ddos attacks).

The issue stems from either the server lacking the capacity to handle player actions or the ISP has esos server throttled or capped (causing a bottleneck).

Cody · January 2015

Many factors have contributed to the downfall of ESO PvP.

AOE caps, the fact the servers can't handle huge fights to begin with; im sure the lighting patch has affected the game in some way, and whatever else I may have not listed.

Cathexis · January 2015

Lighting patch initially caused problems because of poor implementation but it should only be causing problems client side as I understand it (unless lighting requires rendering that is not client side, but that doesn't make any sense to me). Disabling lighting is an easy fix. (See prev post about disabling lighting)

Regardless Ive always suspected the root cause is in the isps and not the server because ISPs have started aggressively throttling companies to force them to renegotiate (extort cough) bandwidth usage rates. If that's the case, it may be outside everyone's control.

s7732425ub17_ESO · January 2015

Because the most effective abilities in PVP are also the ones that are the most stressful on the server.

Cathexis · January 2015

s7732425ub17_ESO wrote: »

Because the most effective abilities in PVP are also the ones that are the most stressful on the server.

It would certainly seem that way at present. Although I question impulses true effectiveness.

There is a counter for everything.

themizario · January 2015

Cody wrote: »

Many factors have contributed to the downfall of ESO PvP.

AOE caps, the fact the servers can't handle huge fights to begin with; im sure the lighting patch has affected the game in some way, and whatever else I may have not listed.

AOE caps. Really bruh? AOE caps will be removed and all of a sudden the lag and performance issues in PvP will be gone?

Bull poo! Everyone has a fracking theory. Remove camps so people can't zerg, that didn't work. People are still zerging, lower pop caps! That didn't work, remove AOE caps....

Nothing is going to work!!! This game was doomed from the start. They're not going back on lighting, they're not going back on facial movement. They're not going to take out the extra items in the world like swords and bottles worth zero coin you can pick up.

There is nothing that will fix PvP in Cyrodill ZOS knows this. Their solution, make it even smaller scale. Such as incorporating PvP into PvE zone and imperial city. Their hope...

They divide PvPers enough between those things large scale battle is a thing of the past or at least buys them time to solve the issue or MORE LIKELY build a good F2P model.

Cathexis · January 2015

The problem is that it is difficult for players to tell if lag is client side, server side, or an ISP issue most of the time.

Client lag seems to occur when graphical processing exceeds a players hardware.
Server/ISP issues occur when packet requests exceed the capacity of the server hardware and network band limits.

The reason they can't solve the problem is that player activity is hyperconcentrated during events, so you get some players who can't keep up because of hardware limitations, and then the server also cant keep up because it receives compounded activity because players are living longer and fighting harder.

As I understand it, impulse is particularly bad for the latter.

Fixing it means (a) getting better servers, (b) monitoring the server demand relative to network band and (c) spreading out player activity.

kijima · January 2015

Go back to pre lighting patch in 1.2

That version of Cyro DID work.

Akiija · January 2015

Cathexis wrote: »

The problem is that it is difficult for players to tell if lag is client side, server side, or an ISP issue most of the time.

Client lag seems to occur when graphical processing exceeds a players hardware.
Server/ISP issues occur when packet requests exceed the capacity of the server hardware and network band limits.

The reason they can't solve the problem is that player activity is hyperconcentrated during events, so you get some players who can't keep up because of hardware limitations, and then the server also cant keep up because it receives compounded activity because players are living longer and fighting harder.

As I understand it, impulse is particularly bad for the latter.

Fixing it means (a) getting better servers, (b) monitoring the server demand relative to network band and (c) spreading out player activity.

Thank you for this summary of the situation.

Grim13 · January 2015

kijima wrote: »

Go back to pre lighting patch in 1.2

That version of Cyro DID work.

This.

This all started with that patch.

C'mon Zeni, you know it and we know it. The lag trail starts there.

Gilvoth · January 2015

it was from the stupid lighting they keep saying it's not but we know better cause we play daily and we know what we saw happen when you put in that stupid lighting.

Lava_Croft · January 2015

It sucks pretty hard to play the betas, notice how well the game is running, pre-order the Imperial Edition, play for a month and then get smacked over the head with patches that just ruin the performance of both the renderer and the networking.

Then, patch after patch, so-called improvement after improvement, the game still performs laughably bad compared to when it was first presented to me in the form of an open beta test.

I do feel kind of cheated, knowing very well that things like this can happen to a dynamic product such as an MMO.

badmojo · January 2015

Everyone likes to blame the lighting changes, yet in an ESO live they claimed they reverted these changes in testing and it didn't fix the problems.

1.2 might have caused the problem, but there were many other changes than just lighting. http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/discussion/113161/patch-notes-v1-2-3

It could be anything, maybe the loading of objects while on horseback causes the problems in Cyrodiil?

Point is, we don't know if it's lighting, so you're just spreading misinformation everytime you say it is.

Gilvoth · January 2015

and btw, have you Ever heard even ONCE some one say

"WOW, that lighting is awesome in eso omg"

no, you havent and you never will, no one gives a flying terd about that stupid lighting, shut it off!