This game is such trash.. I mean the concept and how it started in idea was amazing and fun. It had tons of potential. Long gone are those days, its sad really. IC had such potential but they flopped it and so now its free. The only reason its now populated is due to the unplayable lag in Cyrodiil.
These programmers fail almost at every turn and then break the game, making it worse then it was before with each patch but then expect us to keep paying for broken content that they break each patch release. But they don't stop there, they break stuff in one patch and we have to wait until next patch for it to be fixed only to get a list of other aspects that they break. A vicious cycle of incompetence and an over worked understaffed team for PVP. Dispite all of this many continue to pay for this and they know it too. That's why nothing really changes. Even PVE has taken hits on this level but not as much as PVP which was, as I have heard, an after thought and it truly does show. ESO almost was on the way out of recent times with a steady decline until recent patches. I don't think anything will change in this game sadly, but I am hoping to be wrong on this. I suppose we can only wait and see what fixes or how bad they break the game next patch. Even though they hyped us up on all the fixing of the multitudes of lag and glitches...

PS : PVE is also affected by this during prime time, but you don't hear as much about that as it isn't as 'game breaking' as in PVP.

Have loads of people I am wanting to play with in PvP atm, but soon as hit a fight, lagging all over the place, I freeze and go “I bet you I will be dead when this unfreezes” 4-5 seconds go by, yep dead, or find myself about to be flatted by a Zerg. Even worse if I’m in a group. -cries-

1. PC/NA with a good-ish PC (~$1200, all new parts, 2016)
2. Comcast throttles quite a bit, but I pay for ~600mbps on 10 devices and I average around 250 per device on 8-12 devices.
3. Seems like a cop-out answer, but I believe there is no way they can ever address performance at its core. The game is, technically, 12 years old (7 years in development). So the underlying systems for Cyrodiil, the feature this game advertised most on launch, was built in a way that is now 12 years out of date. Who knows how hard it is t o fix the problem now, how much of the performance is based on population vs core game architecture vs new bugs/systems add. The same can be said about other MMOs, which is why they all tend to have mediocre performance no matter the user's hardware.

For the record, I have noticed that people with stronger computers or who installed the game on an SSD have an easier time brute-forcing their way through some points of performance pain, like ball group rushdowns and huge siege battles. But obviously, saying "get a better computer" isn't a valid solution for server-side performance issues.