Ourorboros wrote: »

Would you want the lag fix if it meant rolling back to 1.3 or there about (when we first got the lag)?

In a word, yes.

Unless the lag is a pipeline issue (so many packets being sent out that our cable connections cannot handle them all), then ZOS needs to do whatever it takes to fix this issue. Otherwise, the whole idea of mass PvP combat is pointless and a lie.

Simply altering the game play to try and break up zergs to reduce lag is also ignoring the actual problem.

Fix the lag problem.

Ourorboros wrote: »

While I certainly agree with OP, if zos could fix the issue, don't you think they would by now?

If they all sat down and put their collective knowledge together to focus on bugs and lag for one entire quarter instead of working on dark brotherhood, yes they could.

To Whom It May Concern,

As both an TESO:TU player and ESO Plus subscriber on XBOX ONE essentially from day one, my dissatisfaction and distrust in the direction in which this wonderful game is headed is growing steadily. I write this letter on March 23 having spent about 12 hours exploring the new Thieves Guild content which is a combination of enjoyable, often beautiful, but overall underwhelming and frustrating. Yes, the actual Thieves Guild patch, the new zone, and the quest line are welcome additions. What I can't understand though is how badly you missed on the issues that are at the very core of what is causing the most frustration among your community of players. I want to preface the rest of my comments here by saying that I am in no way familiar with the actual technical aspects of game construction and that my issues are more directed towards your actions in a philosophical sense.

The very first thing I want to bring up is the ever intusive, ever frustrating , ever present issue of lag. I'm not just talking PvP here either, although that is where one is most likely to find this enemy of fun. I'm speaking more of the two newest DLC zones, Orsinium and Hew's Bane respectively. I can only assume you have testers who have made mention of this along with rampant disconnect issues and random loading screens. The latter of which is an issue in any high traffic zone throughout Tamriel, particularly Elden Root in Grahtwood. Let me focus on Hew's Bane though, as this is the newest DLC and the one where, after basically 6 months of console players addressing these same issues on these same forums, you still failed to create a smooth running enviroment, free of lag and the intolerable amount of disconnecting and dashboarding. Here we have a zone with both a skill line and quest line which rely heavily upon not being detected. This of course involves sneaking past guards and the watchful eyes of NPC. How then do you think it is going to work out when your players are hit with lag while trying to evade either detection or pursuit? My most aggravating moment came when I was disconnected with an inventory of stolen loot, only to log back in face to face with the guard I had been trying to avoid prior.

In fairness I should say I derive a certain amount of pleasure of seeing my fellow players frozen in various degrees of action throughout these zones. There's just something about a High Elf on a camel frozen in mid-air that tickles my funny bone. The problem is of course far more obtuse than these acute examples. Just running through the city exploring, subjects your players to an endless wave of glitching and what can best be described as stuttering mechanics. What I find the most disheartening about these issues is that they universally exsist in Orsinium as well. I loved Wrothgar! Loved it for about a day that is, before just trying to do the daily writs at the city's crafting areas meant a constant wave of disconnections. The clothing station, you know, the one where you fixed the cooking fire, had me trapped one time for 15 minutes trying to reach the door to escape. As of the time of this letter I still cannot run from the guild traders to the bank without encountering a random load screen, or being disconnected. I simply don't understand how that can be possible after months of feedback on these very forums. These problems are of course all PvE based, let me quickly address PvP.

I'm not a big PvP player, never have been, probably never will be, and my hope is that when I post this someone can add to my thoughts and hopefully do so with the same respectful spirit in which I aimed for in this letter. My experiences in PvP, in particular large group play, has been steadily declining with each new patch. Yes, small group versus small group action seemingly runs very smooth, but if this is your aim, it's simply not realistic. No amount of new sets, abilities, buffing, or nerfing will address the reality of the problem with PvP lag: Players want to play in groups, usually large groups. We're not just talking siege where all the players are essentially forced to be stacked on top of each other as being where your biggest problems exsist, but open field combat where the fighting factions are relatively spread out leads to an equal amount of lag. If you've never played on an open battlefield where say 40 plus players are engaged, let me tell you, for about 85% of those players they can just close there eyes and hope for the best and get nearly the same results as your best PvP players. Animations, both effect and movement, typically breakdown to the point where you look like a cartoon character whose legs start spinning before they zoom off. By the time you do zoom off though, the whole situation has changed and there's no telling what mess you've just gotten yourself in to.

