Cyrodiil Updates for Update 18

Joy_Division · April 2018

Good stuff all around. Some of these changes long overdue! After 4 years, I won;t have to worry about missing a tick and can actually go PvP in earnest. Will preorder just for that!

Those DC who run back to Chal mine after their pathetic attack on Chalman fails will no longer be safe because we're waiting for a defense tick

Some things to consider further.

Catapults now have their area damage stick around in the world for a period of time after impact resulting in better area denial. Ballista have been rebalanced to do more damage vs. Siege weapons and damage vs. players has been reduced.

By "catapults," we're just talking oil, stone, and meat ... not ice and fire trebs? The oil stays on the ground and snares/drains stamina? The stone has rocks all over the ground and increases damage by 20% (hmm...thinking, maybe I'll buy one now).
The meat creates a green cloud with heal debuff? Can you post a screenshot of the animations (hopefully they are clear and easy to see).

I am the antithesis of a "left click hero," that is, using siege to kill players, but a lot of folks feel this is needed against organized groups so I'm not sure the ballistas doing more damage to enemy siege (already does a lot) and less Vs. players is the way to go here.

New daily quests have been added with a new quest board. These quests will grant Cyrodiil exclusive costume pieces and other goodies.

Thank you. hopefully they are something that EVERYONE will want!

Can ZOS please add some of this stuff for reaching PvP ranks too?

Tick stuff

Awesome! Perhaps we can fine tune this and make it even better. Since the server is already tracking us (i.e. the calculations are going to be there anyway), can we make it so it tracks not just if the player participated in combat, but how long and how much AP was generated while the player was actually there? What I mean by this is let's say a siege lasts for 5 hours at BRK. If I show up at the 4 hour and 59 minute mark and get a single light attack tag in, the people who were actually there should get a bit more AP than me, right? The player who gets a light attack in a the 1 minute mark and then takes an AFK at the Morrowind North Gate will get a fat juicy tick 5 hours later?

LukosCreyden · April 2018

Unique, earnable costume pieces in Cyrodiil?

You had my curiosity, but now you have my full attention.

driosketch · April 2018

jaws343 wrote: »

WasteOfTime wrote: »

Lost count of the PVP performance improvements that have been released, be nice if this is the first actual one,

You can be on several credit lists for a Keep superstructure of a Keep, Mine, Lumbermill and Farm and earn Defense ticks for each of them, however if you defend or attack a new Keep superstructure, your credit will be removed.

umm so still able to lose def ticks if you go def another superstructure too quick? not sure why you'd want to remove players from credit lists

Yeah I am also concerned that you may be required to decide between staying for the tick or porting to another keep that is under siege before it gets flagged. Either way, nothing is changing from the way it is now. You are either waiting around for the tick and not getting to the under siege keep in time, or you leave to defend the other keep and miss out on the tick. And when you defend a keep for 20 minutes and lose a 10K tick because you need to defend another keep, it's kind of disheartening and doesn't really aid in promoting keep defense.

Depends on when the tick clicks over. If it's as soon as the keep unflags, or sooner than it take to ride between keeps, it's less of an issue.

Vilestride wrote: »

I am just going to casually slip this in here. My 2 cents. Glad to see some of the proposals align with what is coming to fruition.

Damn your fake post, had me going. I needed to stand up just so I could sit down. :P

Sandman929 · April 2018

driosketch wrote: »

jaws343 wrote: »

WasteOfTime wrote: »

Lost count of the PVP performance improvements that have been released, be nice if this is the first actual one,

You can be on several credit lists for a Keep superstructure of a Keep, Mine, Lumbermill and Farm and earn Defense ticks for each of them, however if you defend or attack a new Keep superstructure, your credit will be removed.

umm so still able to lose def ticks if you go def another superstructure too quick? not sure why you'd want to remove players from credit lists

Yeah I am also concerned that you may be required to decide between staying for the tick or porting to another keep that is under siege before it gets flagged. Either way, nothing is changing from the way it is now. You are either waiting around for the tick and not getting to the under siege keep in time, or you leave to defend the other keep and miss out on the tick. And when you defend a keep for 20 minutes and lose a 10K tick because you need to defend another keep, it's kind of disheartening and doesn't really aid in promoting keep defense.

Depends on when the tick clicks over. If it's as soon as the keep unflags, or sooner than it take to ride between keeps, it's less of an issue.

Vilestride wrote: »

I am just going to casually slip this in here. My 2 cents. Glad to see some of the proposals align with what is coming to fruition.

Damn your fake post, had me going. I needed to stand up just so I could sit down. :P

I think of it less as a fake post, and more as what patch notes might look like if there was a team interested in Cyrodiil.

