Did ZOS give up on Cyradiil and PVP?

wOOOOt_of_SD · April 2015

PLEASE KEEP THE TOPIC HERE.
This thread is about, ZOS want to change player behaviour and change gameplay in Cyradiil.
It is NOT about lag, and not about if you think Cyradiil is good or bad, or any other pvp types.

ESO promised massive PVP in Cyrodiil, with thousands of players in huge battles.
Now I think we are Down to a server pop cap around 450, and I'll settle for that - its still fun.
But I want to discuss, if it is ok that they are heading in a direction where they are going to change the biggest core part and goal of the game?

Let me explain.
Most players know that lag has been a huge problem in Cyradiil since the beginning,
and despite several patches and cuts on the max population in the zone, we still have the same problem.

On the 13'th march, ZOS_PaulSage wrote:

ZOS_PaulSage wrote: »

Actively, we are looking at changing the behavior of the players to remove incentives for large groups to stay in the same area.

- FULL LINK

To summon up - what Paul says is that they will try to spread the players more in Cyradiil to reduce the lag.

And I Ask - "WTF" - Seriously?
So they make a wonderful Cyradiil zone and great gameplay designed for lots of players, and when they cannot fix the lag issue,
then they play to change player behaviour? - are we actually there? at the last resort?
In other Words, they fail - they admit it, and now they will change the gameplay and force players to spread out.

Now, I play ESO for the PVP, and especially for the massive PVP that was the entire goal for the game to begin with.
I don't have a future in ESO, if the plan is to abandon the massive PVP concept in Cyradiil, and force players to play in smaller Groups.
Don't get me wrong, I'm an old hardcore Daoc Group vs Group pvp player, but Cyradiil was made to give players freedom to choose.
Cyradiil is perfectly designed to give us both pvp for zergs, Groups and solo if you want that.

And let me repeat - this thread is about "changing player behaviour" - is that ok? is that possible?

Most of us who like the PVP in ESO, we play it for a few main reasons:
- Its a great PVP concept with 3 factions fighting over land, Castles and domination.
- Cyradiil and the large scale pvp combat is fun and facinating - and we have the freedom to choose zerg, Group or solo.

And I am pretty sure that we like that freedom, and if it is taken from us, we Loose interest in the game.
And the very nature of MMO PVP players, in this kind of 3 way war, is to run in large zergs, because well, in most wars, winning depend on numbers.

They already started gently with a Little AP bonus, if we spread out and do some pve in the dungeons in the zone.

What is Next when that don't change the lag problems?
- more population cap cuts? from 150 from each side to 50? - more servers to spread the population? - smaller servers?
- will they use the stick or carrot with more bonuses or penalties? better xp for smaller battles?
- maybe cut raid size to make coordination harder?
- and if nothing else Works, that then? more extreme measures like removing map battle indicators so we run around blind?
Attention ZOS - These are not 4 suggestions! - this is Things you need to avoid!

It is not ok Zenimax! - Not ok to abandon fixing the lag, and instead changing the biggest Unique part of the game for us.
Think about it Again! - Changing player behaviour - it nothing but a bad combination of forcing, nerfing and limiting our gameplay.
Go fix the problem, and stop treating symptoms with bandaids and cutbacks on freedom in the game.

Sorry for long post Guys.

w

DeLindsay · April 2015

The recent changes to try and get Players away from Keeps (the entire reason Cyrodiil exists) and into small group PvP is a very clear indication that after a year ZoS is no closer to figuring out how to fix the lag in Cyrodiil. Either that or they do know how to fix it and their bosses (the money types) won't let them spend what it will take to either upgrade the hardware or spend MANY hours coding to properly fix it. That said, I'd say yes, they've given up, at least to the point that there isn't any more time, effort, and/or money that they're willing to throw at it.

stefan.gustavsonb16_ESO · April 2015

At this point, I'd say that anyone hoping for a lag-free Cyrodiil should be looking at what the console release will bring. On locked-down platforms with signed code, the server can be a lot more naive in its trust that the client software is not up to anything funny. Many server computations could be off-loaded to the clients, reducing the server load to what it was right after launch for the PC/Mac version.