Here then is the crux of my argument. You have an essentially great game in theory. If everything is working right it really is alot of fun, with some fantastic features, cool skills, and mechanics. Most importantly, and I can't stress this enough, you have an amazing community of players. These players are your greatest asset, whether you want to recognize that or not. However, since the Imperial City DLC which was amazing, but inexplicably left to rot on the vine, you have been steadily force feeding us mediocrity. What's frustrating is that it's mediocrity with amazing potential! Along with that, you have failed in every way possible to keep the older content relavant. I know you're tired of hearing questions about why end game PvE content and the subsequent rewards haven't scaled up, but I think you have to agree that this omission is an agregious one. You essentially brought that elephant into the room of your own accord. My goal in writing this letter was to hopefully address these issues, albeit from the limited understanding of a relatively casual player (Although, I've logged probably close to 2 thousand hours of game play!), and say this final thought:

If you refuse to address the core issues affecting the quality of gameplay in TESO:TU (Lag, broken skill mechanics, outdated content/rewards) and instead continue focusing on surface issues such as new DLC, you will continue to lose the players who make this game as enjoyable as it is. I know that negativity, especially on the scale which you must deal with when you have a community this large, with the communication skills of the vast majority of your key demographic audience, is a labor of Herculean effort, but know that it comes from a good place; from people who want this game to succeed because we see its potential; from a community that wants this game to be around for a very long time.

Thank you for your time.

mfraher05 wrote: »

To Whom It May Concern,

As both an TESO:TU player and ESO Plus subscriber on XBOX ONE essentially from day one, my dissatisfaction and distrust in the direction in which this wonderful game is headed is growing steadily. I write this letter on March 23 having spent about 12 hours exploring the new Thieves Guild content which is a combination of enjoyable, often beautiful, but overall underwhelming and frustrating. Yes, the actual Thieves Guild patch, the new zone, and the quest line are welcome additions. What I can't understand though is how badly you missed on the issues that are at the very core of what is causing the most frustration among your community of players. I want to preface the rest of my comments here by saying that I am in no way familiar with the actual technical aspects of game construction and that my issues are more directed towards your actions in a philosophical sense.

The very first thing I want to bring up is the ever intusive, ever frustrating , ever present issue of lag. I'm not just talking PvP here either, although that is where one is most likely to find this enemy of fun. I'm speaking more of the two newest DLC zones, Orsinium and Hew's Bane respectively. I can only assume you have testers who have made mention of this along with rampant disconnect issues and random loading screens. The latter of which is an issue in any high traffic zone throughout Tamriel, particularly Elden Root in Grahtwood. Let me focus on Hew's Bane though, as this is the newest DLC and the one where, after basically 6 months of console players addressing these same issues on these same forums, you still failed to create a smooth running enviroment, free of lag and the intolerable amount of disconnecting and dashboarding. Here we have a zone with both a skill line and quest line which rely heavily upon not being detected. This of course involves sneaking past guards and the watchful eyes of NPC. How then do you think it is going to work out when your players are hit with lag while trying to evade either detection or pursuit? My most aggravating moment came when I was disconnected with an inventory of stolen loot, only to log back in face to face with the guard I had been trying to avoid prior.

In fairness I should say I derive a certain amount of pleasure of seeing my fellow players frozen in various degrees of action throughout these zones. There's just something about a High Elf on a camel frozen in mid-air that tickles my funny bone. The problem is of course far more obtuse than these acute examples. Just running through the city exploring, subjects your players to an endless wave of glitching and what can best be described as stuttering mechanics. What I find the most disheartening about these issues is that they universally exsist in Orsinium as well. I loved Wrothgar! Loved it for about a day that is, before just trying to do the daily writs at the city's crafting areas meant a constant wave of disconnections. The clothing station, you know, the one where you fixed the cooking fire, had me trapped one time for 15 minutes trying to reach the door to escape. As of the time of this letter I still cannot run from the guild traders to the bank without encountering a random load screen, or being disconnected. I simply don't understand how that can be possible after months of feedback on these very forums. These problems are of course all PvE based, let me quickly address PvP.

I'm not a big PvP player, never have been, probably never will be, and my hope is that when I post this someone can add to my thoughts and hopefully do so with the same respectful spirit in which I aimed for in this letter. My experiences in PvP, in particular large group play, has been steadily declining with each new patch. Yes, small group versus small group action seemingly runs very smooth, but if this is your aim, it's simply not realistic. No amount of new sets, abilities, buffing, or nerfing will address the reality of the problem with PvP lag: Players want to play in groups, usually large groups. We're not just talking siege where all the players are essentially forced to be stacked on top of each other as being where your biggest problems exsist, but open field combat where the fighting factions are relatively spread out leads to an equal amount of lag. If you've never played on an open battlefield where say 40 plus players are engaged, let me tell you, for about 85% of those players they can just close there eyes and hope for the best and get nearly the same results as your best PvP players. Animations, both effect and movement, typically breakdown to the point where you look like a cartoon character whose legs start spinning before they zoom off. By the time you do zoom off though, the whole situation has changed and there's no telling what mess you've just gotten yourself in to.