ZOS_BrianWheeler · April 2018

Catapults will be the only siege in update 18 (for now) with the effects lingering on the ground after impact. The assumption is correct that a Meatbag will leave an area on the ground that does it's debuff and DoT to anyone that enters it. If a player leaves the area, the secondary effect still lingers on the player but not the damage. Again, this is to reinforce that Catapults design is to be area denial as their damage vs. siege is low.

Ballista had their damage vs. players reduced but increased vs. Siege because their intended design is to be Anti Siege, not Anti Player. The reduction in damage can be re-analyzed however during the PTS cycle.

As a refresher on the D tick is a separate timer from "flagging" the keep. EG flagging a keep won't reset the D timer. Also it's a shorter timer to get the D tick than it is for a keep to unflag. Credit is linked to the individual whether they're in a group or solo and solo actions by members will not wipe your credit unless you assist that player in a kill at another objective. There are lots of edge cases we can go down rabbit holes on...and we did internally...a lot. The systems main goal was to be more forgiving and allow more movement in the battlefield without feeling like you had to magnetize yourself to a keep or resource after you've taken it over. It's meant to reinforce clearing the area and moving to your next target without regret of loss.

Regarding Joy's question, we did not make the credit scale depending on your contribution as that resulted in more data than a binary qualification list per objective which the system now does. Furthermore recalculating credit scaled for contribution measured against the damage and healing output of players vs players, vs. siege and vs. walls would result in the database doing way more work than it's currently comfortable with under stringent performance rules as is. We may be able to go down that route in the future but for now, we believe this system overhaul strikes the best balance between earning credit for actually defending while earning AP for those actions, and cutting back on leeching without punishing late comers to a battle too much.

We wanted to have some UI stating that you got a D tick and from which source, but it didn't make it in time and is planned for a future update.

Apache_Kid · April 2018

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

Catapults will be the only siege in update 18 (for now) with the effects lingering on the ground after impact. The assumption is correct that a Meatbag will leave an area on the ground that does it's debuff and DoT to anyone that enters it. If a player leaves the area, the secondary effect still lingers on the player but not the damage. Again, this is to reinforce that Catapults design is to be area denial as their damage vs. siege is low.

Ballista had their damage vs. players reduced but increased vs. Siege because their intended design is to be Anti Siege, not Anti Player. The reduction in damage can be re-analyzed however during the PTS cycle.

As a refresher on the D tick is a separate timer from "flagging" the keep. EG flagging a keep won't reset the D timer. Also it's a shorter timer to get the D tick than it is for a keep to unflag. Credit is linked to the individual whether they're in a group or solo and solo actions by members will not wipe your credit unless you assist that player in a kill at another objective. There are lots of edge cases we can go down rabbit holes on...and we did internally...a lot. The systems main goal was to be more forgiving and allow more movement in the battlefield without feeling like you had to magnetize yourself to a keep or resource after you've taken it over. It's meant to reinforce clearing the area and moving to your next target without regret of loss.

Regarding Joy's question, we did not make the credit scale depending on your contribution as that resulted in more data than a binary qualification list per objective which the system now does. Furthermore recalculating credit scaled for contribution measured against the damage and healing output of players vs players, vs. siege and vs. walls would result in the database doing way more work than it's currently comfortable with under stringent performance rules as is. We may be able to go down that route in the future but for now, we believe this system overhaul strikes the best balance between earning credit for actually defending while earning AP for those actions, and cutting back on leeching without punishing late comers to a battle too much.

We wanted to have some UI stating that you got a D tick and from which source, but it didn't make it in time and is planned for a future update.

The levels of communication and information here are staggering for these message boards. Thank you so much.

Koolio · April 2018

Did that say a cold fire ballista nerf?

Lightning Ballista drains magic but meant to be anti seige?

ZOS_BrianWheeler · April 2018

Cold fire balista did get damage reduced vs players, but it still trucks. Also note this got buffed vs. siege so it hits for 20,800 vs. siege weapons...

Rickter · April 2018

So since siege is going to be useless against keeps, will we be able to scale the walls with grappling hooks like the original eso trailer?

Iskras · April 2018

This is real, ZOS CARE about PvP?

Finally

Iskras · April 2018

REQUEST:

Someone from ZOS in Cyrodiil some times, in all faction's. Play? Maybe, but to experience what we experience all days.

This is serious!

RMerlin · April 2018

Lots of great changes indeed. I'm not too sure about the balista damage reduction against players, since it's currently the main way to slow down an advancing zerg. They're already pretty much unkillable due to Earthgore and other mass healing, hopefully catapults can compensate for this, otherwise it will be another step backward in fighting zergballs.

I miss the days when you buffed siege weapon. A stone treb could one shot you if you ran with everything in stam/magicka and only 17K health. I recall Wheeler saying something at the time about how a massive stone hurled at you SHOULD hurt.