No official word for a month in the sticky thread started by Paul Sage. I don't know what to make of that, really.

synnerman · April 2015

Well Ive been here since early access and I am now at the point of thinking they actually don't know what to do .
In the past when the fight was local the lag would hit, now its a case if there is a large fight (usually a keep assault) anywhere on the map the lag hits everywhere.

Increasing siege damage and the zergbuster skills really did nothing because the lag prevents anything being done. I am so sad and disappointed that it seems they cannot fix it and because of this PvP in the form they promised will eventually die in this game and cyrodiil will become just another PvE zone.

As for me and most of my guild we have about 7 weeks of sub remaining and we have all said that we wont be paying anymore until the lag is sorted and zos just have to hope that another serious PvP game doesn't come out because they will lose their own PvP community.

When there is no lag nothing touches this game for Visuals and PvP but it seems that they cannot keep both when large scale battles occur (something that happens every half hr or less due to keeps being the objectives) , personally I would take less intense graphics for performance.

We also need more campaigns opening up as once again last night all EU campaigns were almost full on every faction. More importantly get rid of cyrodiil PvE buffs as the buff campaigns with every keep 1 colour deter people from going there to try and take keeps back only to get zerged down by 100 pvers trying to keep their bonuses.

We need some input as to where we are going with this as this performance is unacceptable after 1 year and if this goes live on console the game will be reviewed as a complete joke. But hey I suppose they are all working on that now.

wOOOOt_of_SD · April 2015

Same here - kept paying monthly after 1.6, but im also going to cancel my payment until they fix Cyradiil lag, and not fix by nerfing the gameplay.

Maybe we should make this our statement.

Money comes back, when the Lag is gone in Cyradiil.

xarguideb17_ESO · April 2015

synnerman wrote: »

Well Ive been here since early access and I am now at the point of thinking they actually don't know what to do .
In the past when the fight was local the lag would hit, now its a case if there is a large fight (usually a keep assault) anywhere on the map the lag hits everywhere.

Increasing siege damage and the zergbuster skills really did nothing because the lag prevents anything being done. I am so sad and disappointed that it seems they cannot fix it and because of this PvP in the form they promised will eventually die in this game and cyrodiil will become just another PvE zone.

As for me and most of my guild we have about 7 weeks of sub remaining and we have all said that we wont be paying anymore until the lag is sorted and zos just have to hope that another serious PvP game doesn't come out because they will lose their own PvP community.

When there is no lag nothing touches this game for Visuals and PvP but it seems that they cannot keep both when large scale battles occur (something that happens every half hr or less due to keeps being the objectives) , personally I would take less intense graphics for performance.

We also need more campaigns opening up as once again last night all EU campaigns were almost full on every faction. More importantly get rid of cyrodiil PvE buffs as the buff campaigns with every keep 1 colour deter people from going there to try and take keeps back only to get zerged down by 100 pvers trying to keep their bonuses.

We need some input as to where we are going with this as this performance is unacceptable after 1 year and if this goes live on console the game will be reviewed as a complete joke. But hey I suppose they are all working on that now.

Yes, ZOS seems clueless about how to fix the lag. Graphics have nothing to do with this.
The problem is the servers can't handle the amount of messages coming from the clients during large-scale battles.
They probably need to simplify communication.

I wouldn't care if they have to reduce population cap or decrease group size. Anything to get rid of this ridiculous lag. It's killing the game's PVP.

However, the system needs to work so, that even if all the people in Cyrodiil are fighting in the same place, there is no lag!

tengri · April 2015

Cyrodiil needs to split up in a few zones, it's just too big for the servers to handle.
Yes, yes, immersion, *rant*, *rant*.... LAG.
I dont care that I can ride for an hour in the same direction; I dont really need that but I need a lag-free battlefield. If that means Z has to think a little smaller... so be it.

