Destai wrote: »

Jaxious79 wrote: »

Destai wrote: »

technohic wrote: »

And I have a hard time resisting to take jabs here and there myself; but I wouldn't beat up our communication team. This sort of thing smells of a management decision to not dedicate resources toward it, or at least minimal; so they can push through the chapter for sales. I'd bet Gina and Jessica, as well as some of the devs; are just as frustrated as we are.

If that were the case, which it could be, you'd think they'd be more vocal on here. Obviously they can't voice that frustration, but they could engage the community WAY more and with more conciliatory tone. That's not happening. I don't know if their silence is management-driven as well, but it reflects really poorly on them and ZOS as a whole.

Maybe they are tired of the vocal minority screaming at the sky nonstop. Instead of bringing out your pitchforks, lawsuit threats and threatening to quit everytime you have a lag spike maybe the negative over the top complainers could try starting discussions I don't know in a more civil tone?

Very few of the 20 or 30 major complainers are going to quit most will be buying the next chapter it's all show and guess what they have all that information at their finger tips.

There's plenty of constructive threads they could engage on. They don't.

Jaxious79 wrote: »

@Casterial

You do know when you make a comment like this it's very easy to check it right?

Also very few players play on steam but let me just post some numbers for you and everyone else that will take your "word".

April 2020 +92.92% INCREASE ave 25k players
Last 30 days -17.36 decrease still up 75% in the last 60 days ave. 24k player


The Average players in the last 30 days is the most EVER except for last month.

You probably should have reviewed your source before mentioning it.

Oh right now ESO is the 28th top played game on steam.

#1 MMORPG.

Durham wrote: »

They know about this. They are not really serious about fixing it. They know that the amount of people that PVP is small compared to amount of people that PVE on a regular basis.

What they do not get is that PVP in this game could become the standard of future PVP games in this genre if they would just take more seriously. PVP in this game is simply awesome when performance is good. Unfortunately that is not on the most populated server. You have to go to the standard server where at prime time it sits at 2 and 3 bars. At times this server because of the low pop can become extremely unbalanced easily, thus killing the PVP for a time.

PVP needs serious changes in order to improver performance

1st should have been done a long time ago... Eliminate stacking AOE healing unless you are caster yourself. AOE should also be group based. This would have forced the balls to spread a long time ago. AOE healing should be more group based instead of Area based thus eliminating more calculations..

2nd AOE damage can be stacked but needs to see futher reductions in damage compared to single target damage. AOE could be square based rather then circle based this could also help reduce calculations.

3rd Simply mitigation and penetrations for damage.

4th Simply healing

5th group sizes need to brought down to 12 rather then 24 just like the rest of the game.

6th AP needs to be drastically reduced for 2 groups of 12 ( 24) killing solo or lesser grouped individuals.

7th Claimed keeps should be able to upgrade guards with AP and guards should be able to notify that specific guild members of an attack much like DOAC.

8th there should also be a PVP guild tracking to further push guilds in PVP. Much like the old Camelot Herald in DAOC.

9th Outposts should mean even more then they currently do. For example farm could mean more health and quicker respawn of guards. Lumber means easier doors and more damage from archer guards and mages. Mine should mean more armer for all guards and more wall hitpoints and regeneration. Keeps should hard to ninja in this game. Smaller guilds could shine in this aspect of the game..

robertthebard wrote: »

That's hilarious.

"They need to communicate with us".

Gets link to communication.

"I don't believe anything they say"...

Gee, I wonder why they're not hitting every thread with responses, eh?

So, in reality we're about to go on the 3rd one, the other 2 have been complete and utter failures and have worsened the gameplay. This game state is the worst for me ESO has been since 2014. I love this game, I spend PLENTIFUL amount of cash on it, and I put THOUSANDS of hours into it....

Casterial wrote: »

robertthebard wrote: »

YandereGirlfriend wrote: »

robertthebard wrote: »

Destai wrote: »

Jaxious79 wrote: »

Destai wrote: »

technohic wrote: »

And I have a hard time resisting to take jabs here and there myself; but I wouldn't beat up our communication team. This sort of thing smells of a management decision to not dedicate resources toward it, or at least minimal; so they can push through the chapter for sales. I'd bet Gina and Jessica, as well as some of the devs; are just as frustrated as we are.

If that were the case, which it could be, you'd think they'd be more vocal on here. Obviously they can't voice that frustration, but they could engage the community WAY more and with more conciliatory tone. That's not happening. I don't know if their silence is management-driven as well, but it reflects really poorly on them and ZOS as a whole.

