Maybe if the unintended button mashing exploit of animation cancellations were removed as they should have been way back when it was discovered, things wouldn't have kept escalating.
Players are insisting on doing it, it's clear ZOS can't handle the traffic, and very likely macro cheaters are hiding in it claiming it's "skill" at pressing buttons really fast.

If ZOS wants fast-paced combat they should try something based on SWTOR's Alacrity -- which is an INTENDED mechanic that is actually under the developer's control. It can be fast, but not so fast as to choke up the server by allowing people to mash block as fast as they possibly can for dubious reasons.

Muizer wrote: »

fred4 wrote: »

ZOS are now systematically stripping values from the game to decrease the resources required.

I have that impression too, but what's remarkable is how little success they've had with that, which means they're either unwilling or unable to perform a sufficiently in-depth analysis and are therefore just randomly trying stuff, which is very disappointing.

What concerns me is that they have actually said there is no silver bullet. I don't know about you, but when optimizing performance, there often turns out to be a silver bullet. It migth just be a combination of things that is hard to diagnose. Yet to come out and say there isn't one to me kind of suggests they know of some fundamental weakness that's beyond a mere code refactor, and that they are now limited to optimizing anything they can that comes on top of that. Like plugging leaks in a hull that's structurally unsound, in the hope of riding it out to the nearest port (which is when they stop producing new content/make money off of ESO). I think that is certainly an impression a lot of us have. In short, I'd be encouraged if they said "we don't know what's causing the problems, but we're working on it". To say "there's no silver bullet" is saying "we know what's wrong and we can't fix it".

If they said that, I guess it's true.

Let me just elaborate on my thinking in one regard. I believe that, when the game was released it was much less laggy and the battles in Cyrodiil were bigger. I was not there, I only heard this. Then came the "lighting" (or was it "lightning") patch and performance decreased. People blamed it on additional visual effects, but I also heard ZOS added a lot of server-side validation at the same time, because of bots and exploits - by which I mean cheat engine / network protocol hacking - and that is what killed performance. Again, just before my time. Effectively they had to move work previously distributed and performed by the clients to their servers, because the clients could not be trusted.

Of course this is all pure speculation, but the thought crossed my mind that if the code was already factored in such a way that the clients could originally carry more of the load, then you could have a server architecture that consists of two stages. The original server(s) and additional server(s) that sit in front of them and perform work that was previously performed on the client machines.

Of course this dates back years and we may be well beyond the point of rescue or what I wrote could be complete speculative rubbish.