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Does anyone actually buy into the AddOn blame game?

  • VaranisArano
    VaranisArano
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    Add-ons are one part of the problem, with multibidding and game server requests forming the bulk of the problem. We know that PC/EU gets hit with greater strain due to game server requests - that's anytime lots of players are playing at once.

    But add-ons are the easiest thing for ZOS to remove.

    Okay...that's not true. ZOS could simply revert multibidding.

    But that would mean reverting their newest baby and one of the big PR points for the new Update. So of course ZOS can't possibly do that!
  • MLGProPlayer
    MLGProPlayer
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    No, that's just silly
    Imagine if price-checking was built into the actual game. Wouldn't that be nice?
  • Cavedog
    Cavedog
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    No, that's just silly
    Vapirko wrote: »
    I mean for the most part no. But I’ve youve got master merchant sending queries every few seconds in Cyrodiil and a bunch of out of date addons then yes you’re going to see a performance drop. If you’re smart about minimizing your use of addons and research/test the best ones then it’s probably having minimal to no impact.

    Exactly
  • x48rph
    x48rph
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    Yes, curse them AddOns and their game breaking thingamajiggers
    I can buy that addons contributed to the problem. They didn't say it was the root cause , only that it made a substantial enough contribution to warrant turning it off while they work to fix it. Obviously , if so many clients making so many requests at once causes such an issue, then they obviously need to recode how such things are handled. But at the same time, they still need to address the rest of their broken code because it's in a really bad state and getting worse. Sorry devs, but your QA dept, if there is such a thing, has dropped the ball repeatedly lately. One has to wonder if you guys really do any kind of actual code review and understand how everything ties together, or do you just have a big ball of spaghetti code that no one really understands. It sure would explain how you can release patch after patch and not only break things you messed with, but also manage to break completely unrelated stuff as well.
  • rumple9
    rumple9
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    No, that's just silly
    Game is still in beta after 5 years
  • AlnilamE
    AlnilamE
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    Other, you see what happened was ...
    While addons can cause problems, unless the addon ecosystem in EU is very different from NA (maybe they use things like localization addons?), that is unlikely. Unless it's a matter of load rather than a specific issue, and we know the EU server is busier than NA.
    I’m actually seeing what feels like several different times bandied about. Is it not the same time per each time zone?

    Example: PS4 NA. I am East Coast USA. Trader flip on Sunday is 9pm Eastern (changing to 8pm when Daylight Savings change hits). Which is 6pm Pacific. So, for North America it hits anywhere from early evening to early night depending on your time zone.

    What is it for everyone else?

    That is correct. But EU apparently switches several hours earlier than we do, which is how we became aware of the potential problems.
    The Moot Councillor
  • p_tsakirisb16_ESO
    p_tsakirisb16_ESO
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    Yes, curse them AddOns and their game breaking thingamajiggers
    Close down the API and make all addons absolete.
  • Cavedog
    Cavedog
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    No, that's just silly
    Keep in mind, ZOS has to approve the add-ons. No matter how you slice it, it all comes back to ZOS.
  • SirAndy
    SirAndy
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    No, that's just silly
    Cavedog wrote: »
    Keep in mind, ZOS has to approve the add-ons. No matter how you slice it, it all comes back to ZOS.
    @Cavedog

    AddOns don't have to be approved by ZOS ...
    shades.gif

  • Vixenator
    Vixenator
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    No, that's just silly
    Scapegoat
  • Vlad9425
    Vlad9425
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    No, that's just silly
    I don’t believe anything they say anymore 😂
  • Zer0_CooL
    Zer0_CooL
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    Yes, curse them AddOns and their game breaking thingamajiggers
    Damn russian hackers and their addons!!
  • rpa
    rpa
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    Other, you see what happened was ...
    I don't think its unbelievable someone has developed so broken addon api that it can significantly contribute to server issues due increased database queries or something. After all rushed, broken and buggy is what one does expect from software any way related to Bethesda.

    But that's not the fault of the addon makers. Trying to blame people doing free work to make PC version of game playable and enjoyable would be stupid.



  • RexyCat
    RexyCat
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    SirAndy wrote: »
    Cavedog wrote: »
    Keep in mind, ZOS has to approve the add-ons. No matter how you slice it, it all comes back to ZOS.
    @Cavedog

    AddOns don't have to be approved by ZOS ...
    shades.gif


    No, but they use special commands that Zeni have control over for what kind of information that is sent and how often. That is one reason that a lot of add on stopped working or started to give error messages as some commands have had a change from "newest" or "old" to use "event" as part of their name.