Maybe they are tired of the vocal minority screaming at the sky nonstop. Instead of bringing out your pitchforks, lawsuit threats and threatening to quit everytime you have a lag spike maybe the negative over the top complainers could try starting discussions I don't know in a more civil tone?

Very few of the 20 or 30 major complainers are going to quit most will be buying the next chapter it's all show and guess what they have all that information at their finger tips.

There's plenty of constructive threads they could engage on. They don't.

They can't. If they engage in one thread, and not another, there'll be another bonfire with loads of pitchforks about how they're "playing favorites" or something. It's like dismissing a plan to deal with the situation because it wasn't dealt with 5 minutes after someone encountered it, while complaining about no communication. They can't win, no matter what they do, so the actual smartest thing to do is in fact nothing, in so far as responding to threads on the forums/social media goes.

Actually, the smartest thing that the company could do would be to fix the problem.

They're in the current quagmire because it took ages to get the issue of performance even addressed and then because their promised changes had no effect, at best, on the problem.

Then the company and spokespeople go to ground and duck the problem and have to deal with the conspiracy theories and anger because they have left their players alone on the internet with a game in a severe state of disrepair.

It is often said "Sunlight is the best disinfectant" and that's true in this case as well. If we actually had some relevant developers (e.g. technical leads in charge of the engine or netcode) pass along some of their findings (e.g. "We find that our database architecture really doesn't scale well when under the rigors of PvP") and their concrete strategy to fix it (e.g. we even had to headhunt some Amazon guys because this is something we're not currently equipped to deal with) it would go miles toward improving relations.

Sunlight is indeed the best disinfectant, so let's lay some out? In a thread complaining about no communication, we have a poster going "I don't believe them". According to what's been posted even in this thread, there's a potential fix coming with the next update. I'm sure they're all hoping it will actually fix it, if just to alleviate some of the heat. If it alleviates it for some, but not for others, we're going to be right back to talking about how they're not doing anything...

It'll be like when Valve doesn't get their end updated right, and people can't log in through Steam, but come here, acting like it's on ZoS. Then there's the gaming gods know how many different hardware configurations trying to run the game, and a fix that works for Intel, or for AMD, may not do much, if anything for the other one. I remember when SLI was new, and something in games was wigging out about it, and AMD released a patch, within a few days, that cleared it up. In the meantime, however, it was "but the gaming company isn't fixing their game". I don't remember if Intel ever did, but I quit using Intel in the mid '90s, so I wasn't paying much attention to what they're doing. What if it works for Xbox, but not for PS?

There's a bit of sunlight. There are a ton of variables that have to be taken into account while they work through sorting this stuff out. Of course, if the actual stress test of going live makes it not make a lot of difference, it's going to be more "they're not doing anything", nature of the beast. Anyone that believes for one minute that this is a unique situation to here needs to "get out" more. I've seen this particular thread at least a thousand times, and the claims of "they're not even trying to fix it" or "they're just milking a cash cow" at least that many times each as well.

The reason we don't believe their publicity post is because it has been "server optimization" on each one, we're going into the 3rd or 4th one now and the servers are far worse than they have ever been. Their next optimization doesn't fix the current issue at hand, or even specifically talk about it. It feels as if an engineering left a performance tracker on in the server/partition and forgot to turn it off.

You will be blinded by the next update because they will spin up more hardware, more partitions to alleviate stress for the influx of players, but once the heat dies down (for ESO ~2-3weeks in) they spin down these partitions and hardware needs and we will more than likely end up where we are.

I've been in game development for a long time, I've seen technical debt like this accrue of the years. I understand ZOS is trying to tackle it, but they don't have the man power or means to actually test their hardware. They use the PTS which gives almost no real qualitative feedback. They get maybe 100, maybe 200 people on the PTS at a time which no where nears the sheer amount of players actually on the live servers. We've seen this before, they had QA spend weeks with LFG new system, it was good. It went live, it failed miserably by the sheer number of players on live, their QA did not have the numbers, the company did not do a giant playtest with all employees. They probably need 300-500 people online at once to test a mass queue at once, they probably tested with 10-50 people. No where near the need.

Thoragaal wrote: »

robertthebard wrote: »

That's hilarious.

"They need to communicate with us".

Gets link to communication.

"I don't believe anything they say"...

Gee, I wonder why they're not hitting every thread with responses, eh?

What people wanna see is a relatable response.
Something that acknowledge the issues and something that ensures them they are working to solve said issues.
The respone needs to be in relation to why we have DLCs/Crown Store items, and client side performance improvements, seemingly taking priority over server side related issues (lag/desync).
Only saying things like "we're working on it", when the playerbase doesn't experience it themselves, isn't a useful reponse to anyone.
It's like the story with the girl who cries wolf; eventually people stop believing it.