Here then is the crux of my argument. You have an essentially great game in theory. If everything is working right it really is alot of fun, with some fantastic features, cool skills, and mechanics. Most importantly, and I can't stress this enough, you have an amazing community of players. These players are your greatest asset, whether you want to recognize that or not. However, since the Imperial City DLC which was amazing, but inexplicably left to rot on the vine, you have been steadily force feeding us mediocrity. What's frustrating is that it's mediocrity with amazing potential! Along with that, you have failed in every way possible to keep the older content relavant. I know you're tired of hearing questions about why end game PvE content and the subsequent rewards haven't scaled up, but I think you have to agree that this omission is an agregious one. You essentially brought that elephant into the room of your own accord. My goal in writing this letter was to hopefully address these issues, albeit from the limited understanding of a relatively casual player (Although, I've logged probably close to 2 thousand hours of game play!), and say this final thought:

If you refuse to address the core issues affecting the quality of gameplay in TESO:TU (Lag, broken skill mechanics, outdated content/rewards) and instead continue focusing on surface issues such as new DLC, you will continue to lose the players who make this game as enjoyable as it is. I know that negativity, especially on the scale which you must deal with when you have a community this large, with the communication skills of the vast majority of your key demographic audience, is a labor of Herculean effort, but know that it comes from a good place; from people who want this game to succeed because we see its potential; from a community that wants this game to be around for a very long time.

Thank you for your time.

Excellent post, wish i could give you more awesomes.
Sadly the lag (and the other problems you highlight) will never be fixed. Each DLC just adds more and more bugs to the grand mess of bugs and none of them are ever fixed. Many become features as that's a handy excuse for not fixing.
Since Thieves Guild launched the lag has actually gotten a lot worse, and the many many other bugs it introduced are just ignored and swept under the carpet, and will almost certainly still be there when Dark Brotherhood launches. Threads highlighting the bugs and the lag are usually sunk or closed down by the mods, or moved into very low traffic parts of the forums.
"We are working on a fix,"...... "we are investigating the cause,"....."future incremental patch but no eta," all just politician speak and damage control.
ZOS have had their $$$$ for Thieves Guild, it's all about the next cash grab now.

If they dont put any effort into the lag (or pvp) by the end of the year im giving up on the game.

Its one thing to have a problem you're having trouble solving, its another thing for it to be a constant ongoing issue getting worse and worse with no word to your customers on whats going on and what you're doing about it. It should be a priority, is it really so bad that it cant be fixed?

Then we are doomed. Nothing will get added.

Uriel_Nocturne wrote: »

Asherons_Call wrote: »

Ourorboros wrote: »

While I certainly agree with OP, if zos could fix the issue, don't you think they would by now?

If they all sat down and put their collective knowledge together to focus on bugs and lag for one entire quarter instead of working on dark brotherhood, yes they could.

And this comment shows that you have zero knowledge about how coding/programming work in a persistent online atmosphere.

They've got different teams performing very different jobs, all at the same time. Those teams are also responsible for communicating back and forth to ensure that the changes one team makes does not negatively affect any other teams' work.

It is in no way viable to take everybody in the building and put them on bug/lag fixing duties. Sound, graphics designers, character modelers, none of those people on those teams would know how to fix that server lag. Similarly; none of the server maintenance crew would know how to patch a bug in the source code for the game.

Your suggestion simply is in no way feasible, and is generated by impatience.

Some issues (i.e. the bugs and lag) are far more difficult to fix/maintain than adding a reskinned mount into the Crown Store.

Hence; they have different teams working on vastly different areas of the game. Some of those are (by their very nature) going to take longer to rectify than others. But it would be suicide to any online business model to cease all business functions just to fix a bit of server lag. just because Walmart's website might lag for a bit or not load properly, they aren't going to quit selling items to the public just so everyone can hop on that server issue.

Lag fixes are coming. they are being actively worked on. Zenimax has communicated this innumerable times. Just because it doesn't fit into your personal schedule/timeline, doesn't mean that they have to shut the business down and work on nothing else.

But until then, there is zero reason to stop business operations just because of some server lag.

While I would usually agree with you, I can't in this case just because they made the game so much worse with this update, it's almost unbearable how badly it stutters and lags in even low-traffic areas, and in high traffic areas it is, for me at least, unbearable, and I just signed off because I'm sick of it despite otherwise very much wanting to keep playing. If updating the game with new content means breaking it this badly, then yes I believe they should absolutely stop business as usual and do whatever needs to be done to fix this. Business as usual is they release updates, and this update should not have been released in this state.