    They don't need to formally approve add on when they can unilateral change how commands are called and how those work.
  • blnchk
    blnchk
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    It's refreshing to see an actual poll for once.

    After the last 10 being biased towards the OP without any meaningful choices ...

    Sarcasm?
  • Dojohoda
    Dojohoda
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    No, that's just silly
    I'm answering as if I would know.
    Fan of playing magblade since 2015. (PC NA)
    Might be joking in comments.
    -->(((Cyrodiil)))<--
  • Uryel
    Uryel
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    No, that's just silly
    I don't buy it for a second. I'll copy here what I posted in another thread.

    Thanks for everyone’s patience

    What patience are we talking about here ? We're being patient when you say the servers will be upgraded next year. We're patient when you do silly things to races, classes, skills, when you break the most recent class added to the game with bugs, when said bugs go away without being officially patched after several weeks... We're patient with basically EVERYTHING here. So yeah, damn right you can thank us for that. Any business that wouldn't rely on the sunken cost fallacy as much as an online game would have tanked already. Several times.


    the issues impacting the guild traders from this past weekend were ultimately tied to the overall game load and related processing requests. The cause was a high volume of add-on requests, game server requests, and multi-bid process requests all hitting at once.

    Yeah, so ? This is, this should be at least, business as usual. It's not like trade-related server load is anything new. It's been a whole year since server performance has started degrading quite a lot. You guys used some band-aid several times already, and we all have been requesting server upgrades for a while now. We STILL have huge lags for no reason, framerate drops in the middle of nowhere with nothing especially GPU-intensive visible for several seconds, long loading times, returns to the login screen, delays in bar swapping and whatnot... But hey, everything's just fine, server upgrades can wait until 2020, that's our roadmap.

    Well, it should be pretty obvious now that no, it can't wait. Sure, in a few days from now on you can expect the WoW crowd to leave and go play Classic. That's a server upgrade by itself : less load, more ressources available for everyone else. Will that be enough ? Wouldn't you want, as a business, to try keeping those customers ? I know new customers provide more income than returning / staying ones, but new customers influx relies on game reputation. You may be "killing it" now, but your reputation won't improve with a flustercluck each and every patch.

    Basically, server upgrade has been overdue for months, get to it now. You just admitted your servers can't handle the load, so make them able.


    Disabling this functionality is the quickest and least impactful way to effectively adjust the overall load on the game. We’re still working on adding the additional safeguards and once we’ve tested it internally, we’ll determine if it’s something we can hotfix or if we’ll need to add it to an incremental patch. We’re also discussing the possibility of moving when guild trader ownership switches to another time that’s outside of primetime hours, but still during a reasonable time.

    Hey, look, more bandaid.

    So, let me see if I get this right. You guys create a game with interface and functionalities so bare that pretty much everyone and their cousin has to use addons fo the most basic things. Like, actually having a minimap, some sort of inventory management tools, proper trade history, and whatnot ; and then you blame those addons we only use because you never provided those functionalities in the first place to be responsible for your shortcomings ? Impressive.

    I've been playing MMOs for almost 20 years now. Back in 2002 when I started Anarchy Online, interface could already be customised and things moved around. Every game with any sort of trading system in it I have played over those years always had some form of purchase / sales history. Minimap was pretty much always there, as an option one could toggle as they please.

    Your base interface and functionalities would already have been sub-par 10 years ago. BUT at least, you give us tools to do all the work for you, so some people did. And now you blame THEM for doing YOUR job. All the while still not doing your job and not upgrading servers that have really, really needed it for over a year.

    And let's talk about your coding, too. How can such a mess even be possible ? Or the previous mess, where Necromancers were stuck in infinite blocking / lost the healing part of their skills / insert many, many other bugs ? Or the desync of AoE attacks and their visual indicators ? You guys manage to break things you don't even touch. That's bringing clumsiness to a whole new level.

    I used to work in IT, systems and networks management, back then. So here's how we did work when we had stuff to add to live servers : once whatever it was was coded, we tested it on a specially dedicated test server. It wasn't something fancy like a huge public test server where customers would be able to report bugs, no, just a private server where the team would try the new stuff and see how that goes, as well as roughly checking if something else was broken. THEN, if everything was fine, code was pushed to live. If it wasn't, then back to the dev team.

    You guys are trying so hard to push that "year of the dragon" deadline thing, which no one ever asked you for in the first place, by the way, if the in-game year of the dragon was taking one year and a half in the real life no one would have cared... You are trying so hard to push that deadline that you skip the most basic requirement of every upgrade ever : see if it works first.

