Should ZOS lower the population cap on campaigns?

idk · January 2019

No, keep it the way it is and wait 5 more years for the fix that may never come.

zyk wrote: »

For what it's worth:

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

Lowering population will not resolve client or server performance as you can still hit a critical amount of players in an area which would results in lower performance for either the client or the server. This is evident in cases where populations are equal, if not higher than regular campaigns, such as Black Water Blade on Xbox, and perform just fine.

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

@Neoakropolis is correct in that the less CP you have, the less passives you have, therefore the less the server needs to calculate per combat action. This can also be said about armor set procs, player passives and active abilities that have to hit multiple players or sort through multiple players before firing off their abilities to a specific or sub-set of targets.

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

More players means more server calculations; that is 100% correct. However the key variable in all these scenarios is how much information is being calculated on a character by character basis depending on abilities being used, passives, armor sets, etc. This is why population is not as big a factor compared to what's being calculated on a character by character basis within that population. Let's take an example of a typical armor setup now a days.

A player wearing Viper, Velidreth, and Red Mountain doing a single heavy attack costs the server 3 times as much as a player doing Heavy attack without those sets because of calculating whether to proc those 3 sets or not. Even when a proc is on cooldown, the server needs to check per attack if the cooldown is done yet, which means every attack it checks whether it can fire or not based on either percentage, cooldown, or other situations. Factor in Champion Point passives, class passives, weapon passives and whatever temporary passive bonuses from potions, and you add to those calculations per attack/being attacked. In campaigns like Blackwater Blade and Azura, there are simply less things to calculate even when they have higher population than Trueflame.

Thank you.

Zos needs to find a more efficient means to handle the calculations. Not make it so Cyrodiil has so few players that there is not much PvP or that players get punished because they did not realize they were X plus 1 and therefore had their buffs and damage lowered.

Zos created the mess and they need to fix it. How many proc sets were in this game April 2014? I think we could count them on one hand.

zyk · January 2019

No, keep it the way it is and wait 5 more years for the fix that may never come.

What ZOS needs to do is design PVP gameplay according to the limits of their technology.

Every kind of server has limitations. The fact AvA servers have limitations isn't the problem. That's expected. The actual issue is that ZOS has designed and deployed gameplay the server cannot handle.

Consider what Brian Wheeler writes about passives and proc sets. If these cause major lag in Cyrodiil, then they shouldn't be there.

All this time there has been a game design solution that excludes the server that ZOS ignores because of their flawed ideological goal of keeping PVP and PVE gameplay tied together.

I believe the server tech has been improved over the years, but all gains are erased by gameplay designed for 12 player instances. ZOS tells us proc sets and passives hurt PVP performance, yet keep adding more!

idk · January 2019

No, keep it the way it is and wait 5 more years for the fix that may never come.

The bigger issue is that Zos has made PvP heavily about proc sets, one of the factors

Zos has mentioned their "vision" for the game since before the game launched but based on how they have managed it I have questioned if there has really been any actual vision. Basically what you are saying.

How they manage the calculations could also be a benefit.

I have said before, multiple times, that Zos does not think through their ideas which is often determinate to the game. We saw that with the state of this game at launch and many times since then.