Malmai · April 2015

They can't handle the game and its content very sad...

Audigy · April 2015

I don't think its the servers at all, its our own systems.

Online games are very complex, you have AI, physics and of course the graphics, sounds ... All of these things are processed / organized by our CPU. Unfortunately does this lead to a CPU overhead, which results in our GPU waiting for commands from our CPU. This behavior you then experience as a lag or FPS drop.

You can see this pretty well if you log in to the game. First you can hear the sounds, then you see your own char, then your surroundings, then the bigger distance objects and NPC´s and last, the other players. If we had a better API, then you would see everything at the same time, but this wont work with DX 11 sadly.

What you as a user can do is lowering said things. Don't play on Ultra if you PVP, but on high / medium. Lower the sound channels, you can even work on the network throttling if you are able to work with your registry on Win 7, put down the particles, shadows and draw distance.

I know this seems wrong and I agree, but a fix from ZOS wont come, its just not possible right now. Maybe they will give us players access to Mantle or DX 12 at the end of the year, but only they know if this is a realistic thing to do.

psufan5 · April 2015

Everything seems to go fine until a guild dressed all in white (won't name names) starts playing. Then the entire server they are on lags to no end, and you need to log out.

I find that incredibly suspicious.

wOOOOt_of_SD · April 2015

Audigy wrote: »

I don't think its the servers at all, its our own systems.

Online games are very complex, you have AI, physics and of course the graphics, sounds ... All of these things are processed / organized by our CPU. Unfortunately does this lead to a CPU overhead, which results in our GPU waiting for commands from our CPU. This behavior you then experience as a lag or FPS drop.

You can see this pretty well if you log in to the game. First you can hear the sounds, then you see your own char, then your surroundings, then the bigger distance objects and NPC´s and last, the other players. If we had a better API, then you would see everything at the same time, but this wont work with DX 11 sadly.

What you as a user can do is lowering said things. Don't play on Ultra if you PVP, but on high / medium. Lower the sound channels, you can even work on the network throttling if you are able to work with your registry on Win 7, put down the particles, shadows and draw distance.

I know this seems wrong and I agree, but a fix from ZOS wont come, its just not possible right now. Maybe they will give us players access to Mantle or DX 12 at the end of the year, but only they know if this is a realistic thing to do.

If it was the players Pc's that are the problem, then you would see lag where some can play, while others get slaughtered. That is not the case in Cyrodiil. Here the lag spikes affects everyone at the same time, no matter what system they run on. I play with my guild, and we communicate during PVP, and its not just some with older systems, its everyone when lag hits.

I have high end PC and super fast internet. I get the lag, even when running ESO on low settings.

Zershar_Vemod · April 2015

They never had a clue when it came to PvP from the get-go.

hehekta · April 2015

May be, to reduce lags, Zos should try to remove PvE stuff (anchors, mobs,quests, dungeons, etc) from Cyradiil?

wOOOOt_of_SD · April 2015

Please stay on topic - this is not meant to be another thread about the lag.

Did ZOS give up on fixing lag?
Is it ok they give up?
Is it ok they go from fixing a technical problem to "changing player behaviour"?

Would you keep playing PVP in ESO, if they go from massive Cyradiil to smaller numbers, smaller servers
or making other limitations on PVP?

Sallington · April 2015

Zershar_Vemod wrote: »

They never had a clue when it came to PvP from the get-go.

That didn't stop them from selling us a PvP environment that they could never support.

wrlifeboil · April 2015

wOOOOt_of_SD wrote: »

Audigy wrote: »

I don't think its the servers at all, its our own systems.

Online games are very complex, you have AI, physics and of course the graphics, sounds ... All of these things are processed / organized by our CPU. Unfortunately does this lead to a CPU overhead, which results in our GPU waiting for commands from our CPU. This behavior you then experience as a lag or FPS drop.

