Too many players? (In any single instance cause performance issues)

Tapio75 · April 2018

Its an MMO

There, i said it so you dont have to repeat that fact anymore.. Moving on.

I was playing at Bleakrock, leveling a new character i recently made. My framerate was somewhat stable 60 all the time in all areas, suddenly a horde of players moved in, or i was moved to another instance with more players, never the less, the end result was the same. my playable FPS of abot 60 was reduced to unplayable heckstorm of about 15 FPS. A pain.

This is not a first time issue at all. In the many years, this has happened to me many times, my instance is changed of more players join my instance, framertate drops and enjoyment rate drops as well. At the same time, i imagine people are just blaming their hardware for obvious resource overload thats happening because ZOS allows too many players on any one instance.

This thing is also apparent in bigger cities every day. In quiet weedays, the framerate is reasonably smooth, but at weekends it drops at unplayable rates.

Something needs to be dont about these undead!.. it is an MMO, but in MMO, a playable performance is also as important as any other factor, and if people just want to see a ton of other players, its not reason enough. Friends need to find same instances with their friends and guikldies and outside of that, people could connect through some sort of cross instancxe system like in Warcraft. The system there, is better made to balance out the workload at any instance than it is in ESO. They also realised in Legion, that its not reason enough for overpopulating a zone, that if people just want to see other people. in fact, the system made launch smoother than it was ever been and also, there was plenty of stuff to do for players, like killing mobs sice overpopulation did not make zones empty of enemies.

They have somewhat adopted the zone scaling from ESO, now its time for ESO to adapt their instancing system to prevent overpopulation and leave zones with enough to do besides running arounf without need of obnoxious respwan rates.

its an MMO, nut in MMO, theree can be less players in one instance, and it can also feel better MMO at the same time.

Emothic · April 2018

ZoS typically make the game go one sale during the aniversary so a lot of newer players start the game around this time. Actually player base have been very slowely declining over the past year or two.

Tapio75 · April 2018

Emothic wrote: »

ZoS typically make the game go one sale during the aniversary so a lot of newer players start the game around this time. Actually player base have been very slowely declining over the past year or two.

Yes, i do notice this in each anniversary effect, but this happens regardless of events. Naturally its worse at the event times but still..

Maybe the numbers would go better, if the performance issues would not be the persistent "feature" of the game

Sekero · April 2018

This afternoon I logged in in Daggerfall. It was fairly crowded. Framerates 7-10 and 2 (TWO) loadscreens between the bank and the wayshrine. I gave up at that point. I'll try later tonight.

DieAlteHexe · April 2018

But...but...but the game is dying.

I'm not getting dragged down that low but a good 20points loss (60-something to 40-something) 'til I stand still and let it all load up.

Tapio75 · April 2018

Allanm wrote: »

This afternoon I logged in in Daggerfall. It was fairly crowded. Framerates 7-10 and 2 (TWO) loadscreens between the bank and the wayshrine. I gave up at that point. I'll try later tonight.

I know the pain, and ots very frustrating to know, that there is nothing at least i know, that i can change in my computer to make it run much better. At least on graphical hardware and in general too, i recently made my machine to run visually modded GT 5 to run at 60 fps stable. ESO does not. Its very frustrating

Tasear · April 2018

Too all those who said game is dying

( now we have too many people)

Now it does seem like more people..then worst things get. I wonder how this works.

Tapio75 · April 2018

Tasear wrote: »

Too all those who said game is dying ( now we have too many people)

Now it does seem like more people..then worst things get. I wonder how this works.

More players is always good for the game, but to reduce performance loss, they need to be split in instances that hold the number of people, which also allows players to have good FPS while playing.

If players begin to note, that whatever machine they are running or try to upgrade graphics cards and so on, to improve FPS but nothing works, they will blame the game and eventually will leave if the performance is not improved.

Making more instances with less people in one instance will allow less performance loss for players in any one instance.

zaria · April 2018

My 980ti died so I had to drive to office and borrow an card. World bosses don't work so well anymore

Tasear · April 2018

Tapio75 wrote: »

Tasear wrote: »

Too all those who said game is dying ( now we have too many people)

Now it does seem like more people..then worst things get. I wonder how this works.

More players is always good for the game, but to reduce performance loss, they need to be split in instances that hold the number of people, which also allows players to have good FPS while playing.

If players begin to note, that whatever machine they are running or try to upgrade graphics cards and so on, to improve FPS but nothing works, they will blame the game and eventually will leave if the performance is not improved.

Making more instances with less people in one instance will allow less performance loss for players in any one instance.

Same time though people will claim game is dying if not seeing enough people. Still find it odd that drops so much from 60 to 15. Wonder if there is more to be done?

Anotherone773 · April 2018

Emothic wrote: »

ZoS typically make the game go one sale during the aniversary so a lot of newer players start the game around this time. Actually player base have been very slowely declining over the past year or two.

Everything i have read/seen has said exactly the opposite. Also the in game population appears to be very healthy. I see people everywhere. Zones feel active and busy and even in the OneT zones i pass people out in the wilds regularly. I dont think ive been the only person in a delve in over a month and i do probably half a dozen or so a day.

MLGProPlayer · April 2018

We simultaneously have people complaining about the game dying AND being too populated, lol.

Franieck · April 2018

Agreed, this is awful. ZoS should look into allowing a drag feature within the settings to allow players to set the maximum amount of other players they want to see on screen. Or allow them to set the rendering and model quality on the other players (put the least resource intensive armor and let all players look the same) for example very low, low, medium, high, ultra rendering qualities.