Hopefully coldfire sieges won't have their damage reduced, as they are rare (and even more expensive than before, average trader price has nearly doubled since last year).

(we were actually talking last night in zone chat how coldfire oils might be "cool"...)

TequilaFire · April 2018

Even oils don't seem to phase players the way they used to after the healbot/tank meta was introduced.
When 2 full raids of DC show up at Chalman and only a handful of EP defenders siege was all we had.
PS4 NA Vivec.

Beardimus · April 2018

Thanks for the update @ZOS_BrianWheeler i worried nothing for PvPers with summerset but a few changes like this are cool

Tougher NPCs are a great idea personally love what they add to Sotha.

Any view on combating AP boosting / alliance switching for nefarious means?

Beardimus · April 2018

Yakidafi wrote: »

The new stuff look interesting, except:

"Monsters/guards in CP Enabled campaigns have learned how to deal with CP enabled characters. They will be a bit harder to kill and hit a bit harder."

I'm happy to see this. Means tanks have a place but also tactically in Sotha they make it a challenge right now, I'm up fot this

RMerlin · April 2018

TequilaFire wrote: »

Even oils don't seem to phase players the way they used to after the healbot/tank meta was introduced.
When 2 full raids of DC show up at Chalman and only a handful of EP defenders siege was all we had.
PS4 NA Vivec.

Correct. Ideally, if someone has two or three oils above you, you should not be able to stand there without either constant heals or a shield bubble to protect you. Personally, I might get 1 or 2 kills top at most when defending a front door with oils, and that's usually either lowbies or novice players.

If there's a whole zerg ball there, even having 6 oils placed above the front gate won't do much to them.

frozywozy · April 2018

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

Quad Cores will see a slight increase but the processors with higher cores will see a greater impact. <-- code gang confirmed 2.0

My i7 8700k atm

RMerlin · April 2018

Beardimus wrote: »

Thanks for the update @ZOS_BrianWheeler i worried nothing for PvPers with summerset but a few changes like this are cool

Tougher NPCs are a great idea personally love what they add to Sotha.

Any view on combating AP boosting / alliance switching for nefarious means?

NPCs need to be made harder indeed, however they need to also be rebalanced. RIght now, they are easy mode for stam builds, and a nightmare for magicka builds (as they keep spamming unbreakable yellow bubbles on you).

I'd be in favor of reducing the bubble's frequency (or making them breakable) while increasing damage output.

geonsocal · April 2018

howdy brian...

is it a matter of complexity or difficulty implementing some type of faction swapping timer?

is the belief that faction hopping is really simply a non issue amongst the campaign player base?

or, that the amount of players bothered by faction swapping is insignificant?

is it the hope that eventually the player base will simply take it as an immutable truth that players that are their allies one minute - can be their enemies the next?

Agrippa_Invisus · April 2018

@ZOS_BrianWheeler

Brian,

One of the things that myself and some guildies have noticed that seem to correlate to some of the lag is the new Outfit system. This is on PC NA.

Whenever swapping weapons myself and others have noticed FPS drops for ourselves from anywhere between 5 to 10 FPS. This varies from person to person and we all have a very wide variety of hardware and gets significantly worse when we're weapon swapping in combat in Cyrodiil.

This leads to the 'sticky weapon swap' problems of the past where there is a several second delay in high traffic moments between swaps.

While I realize correlation is not causation, this is something I wanted to bring to your attention if it has not been noted elsewhere.

ZOS_BrianWheeler · April 2018

Campaign lockouts based on Alliance swapping on a temporary level have been discussed and are still on going.

Beardimus · April 2018

geonsocal wrote: »

howdy brian...

is it a matter of complexity or difficulty implementing some type of faction swapping timer?

is the belief that faction hopping is really simply a non issue amongst the campaign player base?

or, that the amount of players bothered by faction swapping is insignificant?

is it the hope that eventually the player base will simply take it as an immutable truth that players that are their allies one minute - can be their enemies the next?

@geonsocal on the threads about this last month there were PLENTY of voices in agreement with us something needs doing. Some ok arguments were made for keeping a degree of switching (playing with mates) however none had argument at least of a timer, 48hrs etc. I for one vote for full lock, but that gets peoples backs up so happy a Middle ground

Nefarious play ruins Cyrodiil, keep flipping, emp getting handed round like sweets, flipping, scroll moving etc.

Beardimus · April 2018

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

Campaign lockouts based on Alliance swapping on a temporary level have been discussed and are still on going.

You sir @ZOS_BrianWheeler are AWESOME. To at least know its in review is a breath of fresh air.

geonsocal · April 2018

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

Campaign lockouts based on Alliance swapping on a temporary level have been discussed and are still on going.

thank you sir

personally - with 10 characters , i really appreciate the opportunity to keep all of them in the same campaign (it feels like home)...

however, it really upsets a lot of people - and, i'm hoping that any large issue which might be causing folks to leave pvp can be addressed...

it's no fun pvping by yourself - we're really dependent on new players and pvers to come join us in cyrodiil to keep the war alive...and, hopefully anything that can be done to keep our existing pvp player base will be looked at...