    The way you guys proceed reminds me of some really, really bad companies I've had the displeasure to work for, which tried to cut the costs at every corner by subcontracting some of their code development to really dirt cheap external team. You get what you pay for, so code was crap, and of course they didn't bother testing it before implementing it, leading to us support team to deal with the dungstorm and trying to find workarounds for things that shouldn't have happened in the first place. Which, in the end, causes more loss of money than actually paying some decent people in-house to do some proper coding and testing. The only use of that kind of policy is to shift the blame on the subcontractant. The higher ups rant, we get a new subcontractant, rince, repeat.

    Pretty much the same as what you do, come to think of it. Shift the blame on extreme server load caused by addons, when said addons wouldn't even exist in the first place if interface wasn't so devoid of everything, and load that wouldn't even be excessive if the servers were upgraded according to their population.

    Seriously, stop that crap. Do some proper coding, and more importantly, do some testing. There is NO WAY something like that could have happened if you had tested your code and if it were running on non-potato servers. If you expected load-related issues, and by now you should expect them all the time, it was easy to simulate by running the testing environnment on a virtual machine for which you gradually reduced allocated ressources until it lags as much as Cyrodiil on a friday night.

    You want our money ? Give us good reasons to spend it on you.
  • Gandrhulf_Harbard
    Gandrhulf_Harbard
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    No, that's just silly
    Uryel wrote: »
    So, let me see if I get this right. You guys create a game with interface and functionalities so bare that pretty much everyone and their cousin has to use addons fo the most basic things. Like, actually having a minimap, some sort of inventory management tools, proper trade history, and whatnot ; and then you blame those addons we only use because you never provided those functionalities in the first place to be responsible for your shortcomings ? Impressive.

    ^ This.

    ZOS were so lazy and incompetent they though a 1990's UI was sufficient for a 2014 AAA Game and then realised it wasn't, but instead of having enough professional integrity to a) admit the mistake, and b) expending effort to fixing their mistake internally, they went down the Third-Party Add-On route.

    I suspect they deliberately went down that route knowing they would have a ready-made excuse to cover future incidents of incompetency.

    All The Best
    Those memories come back to haunt me, they haunt me like a curse.
    Is a dream a lie if it don't come true, or is it something worse.
  • Gythral
    Gythral
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    No, that's just silly
    Nothing to do (directly) with add-ons, and everything to do with lack of investment and poor top level choices!
    “Be as a tower, that, firmly set,
    Shakes not its top for any blast that blows!”
    Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
  • ThePedge
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    Turned all but 4 add-ons off last night and didn't crash after that.

    However they were never an issue before so don't know why they would suddenly be this big an issue.
  • Ash_In_My_Sujamma
    Ash_In_My_Sujamma
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    No, that's just silly
    Add-ons did not suddenly fall from the sky. They are there with zos's permission. Saying that the add-on load was too much for the server means either that they did not calculate properly the strain they would cause or that the servers couldn't handle it in the first place. So either way, blaming add-ons is just a cheap excuse for their lack of preparation or resources imho.
  • GrimTheReaper45
    GrimTheReaper45
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    No, that's just silly
    <- ps4

    no addons

    game performance still ***.....
  • Skwor
    Skwor
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    Other, you see what happened was ...
    I can belive the add ons contributed but that does not absolve ZoS from responsibility.

    I posted the below in another thread that I think also answers this.

    "There was ample player feedback on PTS for this bidding system.

    Of course the changes were not properly tested, if they were this would not have happened. You cannot avoid the cold fact that the event proves the supposition.

    Wether proper testing was pratical to perform for this change could be argued, however that it was not properly tested is not arguable. This is a large MMO, server load and call functions are critical to manage and they should be well known.

    ZoS even brags about the overall player numbers, if you are going to brag about it you better be ready to own the problems associated with it.

    This sort of mistake is a pretty big oopsie, it should have been foreseen."
  • Lazarus_Rising
    Lazarus_Rising
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    They don't blame addons only... this is just out of context. I think we can all agree that addons might influence the server stability to some extend, no? They stated multiple reasons and that addons might be one of them is obvious. They don't say it was the main reason
    also known as Overlich.
  • wavingblue
    wavingblue
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    No, that's just silly
    They don't blame addons only... this is just out of context. I think we can all agree that addons might influence the server stability to some extend, no?