JD2013 · April 2018

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

We simultaneously have people complaining about the game dying AND being too populated, lol.

The ESO forums in a nutshell.

Tapio75 · April 2018

Even though my post has nothing to do with playerbase as a whole, but a performance issues too many players on any single instance do, i wish to point out that game may be losing players but still look like its having a healthy population due instances and number of players they put in any one instance.

For example if they notice, that people are complaining about game dying, they can simply make less instances and put more population to any single instance.

I would also like to mention, that most of us MMO veterans will just pass the "Game us dying" comments with a small laugh, as for example, the World of Warcraft has been dyig since forever, and it still does extremely well dispate the fact its apparently allready died multiple times and is nothing but a zombie with each departed limb still clinging to animated undeath

MMO's are rarely dying when players tell us so.

But imagine, if a player with a low end machine decides to try ESO like my Warcraft buddy did. He lives in a country where wealth is not as good as in mine for example. Cant afford a powerful gaming PC, and his test with ESO told him that he just cant play this game because when theres too many players, theres one frame per second so no, cant play naturally. Still can play many other MMO's including Warcraft where Blizz has realised, that if low end machines can run the game, there is more players than when the playewr hardware is pushed to the limit with for ewxample, amount of players in one zone or that too many players on one instance of a zone, can also make the game boring and unappealing as doing quests is nothing more than running from point a to b to c and no monsters in between because the NPC population cant cope with player population on that one instance. Its also bad, when there are quests, that require collecting stuff from those monsters. If theres too many players doing that quest in same instance, it will take forever and will eventually frustrate people to leave the gameworld and if theres no alternatives to questing, the whole game.

Sanctum74 · April 2018

I'd rather that they fix the performance issues with their code that's causing the problem instead of keep lowering the amount of people on screen. The fact of the matter is that there used to be many more people on screen then there currently is now and it used to run much smoother.

They've increased instances, lowered pvp pop caps, and yet it just keeps getting worse. It used to just be a console problem, then it was a pvp problem, and now it's a problem even in solo instances on all platforms. Hmmm maybe it's not a population problem if it's happening in solo instances too.

andreasv · April 2018

Interesting how the common ESO fanboy manages to turn a post about performance criticism into "Yay, we have more players!". You guys are cute.

Tapio75 · April 2018

Sanctum74 wrote: »

I'd rather that they fix the performance issues with their code that's causing the problem instead of keep lowering the amount of people on screen. The fact of the matter is that there used to be many more people on screen then there currently is now and it used to run much smoother.

They've increased instances, lowered pvp pop caps, and yet it just keeps getting worse. It used to just be a console problem, then it was a pvp problem, and now it's a problem even in solo instances on all platforms. Hmmm maybe it's not a population problem if it's happening in solo instances too.

There may be other issues, like memory leaks and in general, the hero engine which ESO is based on, is not a very good engine too.

But at this time, it is mainly due population changes on instancxes and in nutshell, can be fixed by making instances smaller.

If memory serves, they actually increased the instance population instead of lowering it in early history of ESO since people complained about not seeing their friends and guildies. The issue was not fixes but it created this performance issue which has been getting worse added with other unfixed issues.

Also, when i play, my memory tells me, that population i see, is actually increased on the screen, and the game might also loading and rendering character very far away from player for some odd reason. In my case, the population i see, is not getting lower over the years, its getting bigger. The FPD always drops relative to population i see and is on the instance i play. Sometimes traveling to another player in same area on another instance also increases the FPS, at the same time, i can withess, that there are less players than in the instance with more players.

Sekero · April 2018

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

We simultaneously have people complaining about the game dying AND being too populated, lol.

I wasn't complaining about the number of players, I was commenting on the dire state of the PC-EU server, which has been sulking for the past few days, despite being restated twice this past week. I have seen Daggerfall (The home of 2 of my characters) FAR more crowded that it was today, and no real problems with framerate or loading screens. The loading screens especially are becoming a regular feature of gameplay on PC-EU and I don't think it's related to the number of players, because it happens late at night too.

maboleth · April 2018

There are people everywhere even at 3-4am in distant places and remote areas, PC EU.

Buy a new graphics card.

No really, I never run into any problems with gtx1060 and ESO has been running very smoothly since the latest update, even in Cyrodiil.

Sekero · April 2018

Quite sure it's not my graphics card. It works fine with other games at 1920*1200 59hz, and for example SWTOR has no lag spikes or framerate drops, runs just fine. In any case how would the graphics card cause loading screens? I am not the only one with this problem either, I think. There has been much grumbling on these very forums about performance on PC-EU recently. In fact,

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/comment/5018657#Comment_5018657 just now.

Tapio75 · April 2018

I do indeed happen to get a loading screens regularly when im in Daggerfall, other places as well but only on occasion.

Sekero · April 2018

Tapio75 wrote: »

I do indeed happen to get a loading screens regularly when im in Daggerfall, other places as well but only on occasion.

Thing is though, ok Framerate vatiations and lag spikes have always been part of this game to a greater or lesser extent, depending on location, server usage, etc. The dropping to load screen frequently is something much more recent and seems to be more on the euro server than NA, at least judging by the comments on the forums.

Tapio75 · April 2018

Thanks for all the advice. Much apreciated

Elf_Boy · April 2018

I dont have the FPS issue, still I would like to see us have a preference for zone density.\

Most delves I would prefer to solo = often I go from walking though the out doors while seeing a player here and there walk through the dungeon door and suddenly cant swing a dead Khajiit without hitting 3 other players. Breaks immersion and just feels weird to go help clear out the Kwara mine and see 10 other players waiting for the end boss to spawn.