Having an unscripted video response, maybe over Twitch along with questions from chat, has a lower risk of being misinterpreted, and if there are any questions or misinterpretations those can be sorted out immediately.

Destai wrote: »

robertthebard wrote: »

Destai wrote: »

Jaxious79 wrote: »

Destai wrote: »

technohic wrote: »

And I have a hard time resisting to take jabs here and there myself; but I wouldn't beat up our communication team. This sort of thing smells of a management decision to not dedicate resources toward it, or at least minimal; so they can push through the chapter for sales. I'd bet Gina and Jessica, as well as some of the devs; are just as frustrated as we are.

If that were the case, which it could be, you'd think they'd be more vocal on here. Obviously they can't voice that frustration, but they could engage the community WAY more and with more conciliatory tone. That's not happening. I don't know if their silence is management-driven as well, but it reflects really poorly on them and ZOS as a whole.

Maybe they are tired of the vocal minority screaming at the sky nonstop. Instead of bringing out your pitchforks, lawsuit threats and threatening to quit everytime you have a lag spike maybe the negative over the top complainers could try starting discussions I don't know in a more civil tone?

Very few of the 20 or 30 major complainers are going to quit most will be buying the next chapter it's all show and guess what they have all that information at their finger tips.

There's plenty of constructive threads they could engage on. They don't.

They can't. If they engage in one thread, and not another, there'll be another bonfire with loads of pitchforks about how they're "playing favorites" or something. It's like dismissing a plan to deal with the situation because it wasn't dealt with 5 minutes after someone encountered it, while complaining about no communication. They can't win, no matter what they do, so the actual smartest thing to do is in fact nothing, in so far as responding to threads on the forums/social media goes.

I get it. Realistically they can't comment on every thread or every complaint. But what they could do is comment on some, show some back forth with people on here, and give the impression they're actually engaged in the community. It's safe to assume what the Z actually means on threads and it's not that. Like someone else mentioned, some people take their angst way too far over this stuff. I think most reasonable people are just asking for an update, especially when we've been here thousands of hours and spent thousands of dollars.

Charon_on_Vacation wrote: »

Jaxious79 wrote: »

Eso has around 3million players and 100 (thats a stretch it's closer to 30-40 of the same people spamming every thread) people complaining on the forums.

Out of those 3 million players ESO has a pretty good idea of how many bought the next chapter and a pretty good idea of the current performance.

If you expect developers to give you a phone call every time you complain you will always be disappointed.

i missed the article where they published their numbers.
could you point me to it?

Casterial wrote: »

robertthebard wrote: »

I've also seen the aftermath, where a dev working for BioWare was forced off of Social Media due to death threats because poster's didn't like what she had to say. It had something to do with a pure Story Mode, with no combat, that she'd like as an option to play. Note that there was no indication that this was going to be a thing, but see above. So no, they can't reply to this, but not that, and there's no way they can reply to everything. If they say something on a stream, and for whatever reason, it's not implemented, or not happening fast enough, then see 2.

Then there's the outright dismissal of "I don't believe them" when they try to provide something. I snipped out an entire list of things in the other post in this quote chain. The primary thing I take away from that list, despite it being the poster's apparent intent to justify "I don't believe them" is that they are indeed trying things, but those things aren't working, or worse, making them worse.

ZOS can just go "We recognize the current lag at hand and how since February it has been worse."

-> Instead we're forced a new Chapter down our throats.... Shoot, i'd pay $40 for 100% improved performance over another story chapter with lacking content.

Casterial wrote: »

Durham wrote: »

They know about this. They are not really serious about fixing it. They know that the amount of people that PVP is small compared to amount of people that PVE on a regular basis.

What they do not get is that PVP in this game could become the standard of future PVP games in this genre if they would just take more seriously. PVP in this game is simply awesome when performance is good. Unfortunately that is not on the most populated server. You have to go to the standard server where at prime time it sits at 2 and 3 bars. At times this server because of the low pop can become extremely unbalanced easily, thus killing the PVP for a time.

PVP needs serious changes in order to improver performance

1st should have been done a long time ago... Eliminate stacking AOE healing unless you are caster yourself. AOE should also be group based. This would have forced the balls to spread a long time ago. AOE healing should be more group based instead of Area based thus eliminating more calculations..

2nd AOE damage can be stacked but needs to see futher reductions in damage compared to single target damage. AOE could be square based rather then circle based this could also help reduce calculations.