Edit: it's good to talk to the man behind the curtain...

Dottzgaming · April 2018

Super hype about the performance changes and the defensive tick changes, but this... this is PERFECT:

"New daily quests have been added with a new quest board. These quests will grant Cyrodiil exclusive costume pieces and other goodies."

Well done ZoS. Thanks for the update Brian! Glad to see Cyrodiil getting love!

jaws343 · April 2018

geonsocal wrote: »

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

Campaign lockouts based on Alliance swapping on a temporary level have been discussed and are still on going.

thank you sir

personally - with 10 characters , i really appreciate the opportunity to keep all of them in the same campaign (it feels like home)...

however, it really upsets a lot of people - and, i'm hoping that any large issue which might be causing folks to leave pvp can be addressed...

it's no fun pvping by yourself - we're really dependent on new players and pvers to come join us in cyrodiil to keep the war alive...and, hopefully anything that can be done to keep our existing pvp player base will be looked at...

Edit: it's good to talk to the man behind the curtain...

This still presents nonsense situations though. I run with a social guild on Friday nights in Vivec on AD. But all of my characters, with the exception of that 1 AD toon are EP and I main them all in Vivec. Any temporary lockout of a campaign would pretty much ruin my ability to PVP for the weekend (or at least Saturday) on 14 of my EP toons in Vivec. If you want to talk about people leaving cyrodil, this will be the thing that does it.

TequilaFire · April 2018

jaws343 wrote: »

geonsocal wrote: »

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

Campaign lockouts based on Alliance swapping on a temporary level have been discussed and are still on going.

thank you sir

personally - with 10 characters , i really appreciate the opportunity to keep all of them in the same campaign (it feels like home)...

however, it really upsets a lot of people - and, i'm hoping that any large issue which might be causing folks to leave pvp can be addressed...

it's no fun pvping by yourself - we're really dependent on new players and pvers to come join us in cyrodiil to keep the war alive...and, hopefully anything that can be done to keep our existing pvp player base will be looked at...

Edit: it's good to talk to the man behind the curtain...

This still presents nonsense situations though. I run with a social guild on Friday nights in Vivec on AD. But all of my characters, with the exception of that 1 AD toon are EP and I main them all in Vivec. Any temporary lockout of a campaign would pretty much ruin my ability to PVP for the weekend (or at least Saturday) on 14 of my EP toons in Vivec. If you want to talk about people leaving cyrodil, this will be the thing that does it.

You must be the 14 EP that didn't jump to AD this campaign.

Sandman929 · April 2018

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

Campaign lockouts based on Alliance swapping on a temporary level have been discussed and are still on going.

How many years old is the discussion? Should we get a cake?

Letho2469 · April 2018

@ZOS_BrianWheeler
That's good news!

Regarding performance increase: Could you ask your coder team if they can increase the amount of 'per core capacity' that the game can use? On my PC the game mainly uses one core (all cores unparked and settings configured for max performance in windows and the game ini) and it's load never increases past 60% - yet I get some heavy frame drops. I somehow got the feeling, that ESO is not capable of using all my system's ressources

geonsocal · April 2018

jaws343 wrote: »

geonsocal wrote: »

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

Campaign lockouts based on Alliance swapping on a temporary level have been discussed and are still on going.

thank you sir

personally - with 10 characters , i really appreciate the opportunity to keep all of them in the same campaign (it feels like home)...

however, it really upsets a lot of people - and, i'm hoping that any large issue which might be causing folks to leave pvp can be addressed...

it's no fun pvping by yourself - we're really dependent on new players and pvers to come join us in cyrodiil to keep the war alive...and, hopefully anything that can be done to keep our existing pvp player base will be looked at...

Edit: it's good to talk to the man behind the curtain...

This still presents nonsense situations though. I run with a social guild on Friday nights in Vivec on AD. But all of my characters, with the exception of that 1 AD toon are EP and I main them all in Vivec. Any temporary lockout of a campaign would pretty much ruin my ability to PVP for the weekend (or at least Saturday) on 14 of my EP toons in Vivec. If you want to talk about people leaving cyrodil, this will be the thing that does it.

you're right @jaws343 ...unfortunately, i don't think there is any possibility of finding a solution wherein everyone will be satisfied...

and yeah, it's easy to talk about sacrificing for the greater good - when you're not the one whom has to sacrifice anything...

i will say the 20 hour timer was just a number i pulled out of my butt...

personally though - i feel for the overall health of alliance war pvp, some restrictions on movement between alliances within the same campaign should be implemented...