You can see this pretty well if you log in to the game. First you can hear the sounds, then you see your own char, then your surroundings, then the bigger distance objects and NPC´s and last, the other players. If we had a better API, then you would see everything at the same time, but this wont work with DX 11 sadly.

What you as a user can do is lowering said things. Don't play on Ultra if you PVP, but on high / medium. Lower the sound channels, you can even work on the network throttling if you are able to work with your registry on Win 7, put down the particles, shadows and draw distance.

I know this seems wrong and I agree, but a fix from ZOS wont come, its just not possible right now. Maybe they will give us players access to Mantle or DX 12 at the end of the year, but only they know if this is a realistic thing to do.

If it was the players Pc's that are the problem, then you would see lag where some can play, while others get slaughtered. That is not the case in Cyrodiil. Here the lag spikes affects everyone at the same time, no matter what system they run on. I play with my guild, and we communicate during PVP, and its not just some with older systems, its everyone when lag hits.

I have high end PC and super fast internet. I get the lag, even when running ESO on low settings.

Having "super fast internet" is meaningless. Mmos typically don't need much bandwidth. Low latency is what is important for online games.

It's better to get a slow dsl connection with good routing to ZOS servers and low latency than a "super fast" cable or fiber Internet connection with bad routing and high latency.

daemonios · April 2015

stefan.gustavsonb16_ESO wrote: »

At this point, I'd say that anyone hoping for a lag-free Cyrodiil should be looking at what the console release will bring. On locked-down platforms with signed code, the server can be a lot more naive in its trust that the client software is not up to anything funny. Many server computations could be off-loaded to the clients, reducing the server load to what it was right after launch for the PC/Mac version.

No official word for a month in the sticky thread started by Paul Sage. I don't know what to make of that, really.

I'd be very surprised if client-side computations aren't one of the big reasons for the lag, actually. Yes, you reduce the workload for the server, but then you have to sync all the data from all the clients on the fly. More people = more separate computations = more syncing needed = more chance for delays, etc. etc. etc.

It would be a huge task, but I'd love to see ZOS try to change the server/client software in PTS so that less syncing would be required, to see if that would reduce the lag.

tist · April 2015

Audigy wrote: »

I don't think its the servers at all, its our own systems.
.

Unlikely. Often times I fight on the outskirts of keeps and the latency is still bad despite my video card having nothing major to render. In PVE zones with few players this is never the case and the game runs smoothly. That, in addition to random things like keep doors not working makes it hard to believe graphics have anything to do with this.

Kas · April 2015

draing people away from the biggest zerg is a good thing. if they want such big zergs and epic battles again, they could always increase opulation caps per campign again.
many players WANT small scale fights to happen. Fights where individual skill and choices have a larger effect than in a typical war of the masses.

that being said, i hope they'll continue working on performance issues and eventually resolve them.

Rune_Relic · April 2015

hehekta wrote: »

May be, to reduce lags, Zos should try to remove PvE stuff (anchors, mobs,quests, dungeons, etc) from Cyradiil?

They are load on demand. You don't have the whole of cydodiil in memory at once.
You will have lots of tiles and a range where only x amount of tiles of the whole map are ever loaded.
Any objects also have a range where they will be invisible, inactive or unloaded.

Try sprinting on you horse across the countryside...you will see a flat grass floor which gets filled with flowers and blades of grass as you move.

Dragonphart · April 2015

I agree with the OP. Large PvP is one of the main attractions for this game. I am beginning to wonder if the game engine is not really capable to handle large scale PvP. If this is so then would it take a major redesign and coding for the game engine to make this happen. If so I do believe this will not happen do to time and expense. I have returned to the game recently, but I do not remember it being this bad when it first launch. But then that just may be me. I did not crash in PvP in those early days and this is the very same PC that I was using. And we had some large battles of keep taking and defending. But now I crash and have a lag fest at lest once in an hour. The other night frame rate dropped to under 10, needless to say, I died a lot.

