Why do Large group VET battles work in Haderus but not in Azura????

Robbmrp · January 2016

So last night(7pm MST Primetime) I was with a group of about 30ish running in Azura. The lag was so bad for everyone that we moved to Haderus. We were able to play there with minimal lag. Our group of 30ish were constantly clashing with other factions groups about the same size and some even larger. There were tons of AOE damage and healing being done. The players we encountered there I recognized as those we generally run into in Azura yet we were able to have actual battles with large groups with minimal to no lag.

There's been speculation that the max player limit for Azura is 75 per faction. We easily had 2/3 of that population in Haderus last night and I don't recall a time where I noticed my latency going into the red. If Azura is maxed at 225 and Haderus was say 150, I can't imagine that a player count of 75 would make that big of a difference. Yes a little, but not from 150-200 ping to average 500 always in the red. I'm pretty sure that all of the other faction players are at the max 501 CP count as well so CP calculations should have been really high and didn't seem to be a factor.

@ZOS_GinaBruno, @ZOS_BrianWheeler, @ZOS_MattFiror, what's the difference between Haderus and Azura besides it's a 7 day Campaign? Are these campaigns on two different servers? Are they located in the same Data Center? Are the CPU/Memory/SSD/HD configuration different? Could it be the amount of data that Azura would have when compared to Haderus that's the real culprit and not calculations? Azura should have four times the data being stored and have to sort through when compared to Haderus's shortened campaign time, which could possibly help increase the lag.

What's the difference in these two Campaigns other than the length of them????

Enodoc · January 2016

What was the population status of both of them? On PC EU in the evenings (UK time), Azura's is usually nearly full and Haderus is only on one or two bars. If Azura was three bars or full, then there were likely a lot of groups of 30s clashing all across the map at similar times, giving (assuming 3 bars on each alliance) 1350 player abilities for the server to count at once. (Brian has said before that something that happens at one keep, eg Alessia, will affect performance somewhere else, eg Rayles.) If Haderus was less populated (assume 1 bar on each alliance), then there may only be a few clashes of 30s, giving up to 450 abilities occurring at once.

Alternatively, if the pop bars were similar, it's possible that the majority of the pop of Haderus was in Imperial City rather than Cyrodiil, essentially resulting in the same situation.

Tors · January 2016

Your groups were probably the ONLY groups on Hadrius, on Azura each faction is fielding 6+ full raids

But yes, the game is fantastic with the performance you would have had and its the hope that it can get back to that for the full servers that keeps me hanging on (well on the forums anyway, not logged in for a week)

Molag_Crow · January 2016

It's funny that you've brought this up, because even on PS4, our Azura's Star (EU) is the LAGGIEST campaign of them all, and a lot of players have changed campaign now.

I saw Brian's 'whiteboard graph' of how a server works with its radius, etc - but it's confusing me now, because over 70 of us combined (around 40 reds, 15 blues, 20-30 yellows) in Thornblade the other night, were all in the Arena District battling it out, non-stop for hours and I was there, we had like... 0 lag.

Now on Azura's, I understand that there's literally hundreds of players, but most of the time they're not all bunched up together and the server would still be as laggy as ever, even while I'm just visiting the bank in Southern Morrowind, there'll be a 1-2 sec delay on everything I interact with.

Isn't the server radius thing (shown on the whiteboard) supposed to only effect those nearby/in the same areas? or does the masses of players at the other end of Cyrodiil, effect the server as a whole?

Robbmrp · January 2016

Tors wrote: »

Your groups were probably the ONLY groups on Hadrius, on Azura each faction is fielding 6+ full raids

But yes, the game is fantastic with the performance you would have had and its the hope that it can get back to that for the full servers that keeps me hanging on (well on the forums anyway, not logged in for a week)

No we weren't. There were other AD in there but I don't know how many. As I said though, there were at least 70 people if not more fighting all in one place all casting tons of AOE's and the game worked fine. People were balled up as well as scattered about also. Zerg's aren't the problem, people may not like how they work when balled up, but this clearly shows that the game is capable of a 35v35 with mass AoE's battling it out with minimal issues. Hopefully @ZOS has it figured out with the upcoming changes, we'll see once Thieves guild is on the live server.

Robbmrp · January 2016

CrowsDescend wrote: »

It's funny that you've brought this up, because even on PS4, our Azura's Star (EU) is the LAGGIEST campaign of them all, and a lot of players have changed campaign now.

I saw Brian's 'whiteboard graph' of how a server works with its radius, etc - but it's confusing me now, because over 70 of us combined (around 40 reds, 15 blues, 20-30 yellows) in Thornblade the other night, were all in the Arena District battling it out, non-stop for hours and I was there, we had like... 0 lag.

Now on Azura's, I understand that there's literally hundreds of players, but most of the time they're not all bunched up together and the server would still be as laggy as ever, even while I'm just visiting the bank in Southern Morrowind, there'll be a 1-2 sec delay on everything I interact with.