    No because its their code that is running on the server, its their code that enable the add-ons, its their code all the way around. It's their code that can turn off the add-ons they are vilifying, it's their code that put that feature in place. It's their servers which traffic didn't magically explode on overnight. It's their servers they could not get in front of and pro-actively block add-ons prior to the first live running of new code. It's all ZOS.
  • CoronHR
    CoronHR
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    Other, you see what happened was ...
    i think it's p*ss-poor of them to blame addons in any way whatsoever, but i think it's possible that addons played a role. i think the larger picture is that you have an overloaded server in general, and they don't/can't address that. what else...well it's stupid of them to introduce this new bidding system, a system that obviously overloads a server, when they have been saying and to small (very small) degree doing some things to ease the server load. so, this new bidding system seems counterintuitive. anyway, i hope they role back the bidding system and focus on other much-needed performance issues as well
    Edited by CoronHR on August 21, 2019 11:49AM
    PC - EU - Steam client
  • Vahrokh
    Vahrokh
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    No, that's just silly
    Addons that call the official LUA game API cannot be blamed.

    Their developers just use the "protocols" ZOS published. If what ZOS published is badly designed and slows or crashes servers, it's not addons developers concern.
  • Uryel
    Uryel
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    No, that's just silly
    wavingblue wrote: »
    No because its their code that is running on the server, its their code that enable the add-ons, its their code all the way around. It's their code that can turn off the add-ons they are vilifying, it's their code that put that feature in place. It's their servers which traffic didn't magically explode on overnight. It's their servers they could not get in front of and pro-actively block add-ons prior to the first live running of new code. It's all ZOS.

    Indeed. Also, I haven't coded anything in two decades, and never was good at it in the forst place, but :

    - If each guild that usually places 1 bid can place up to 10
    - If resolving the bids takes any sort of computing power

    Should't they have been ready for up to a tenfold load in the required computing power ? Allright, sure, it's probably not a linear increase, so tenfold is probably way exagerated. Or is it ? We'll see to it... But an increase in required computing power WAS to be expected anyway.

    It's rather easy to figure it out. When one guild can place one bid only, you can see it as a spreadsheet. Columns (or lines) are all the guilds that placed a bid, lines (or columns) are all the traders available. To resolve who won what, just check the highest value for each trader, they win, the others get their money back. Pretty simple.

    Now, if each guild can place up to 10 bids, we need some sort of way to organize things at a higher level. What if one guild has the highest bid on more than one trader ? They can't have 2, 3, 10 traders, right ? I have no idea what they decided to do in game, as I'm not in a position where I could even place a bid, but there is a need for a sorting system. Can be "rank traders in prefered order, the first one you win voids the others". Can be "your highest bid is you prefered one", too, but then if you bid the same sum on several, we're back at square one. Can be "first bid placed is favourite, second bid is second, and so on". Can be alot of things, but there must be something.

    Any which way you look at it, it adds some data to factor in resolving the bids. To symbolize it, you could imagine a three-dimensional spreadsheet. X-axis is traders, Y-axis is guilds, Z-axis is whatever other sorting system is being used to make sure each guild can have one trader at best. And because not all guilds will bid on the same traders, you need that system to encompass ALL traders. So, still to symbolize it, let's say to make it simple that the game has 20 traders and 100 guilds who bid on them :

    - Old system with one bid per guild has 20 x 100 = 2 000 spots where data are to sort
    - New system with up to 10 bids has 20 x 100 x 20 = 40 000 spots where date may OR MAY NOT be to sort. That's a 20-times increase.

    Now, I'm oversimplifying it, there can be tons of optimization to it, proper sorting algorythms, and keep in mind this is just a very, very simple (and probably very inaccurate) model to represent the massive increase in data sorting that the change requires. Buit also, there are more than 20 traders, and way more than 100 guilds placing bids. If we have, say, 40 traders and 200 guilds, we get 8 000 in the first case, and 320 000 in the second. Square / cube law at its finest.

    So, blaming addons is lazy AF.
  • NeillMcAttack
    NeillMcAttack
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    Absolutely add-ons added to the massive congestion issues, and basic crashing of this new system. Add-ons add to all pinging related issues. They contribute to the congestion and delays on the server, and how efficiently data is packetted and processed. Anyone who doesn’t believe this is simply wrong. But it isn’t the entire reason for this error.

    Lack of effective testing,
    Oversight of implementing during peak times,
    Ongoing networking infrastructure related issues,
    Not addressing the EU mega-server traffic issues way in advance (it’s been going on for years now).

    These things also added to the issue at large. Why are people obsessed with that one part of Gina’s statement?
    Edited by NeillMcAttack on August 21, 2019 12:51PM
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  • Devanear
    Devanear
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    Other, you see what happened was ...
    Don't believe addons are the main cause, not even close, but it's also obvious they add to the server load. I would love to know how much of a percent of the load they are though, and how much of an impact they have.
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