There are very few MMOs out currently that offer this style PvP. It will be sad if ESO cannot really offer it as, for me, this is one of the main selling points to be in the game.

wOOOOt_of_SD · April 2015

Dragonphart wrote: »

I agree with the OP. Large PvP is one of the main attractions for this game. I am beginning to wonder if the game engine is not really capable to handle large scale PvP. If this is so then would it take a major redesign and coding for the game engine to make this happen. If so I do believe this will not happen do to time and expense. I have returned to the game recently, but I do not remember it being this bad when it first launch. But then that just may be me. I did not crash in PvP in those early days and this is the very same PC that I was using. And we had some large battles of keep taking and defending. But now I crash and have a lag fest at lest once in an hour. The other night frame rate dropped to under 10, needless to say, I died a lot.

There are very few MMOs out currently that offer this style PvP. It will be sad if ESO cannot really offer it as, for me, this is one of the main selling points to be in the game.

I agree - i also remember it like it had less problems back in the beginning.
Maybe they just push more and more info into the system with each patch, making it worse over time?

tcgoetzub17_ESO · April 2015

Audigy wrote: »

I don't think its the servers at all, its our own systems.

...

What you as a user can do is lowering said things. Don't play on Ultra if you PVP, but on high / medium. Lower the sound channels, you can even work on the network throttling if you are able to work with your registry on Win 7, put down the particles, shadows and draw distance.

If you were right, then my computer would show the load. Running at full ultra my comp is usually 14% CPU and 49% GPU. During horrendous lag it goes up, but not too much and it's not close to maxed. Sometimes the CPU & GPU utilization even goes down during lag.

I think it's pretty clear that ZOS's servers can't handle to computations. Most likely AOE computations. Removing the AOE caps was a fail and made things worse.

As the servers fall behind on processing player command packets our ping times go up since the ping times ESO reports is network round trip plus time to process the message on the server.

kewl · April 2015

Yes. I have too.

jamesharv2005ub17_ESO · April 2015

I think the problem lies in the core of the code they use. Therefore there is no fixing the lag because it is the core of the game causing it. Basically saying they would need an entirely new engine. There is no budget for that. So they have to figure out ways to get people to split up. Buying new hardware etc wont help if its in the code.

wrlifeboil · April 2015

Can any mmo with decent graphics handle 2k players on a single battlefield (as originally advertised) without lag? It may be that the technology doesn't exist yet or the Internet in the U.S. isn't good enough. Well, we do know that the Internet in the U.S. isn't great.

daemonios · April 2015

wrlifeboil wrote: »

Can any mmo with decent graphics handle 2k players on a single battlefield (as originally advertised) without lag? It may be that the technology doesn't exist yet or the Internet in the U.S. isn't good enough. Well, we do know that the Internet in the U.S. isn't great.

Graphics are client-side, and fiddling with the graphics settings doesn't fix the lag, which appears to be server-side. No correlation there.

jamesharv2005ub17_ESO · April 2015

On a side note the internet in america is just fine. I have 100mb service through cable. Its not the internet causing the problem. The data sent between is miniscule.

Cherryblossom · April 2015

it makes no difference if they change player behaviour, I'm sure everyone has experienced Lag in Cyrodil when it was quiet and no Zergs about. There is a fundemental flaw with Cyrodil which they have made consecutively worse with every patch.
I gave up along time ago believing it could be fixed, from ZOS silence on the matter so have they.

hehekta · April 2015

Rune_Relic wrote: »

hehekta wrote: »

May be, to reduce lags, Zos should try to remove PvE stuff (anchors, mobs,quests, dungeons, etc) from Cyradiil?

They are load on demand. You don't have the whole of cydodiil in memory at once.

Lags happening on a server side, not on client. It's like a DDoS attack but on server CPU's. Anyway who cares about PvE content in Cyrodiil?..

Elsonso · April 2015

Short answer to a long OP: No, they have not.

Will they be able to fix it? I'll let you know about 6 months after Console release.