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.