Maybe it's just overloaded servers but it was happening to me even in the early morning hours at the least populated time, so it doesn't seem like that's the cause. And while I agree with you that obviously the people making new content are not and will never be involved in fixing bugs, that doesn't mean new content should be put out when it ruins any chance of properly enjoying the game, which for me it has. Even when it is technically playable the stuttering in particular is far too distracting and keeps pulling me out of the game, shattering any sense of immersion I might have otherwise had, and makes me want to go do something else instead of playing the game that I love, and that's not right.

If it's just overloaded servers or if it's fixed in a few days then I take back what I said here (if it's the servers then they just need better/more servers and can certainly continue on as normal), but if the game stays like this for any significant amount of time then they absolutely shouldn't be going about business as usual and should be doing anything they have to in order to fix this.

And if stopping this from happening again means never adding any more DLC, I pick no more DLC ever happily if it just means the game will play properly and let me enjoy it, there's no point in more content being added if it can't even be played properly.

Chaos Theory. When you have 1 million lines of code (world) and some new variable (butterfly) flaps it's wings sometimes it will cause a storm in said code.

They just need to get out the raid and kill the bloody thing. I'm just hoping it is not a whole colony of the little buggers, but at this point I'm not too hopeful!

The main reason why I prefer small scale PVP is because of the lag.

I swear I must of had about 3-5 fps yesterday in Haderus (PS4 - NA)

@Xendyn, Not sure what structure they are using for their servers...
Also, I'm a mobile game programmer and by no means any expert on multiplayer games, so take this with a grain of salt...

In multiplayer game (FPS generally) they will use an authoritative server to help agains't cheating.
A fully Authoritative server setup essentially means: anything the client wants to do, it needs to ask permission for the server.
For example: You want to fire? (Client ask server permission to shoot... Server analyse data... and respond to the client: you can attack depending on if you have ammo or cooldowns, etc.)

So the server has total dominance over the game. All (most) calculation happens on the server side.
Therefore, these servers are harder to cheat but all this communication and calculation on the server side hurts performance.

The opposite of an authoritative server is a Non-authoritative server.
In this scenario, the calculations happens on the client side and the result is sent to the server.
(You want to shoot? You simply do... the client then communicates to the server that it just shoots)

What this means? Non-authoritative servers are easier to cheat.


==========

Ok,to get back with ESO, since it's a large scale game, going full authoritative would be prohibitive and hurt performance badly. My guess though is: to fix the bots and cheating issues, they reworked some of their network code base to be more authoritative.

Therefore there is more data being communicated between the clients and the server.


I could be completely wrong here. This is just my opinion.

pmn100b16_ESO wrote: »

We COULD fix the bugs but...











...what about a re-skinned camel mount?

Yeah or, we could fix the bugs but it would be much better to give this $1m to someone to prove we're nice people.

Rune_Relic wrote: »

Well said.

Only way around this is to not trust the client PC on which the client sits and encrypt its own code..rather than not trust the PC and do server calcs.
That way no man in the middle hacking between client>server>client code can take place.
At that point the client can be 100% trusted to do the calcs and you can use a peer-cloud-peer model instead of client server.
Clients-server simply fire off status packets to ZOS central so they can observe/kill client activity.
Peer-Peer is where all the combat-calcs takes place.
It requires an encrypted network pretty much how the latest cloud based storage and latest voice comm software work.

Across between sync.com and discord if you like.
Built from the ground up to be a secured high speed unhackable (monitored) peer-peer network.

Umm ok so in Coding for Dummies language, is this doable and practical for ESO? Is this something they could do to give us back performance in a reasonable amount of man hours and money?

I couldn't agree with this more. The biggest killer of this game is LAGGGGGGGGGGGGG.

If the game cannot handle the massive amount of players in one area that it advertised then for pete's sake drop the friggin population levels to no higher than 3 bars so that it's playable. Open up as many Campaigns as needed to accomplish this.

@ZOS_GinaBruno, @ZOS_RichLambert, @ZOS_MattFiror, @ZOS_BrianWheeler seriously, what's it going to take to get rid of lag in Cyrodil. Open up more CP campaigns and lower the populations UNTIL you can get the code under control and will allow for more players in each campaign.

They work perfectly fine with 3 bars for each faction with almost no lag even WITH CP. Your equipment cannot handle this game period. Please take the appropriate steps NOW to remedy this instead of trying this fix and that fix and the next fix that will come next week or with the next DLC. It's about time this is resolved one way or another. If you don't have the hardware for more campaigns, GET IT. Doesn't management realize that the more people they lose from not opening more campaigns is consistent revenue LOST.......

With all the beautiful graphics this game has, the combat mechanics, the siege weaponry and lore, IT HAS THE POTENTIAL TO BE THE TOP MMO! Thousands of players WILL COME BACK IF YOU GET THE LAG UNDER CONTROL....

Lag is the biggest problem this game has right now.