3rd Simply mitigation and penetrations for damage.

4th Simply healing

5th group sizes need to brought down to 12 rather then 24 just like the rest of the game.

6th AP needs to be drastically reduced for 2 groups of 12 ( 24) killing solo or lesser grouped individuals.

7th Claimed keeps should be able to upgrade guards with AP and guards should be able to notify that specific guild members of an attack much like DOAC.

8th there should also be a PVP guild tracking to further push guilds in PVP. Much like the old Camelot Herald in DAOC.

9th Outposts should mean even more then they currently do. For example farm could mean more health and quicker respawn of guards. Lumber means easier doors and more damage from archer guards and mages. Mine should mean more armer for all guards and more wall hitpoints and regeneration. Keeps should hard to ninja in this game. Smaller guilds could shine in this aspect of the game..

I'll talk about each point.

1. They have set AOE caps for everything, it actually made lag worse because it had to calculate additionally when to stop.
2. I agree with this, if you're massively stacking AOE damage (20 people drop 1 AOE) it should see a damage reduced on the target just to break up zergs and create more synergy/strategy.
3. Agreed, w/ CP, gear, and other stats its too much.
4. Its pretty simple, but again CP and gear
5. 12 would be perfect, break zergs up more and make the fights all over the map
6. Agreed, AP has spiked too high
7. I don't care for notification, but at point guards were gods and it made taking keeps so HARD no one ever FD a defended keep back in the day due to this.
8. N/A for me
9. Outpost can teleport now..its interesting theyre easier.... But yes to the resource control

They should implement a lot to fix Cyrodiil, I think one solution would be to force people in queues to other campaigns whiled queued so they can go have fun in another campaign before popping into the 30 day....Also, remove Volendrung, its nothing but lag when it spawns.

Destai wrote: »

robertthebard wrote: »

Destai wrote: »

robertthebard wrote: »

Destai wrote: »

Jaxious79 wrote: »

Destai wrote: »

technohic wrote: »

And I have a hard time resisting to take jabs here and there myself; but I wouldn't beat up our communication team. This sort of thing smells of a management decision to not dedicate resources toward it, or at least minimal; so they can push through the chapter for sales. I'd bet Gina and Jessica, as well as some of the devs; are just as frustrated as we are.

If that were the case, which it could be, you'd think they'd be more vocal on here. Obviously they can't voice that frustration, but they could engage the community WAY more and with more conciliatory tone. That's not happening. I don't know if their silence is management-driven as well, but it reflects really poorly on them and ZOS as a whole.

Maybe they are tired of the vocal minority screaming at the sky nonstop. Instead of bringing out your pitchforks, lawsuit threats and threatening to quit everytime you have a lag spike maybe the negative over the top complainers could try starting discussions I don't know in a more civil tone?

Very few of the 20 or 30 major complainers are going to quit most will be buying the next chapter it's all show and guess what they have all that information at their finger tips.

There's plenty of constructive threads they could engage on. They don't.

They can't. If they engage in one thread, and not another, there'll be another bonfire with loads of pitchforks about how they're "playing favorites" or something. It's like dismissing a plan to deal with the situation because it wasn't dealt with 5 minutes after someone encountered it, while complaining about no communication. They can't win, no matter what they do, so the actual smartest thing to do is in fact nothing, in so far as responding to threads on the forums/social media goes.

I get it. Realistically they can't comment on every thread or every complaint. But what they could do is comment on some, show some back forth with people on here, and give the impression they're actually engaged in the community. It's safe to assume what the Z actually means on threads and it's not that. Like someone else mentioned, some people take their angst way too far over this stuff. I think most reasonable people are just asking for an update, especially when we've been here thousands of hours and spent thousands of dollars.

No, they can't do that, because thread starters that don't get responded to by a dev will be screaming about how they're playing favorites, as I pointed out above, I think...

My bad, didn't address that point. That's a poor excuse though, sorry. I'm not buying it.

People will always complain. It's part of the line of work. Imagine if waitresses stopped serving because 1 in 10 customers were rude. I'd rather have some forum interactions and some semblance of community management than none at all because they're afraid of rude players. They can easily moderate those convos the moment people step out of line. It's not a justification for not having more community engagement.

Charon_on_Vacation wrote: »

Casterial wrote: »

Charon_on_Vacation wrote: »

Jaxious79 wrote: »

Eso has around 3million players and 100 (thats a stretch it's closer to 30-40 of the same people spamming every thread) people complaining on the forums.

