ESO Game Performance Work Communication

Elsonso · July 2020

ImmortalCX wrote: »

Communication about communication isn't exactly communication.

It is approximately communication?

LadyLethalla · July 2020

I'd like to say that while my Cyro troubles are still around - disconnects before reaching a battle, extremely long load screens - I think it's far better than it used to be.

Please don't prove me wrong, ZOS...

Past years I've been killed by invisible players and disconnected while riding toward a battle, before I ever saw a single player from any faction. This past week I've had 2 or 3 sessions in Cyro with almost full bars on each faction. The first keep transit is long, long, long and the first battle is usually a disconnect, but after that it "seems" to clear up. Once I tried going in on completely full bars and gave up after a few disconnects.

PVE-wise I'm disappointed to see that knockback sliding has made a return, I think since last maintenance.

I love ESO but it's difficult sometimes with the additional ping & lag caused by my location vs the server (Australia to EU).

TrinityDivine · July 2020

Thank you for the info! Will this update be in the Combat and Character Mechanics section like the other one?

So, I know you mentioned that Cyrodiil is a priority, and I'm pretty sure the PvP community is all over that... but I hope that you also have some good news for the rest of us who are not that into PvP and have patiently endured "This may be an unusually long load time" messages all these years.

Cheers!

SweepsAllClowns · July 2020

QuantumPie wrote: »

I've seen many games die off from the dev teams unwillingness to fix longstanding issues and communicate what they are doing. I can clearly see that this isn't the case with ESO and work is being done, it just takes time.

Indeed clearly this isn't the case with ESO, just takes time that's all. My Xbox EU cp 1575 account has been completely stuck now for 1 year and 4 months after 5 days, last time I tried to login I even crashed on the character selection screen! On Xbox NA the lagtastic Cyrodiil experience is quite painful once again and I play and suffer only because of the double ap. As I remember the Cyrodiil performance was supposed to be somekind of priority in 2016 already, the situation shouldn't be like this in 2020!

FierceSam · July 2020

Thoragaal wrote: »

ZOS_JessicaFolsom wrote: »

Hi everyone,

We wanted to share with you an update on our plans for communicating upcoming ESO game performance-related work. Starting with Update 27, we will post a preview of the game performance work that is going live with the next update. This forum post will be similar in spirit to the quarterly combat updates (you can see the Update 26 one here). It will include a greater level of technical detail and development context than our previous game performance article, and will be focused on the most immediate upcoming game update. You can expect to see these posts a few days before each update goes live on the PTS, so the Update 27 one will be next month.

In between the quarterly updates, we will continue to ask for and read feedback, investigate issues raised by the community, and provide answers where and when we are able. We also have a cross-discipline group digging into the longstanding problems specifically in Cyrodiil, and how to best address them. This team is actively working on long-term Cyrodill performance analysis and planning for changes/fixes.

We will continue to reach out to individual players for more specific details about issues or areas in need of improvement that we’re actively investigating. Once each update is live, we’ll also check back in with everyone to ask how the improvements feel and gather more data. We often need to see game performance work in action on the live servers to gauge if the results match the goal, and if additional work is needed. When the Update 27 improvements go live on the PTS in July, we encourage everyone on PC/Mac to hop in give us your feedback on the PTS forums.

Thank you!

Can we please have more specific information about what these upcoming changes are intended to do?
Saying things like "this will increase performance" isn't enough. People want to know if it's:
1) Server side performance improvement.
2) Client side performance improvement.
3) If it's adressing desyncs.
4) If it's lowering the real latency.
5) If it's meant to increase FPS.

All of the above is "to increase performance", but they are achieved completely differently and will impact the individual player differently. Stating the purpose of said change with more precision would be greatly appreciated.
Speaking of latency, it's time to update the shown latency in game; it's not reliable and only shows an avarage latency over a specific time period.

People might ‘want’ to know that, but I’m not sure communicating that much detail actually benefits either ZOS or players.

Do players need to know that much detail? Does ZOS really want to open up discussions on that level of micromanagement? Certainly getting into any kind of ‘debate’ about their work is only going to waste ZOS’s time and almost certainly have no tangible benefit to them or the game. There’s ample evidence from other games that more detailed communication does nothing but increase the demand for more information and provide ever more gripe points for disgruntled players to moan about.

Getting the level of information right is a delicate balancing act... a vast majority of the playerbase don’t care about such dialogue and a very vocal, but tiny minority feel they deserve to know everything and dictate exactly what ZOS should be doing.

Tbh I don’t actually care what the problems are or how they’re going to try to fix them, I just want to see actual improvements in my gameplay. Everything else is just waffle and excuses.

I mean if players trust ZOS, they probably don’t need that level of detail... Alternatively, if they don’t trust ZOS, no level of detail will ever be enough.

zDan · July 2020

Finally some acknowledgement towards cyrodiil performance, it's only been about 5 years. I'm not expecting much but at least it has been said now.

Elsonso · July 2020

zDan wrote: »

Finally some acknowledgement towards cyrodiil performance, it's only been about 5 years. I'm not expecting much but at least it has been said now.

Yeah... not so much. They've been "saying it" for years. They have been saying a team is working on it for years. They have been saying it is a high priority for them. Them not saying stuff about Cyrodiil performance ain't the problem. The problem is how long it is taking them to get to the point where they don't need to say it anymore.

waitwhat · July 2020

@ZOS_JessicaFolsom Your communication is actually fine. You've come a huge way in communication since 2016, and more or less we all know what does and does not work, and how to pass that along.

You have to accept that the reason things aren't getting fixed isn't due to communication. These performance problems date to One Tamriel at the latest, and that was four years ago.