Isn't the server radius thing (shown on the whiteboard) supposed to only effect those nearby/in the same areas? or does the masses of players at the other end of Cyrodiil, effect the server as a whole?

Right. My wife and I can go into Azura when it's pop locked and be the only ones grouped out in the middle of no where with no one around and have a constant red ping of 300+ when were normally at 125-175.

Below is from the thread Campaign Performance by @ZOS_BrianWheeler that is definately part of the problem. They mentioned one spell Hemorrhage that buffs people within 2700M which is ludicrous. No one should be getting a buff from another player that far away. The more spells that are setup with checks like this are contributing to the server sided lag but I don't believe are the main culprit. Unless the Servers that run Azura and Haderus are completely identical, they need to look more at those IMO. There could be a bottleneck on Azura due to the large data component being a 30 day campaign that doesn't bog down Haderus.

Look at the loading screen issue for example, the more achievements your character had, the longer the loading screen was until they fixed it. It could be a similar issue with Azura, just too much data for that server to handle. If both Azura(Non IC) and IC itself are on the same server, it could be as simple as splitting them out to their own servers. Granted we had lag before IC, but it was nothing as bad as it is now. Having each Campaign and each IC Instance on their own servers combined with the calculation fixes Brian mentioned, could resolve the issue.

We can only hope....

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

This thread is for ongoing discussions about Cyrodiil performance as we continue to make adjustments now and in the coming months. Most recently, regarding the Cyrodiil performance questions and what's going on there with the recent changes to some abilities in case you missed ESO Live...and the fancy graph which is now a meme thread...

We have been making changes to abilities bit by bit to save calculation cycles on the server. Using the example of Hemorrhage, this ability would check an area around the size of a 2700 meter circle around the Nightblade which critically hit. The Hemorrhage ability would then apply a bonus (minor Savagery) to all allies in that area.

"All allies" can be 1 ally or 100 allies, but the ability system first needs to get ALL the entities in that area first...monsters, players, siege weapons, friend and foe, then sort that list out to find allies, then apply the bonus to them. Changing the ability to Group only cuts out a lot of sorting the server would have to do. That change has helped a little bit, but not a ton, so obviously we're still digging.

The reason we're looking at abilities and the combat system at it's roots, is clear when you look at the difference between non-veteran Campaigns and veteran campaigns as we stated on ESO Live. The non-veteran Campaigns have better performance than veteran allowed Campaigns, and the biggest difference between those are the players making up the population of those campaigns and how much more the server has to calculate when higher level players fight each other. Veteran players simply have more "stuff" on their characters that has to be cycled into every combat calculation on the server. This means all the passives, weapon procs, blocks, roll dodges, potions, food, all of it, add up to the server needing to check all of that every second. This is why we're looking into how they're structured and their functionality at their basic operation level and making changes for performance reasons as we see opportunities to improve how they function.

We are also looking at how the server handles information from combat itself, so not all changes are going to be ability based, but also at the root of the server and how it processes the info coming from combat, movement, items, etc. Some of these changes will be deep rooted in the server code and some will be a bit more front facing, but we're making changes not just Ability wise like you've seen recently, but also how the servers handle combat at their core. Basically anything that can effect your character we are digging into and applying updates to them as we come across what we believe will improve performance.

This is an ongoing effort which we are resolved to delivering a solid PVP experience in ALL Campaigns, and we thank you for wholeheartedly for your continued support of ESO!

Robbmrp · January 2016

Hello @ZOS_GinaBruno, @ZOS_MattFiror & @ZOS_BrianWheeler

To elaborate more on this, I went into Haderus again last night from 6PM-9PM MST Primetime. The entire time, both Yellow and Blue Populations were locked and the Red was at 3 bars. It was pretty full yet my ping was at a constant 120-150 range. At one time I bet there were 100 people on screen fighting, granted we weren't all balled up on a 10m spot but there were tons of people in there. We had some rubber banding at times and I crashed once, but that was it, everything else worked fine. If this had been the Azura Campaign, my ping would have been in the red the whole night at 300+. I have screen shots that I can send that show the population levels and my ping. There were Zerg groups running around as well, a blue one at Roe that were all concentrated on top of the tower at the mine. I only had a couple issues with not being able to mount and the occasional door not opening but a very enjoyable playing experience.

On the last ESO Live, Matt commented that all of the PVP servers have the same coding, so this cannot be a calculations issue for Azura as Haderus would have been plagued with the exact same lag.

A funny side effect of being in Haderus, my wife and I had taken a resource at Roe and the flag started to do it's "normal" burning change, I had seen this many times but not in the last 4 months. My wife goes "What's the flag doing??? It's burning and then re-creating!". It was funny to see her reaction to that as in Azura, that animation doesn't happen, it just goes from a full Red to Yellow flag.

So I ask again, what is the difference between Haderus and Azura Campaigs/Servers that one can work with almost no issues at Primetime and the other is completely unplayable?