Out of those 3 million players ESO has a pretty good idea of how many bought the next chapter and a pretty good idea of the current performance.

If you expect developers to give you a phone call every time you complain you will always be disappointed.

i missed the article where they published their numbers.
could you point me to it?

ESO has less than a million DAU.

i missed the article where they published their numbers.
could you point me to it?

SpiderKnight wrote: »

Destai wrote: »

Casterial wrote: »

robertthebard wrote: »

I've also seen the aftermath, where a dev working for BioWare was forced off of Social Media due to death threats because poster's didn't like what she had to say. It had something to do with a pure Story Mode, with no combat, that she'd like as an option to play. Note that there was no indication that this was going to be a thing, but see above. So no, they can't reply to this, but not that, and there's no way they can reply to everything. If they say something on a stream, and for whatever reason, it's not implemented, or not happening fast enough, then see 2.

Then there's the outright dismissal of "I don't believe them" when they try to provide something. I snipped out an entire list of things in the other post in this quote chain. The primary thing I take away from that list, despite it being the poster's apparent intent to justify "I don't believe them" is that they are indeed trying things, but those things aren't working, or worse, making them worse.

ZOS can just go "We recognize the current lag at hand and how since February it has been worse."

-> Instead we're forced a new Chapter down our throats.... Shoot, i'd pay $40 for 100% improved performance over another story chapter with lacking content.

This. Just some acknowledgement there's still a problem and is getting worse for some players.

They have recognized the issues! Is everyone going to keep ignoring the performance plan that is updated each month. what the funk is "we know" going to do for you?? 5 days, then if these performance fixes still do nothing, come back with your pitchforks...

SpiderKnight wrote: »

Destai wrote: »

Casterial wrote: »

robertthebard wrote: »

I've also seen the aftermath, where a dev working for BioWare was forced off of Social Media due to death threats because poster's didn't like what she had to say. It had something to do with a pure Story Mode, with no combat, that she'd like as an option to play. Note that there was no indication that this was going to be a thing, but see above. So no, they can't reply to this, but not that, and there's no way they can reply to everything. If they say something on a stream, and for whatever reason, it's not implemented, or not happening fast enough, then see 2.

Then there's the outright dismissal of "I don't believe them" when they try to provide something. I snipped out an entire list of things in the other post in this quote chain. The primary thing I take away from that list, despite it being the poster's apparent intent to justify "I don't believe them" is that they are indeed trying things, but those things aren't working, or worse, making them worse.

ZOS can just go "We recognize the current lag at hand and how since February it has been worse."

-> Instead we're forced a new Chapter down our throats.... Shoot, i'd pay $40 for 100% improved performance over another story chapter with lacking content.

This. Just some acknowledgement there's still a problem and is getting worse for some players.

They have recognized the issues! Is everyone going to keep ignoring the performance plan that is updated each month. what the funk is "we know" going to do for you?? 5 days, then if these performance fixes still do nothing, come back with your pitchforks...

Casterial wrote: »

Destai wrote: »

SpiderKnight wrote: »

Destai wrote: »

Casterial wrote: »

robertthebard wrote: »

I've also seen the aftermath, where a dev working for BioWare was forced off of Social Media due to death threats because poster's didn't like what she had to say. It had something to do with a pure Story Mode, with no combat, that she'd like as an option to play. Note that there was no indication that this was going to be a thing, but see above. So no, they can't reply to this, but not that, and there's no way they can reply to everything. If they say something on a stream, and for whatever reason, it's not implemented, or not happening fast enough, then see 2.

Then there's the outright dismissal of "I don't believe them" when they try to provide something. I snipped out an entire list of things in the other post in this quote chain. The primary thing I take away from that list, despite it being the poster's apparent intent to justify "I don't believe them" is that they are indeed trying things, but those things aren't working, or worse, making them worse.

ZOS can just go "We recognize the current lag at hand and how since February it has been worse."

-> Instead we're forced a new Chapter down our throats.... Shoot, i'd pay $40 for 100% improved performance over another story chapter with lacking content.

This. Just some acknowledgement there's still a problem and is getting worse for some players.

They have recognized the issues! Is everyone going to keep ignoring the performance plan that is updated each month. what the funk is "we know" going to do for you?? 5 days, then if these performance fixes still do nothing, come back with your pitchforks...

AFAIK, they've yet to specifically address that the February 5th patch broke combat. Correct me if I'm wrong. Sure, they've acknowledged performance through monthly updates, which are scant at best, but we don't get any specifics that we're owed at this point.

Animation changes really hurt combat especially with animations getting stuck in lag.