The problem we have is that basic functionality is not present. We can't talk to one another. We can't group with one another. We can't fix these problems without making an entire group wait half an hour while we fiddle with DNS settings because your developers have not been able to deliver a robust, stable enough build such that this fiddling becomes unnecessary. After four years since OT, communication is not the problem.

Your organization and product have reached the point of maturity such that any non-functionality is -- frankly -- your fault. It is 2020. We should not be getting long load screens and non-functional game chat. None of your competitors have these issues, even on console. You should have solved this already, even if it meant forgoing an expansion or even if it meant paying anyone necessary the overtime required to complete the refactoring that solves the problem.

It not acceptable to have an unreliable software product six years after initial release. Pay what you must, hire whom you must, fire whom you must, it does not matter what you do, if core functionality does not work all the time, every time.

Fix it. Communicate to us when it is rectified. Until then, you would be best served making feature reliability your whole-of-organization focus until such time as the stability of the product speaks for itself.

Pyvos · July 2020

waitwhat wrote: »

You should have solved this already, even if it meant forgoing an expansion or even if it meant paying anyone necessary the overtime required to complete the refactoring that solves the problem.

It not acceptable to have an unreliable software product six years after initial release. Pay what you must, hire whom you must, fire whom you must, it does not matter what you do, if core functionality does not work all the time, every time.

Fix it. Communicate to us when it is rectified. Until then, you would be best served making feature reliability your whole-of-organization focus until such time as the stability of the product speaks for itself.

The simple reality is creating new content to sell people, bring back old players and onboard new ones, is going to make them more money than what they'd lose from players ending their subscription due to performance reasons. If the player only owns the game and doesn't have an ESO Plus subscription, than they're only really losing out on the potential to monetize that player and frankly that isn't a big loss financially in comparison to the amount of content they already have in the game they can sell new players (DLC, crown items, crates, tokens, etc.).

I don't like it as much as anyone else, but it doesn't change the economics nor does it change my position or anybody else's position "over" ZOS. If anybody dislikes it enough, they can vote with their wallet.

Communication is good at understanding the internal thinking at ZOS and how our thoughts, opinions, and voices are resonating with them. Communication will obviously only get them so far and actions speak louder than words. The best way they can prove their intent is with patches that actually fix client-side and server-side performance.

I say "actually" because this whole notion that paying someone to "complete the refactoring" is simply flawed. We saw what happened with their rewrite of the activity finder. It's objectively worse, you can't even queue up as a group anymore in battlegrounds. Maybe we'll see some of that get fixed with their upcoming changes this patch, we'll just have to see once it hits live. PTS testing is never going to be a full representation of the game.

caperb · July 2020

Great communication today

tonne.backlinderb16_ESO · July 2020

caperb wrote: »

Great communication today

Same as always. Quite telling what they hink of us.

Yamd · July 2020

I smiled when i read this headline today :-)

shaielzafine · July 2020

They have been saying this sort of communicating about performance / communicating about group finder / eu servers / communicating about Cyrodiil / communicating about communication. And yet I see people complaining about getting comments deleted and permabanned on places like Twitch or other forums when people ask questions or try to communicate with community managers. Banning paying subscribers and buyers / players is communicating a whole other thing and it isn't very positive. You could just fix the game as you promised in road map instead of giving more promises that people of course compare to your 2017, 2018, 2019 promises. I also want to to know how has it been with the community ambassadors program? Was the feedback from players even used? This pts cycle looks a whole lot like that time the devs did vMA changes and nobody responded with a reason why. It was a "just because" and I guess everyone on the dev team with one person's idea despite pages and pages of negative feedback.

Elsonso · July 2020

shaielzafine wrote: »

I see people complaining about getting comments deleted and permabanned on places like Twitch or other forums when people ask questions or try to communicate with community managers. Banning paying subscribers and buyers / players is communicating a whole other thing and it isn't very positive.

I have seen some of the messages that get deleted (when they appear briefly and I get to see them) and yes, they should be deleted. Not because they bring up a point that ZOS does not want anyone to talk about, but because they are just rude and disruptive. No one needs that.

You might think that I am white knighting for ZOS, but I see this sort of thing in a whole lot of places, not just with ESO. I am fairly convinced that the whole point of being like that isn't to get some message across, but simply to make someone else's life worse. People can justify it six ways to Sunday, however they like, but the end result is the same. Other people suffer at the hands of the messenger. In the end, it isn't about the message, it is about the messenger, and the impact to the people around them.

The thing about the performance message from the community is that ZOS has heard it. There isn't a need to be rude about it to the point of being disruptive. Even if people cannot bring themselves to admit it, ZOS has invested a ton of money into performance, and surprise, are willing to invest a ton more to try and save Cyrodiil.

Phanex · July 2020

I think that's what a lot of folks wanted to see in the first place.

They can say "we're looking into it" but if they don't keep us up to date it leaves most of us feeling they aren't doing their job...or doing it well enough.

Transparency is always welcomed and communication is required when the functionality of the game is hindered.

Onefrkncrzypope · July 2020

There is the obviously ridiculous aspect of a spammable being on a three second cooldown but this goes so much deeper. Is force pulse an aoe? It has second target. Are lightning heavy attacks on this cooldown? 2h la splash damage is an aoe is that on a cooldown? What also really concerning is if you are a PvP healer. What heal isn't some form of an AOE. Every skill in the resto tree has an aoe effect. Class skills like harvest, ritual, wait what about surge its a skill that passively heals player but will that skill or aoe effect be on cool down because it's about the calculations right?

It's a shot in the dark. It will help because people won't play PvP for a month.

Next test. We find that non dlc classes are causing lag so we put them on a 3 second cool down.

Here I got an idea. Force a polymorph for a week, I bet there are far more asset draws and memory usage on crappy pixels no one can see anyway.