You have to give ZOS credit for the AOE tests

Scarkii · July 2020

honestly i feel like this change will have a major impact on the lag, the only time ive ever had a lot of delay in cyrodiil is when a ball group was somewhere there, and all they do is spam aoes and ulti bomb with aoes so hoping that it does do something

Scion_of_Yggdrasil · August 2020

Scarkii wrote: »

honestly i feel like this change will have a major impact on the lag, the only time ive ever had a lot of delay in cyrodiil is when a ball group was somewhere there, and all they do is spam aoes and ulti bomb with aoes so hoping that it does do something

Not just PvP either. When I'm in a dungeon and more than one of us are going heavy on the AOE, it gets choppy/laggy. My build alone is stressful... I start with an AOE heal, then lay down an AOE stun (time stop), then lay down bow aoe, then warden ice aoe... oh, then I charge in with whirling blades... theres a lot going on with me alone. Now throw in 2 more players, who also have lots of aoe because it is the best way to deal with mobs...

The_Lex · August 2020

Dusk_Coven wrote: »

Well I can agree that no matter how it turns out, even just setting up this test will cost them an unwarranted amount of time and resources toward Cyrodiil. Far too much to possibly be worth it in the end, but at least they are trying to save it.

On the contrary, the amount of time and resources necessary to fix this broken mess of a game is most certainly warranted.

Tammany · August 2020

Scarkii wrote: »

honestly i feel like this change will have a major impact on the lag, the only time ive ever had a lot of delay in cyrodiil is when a ball group was somewhere there, and all they do is spam aoes and ulti bomb with aoes so hoping that it does do something

I like how players went full denial and throw assumptions "maybe its proc sets, maybe its pop cap, maybe its zerg" meanwhile group bug shows clearly its only about ballblobs - in that precious time when players were not able to gtoup together for crosshealing and crossbuffing cyrodil performed great.

silver1surfer69 · August 2020

Nemesis7884 wrote: »

They do care and they are trying to improve Cyrodiil - pvp players are not forgotten...

Do I like the approach they are taking? No, as a Templar main I am highly concerned that my class basically gets wrecked, and seeing how long any type of skill revision takes them I have huge doubts they will be able to simply rework all classes (AGAIN)...

That being said, we are out of options and need to look for solutions where we find them...so people should approach this with open minds and participate in the tests if they can....

1. My heart wants to agree but my mind says we are at a point that is so bad they have to take action. So they are forced to!

2. Second i dont feel like they really care enough for pvp, it is a minority. But if pvp is breaking down that will fall back on th whole game. Thats why.

3. The attitude: zos will take care of it, isnt apropriate in most cases anymore. I learned over the years, they start doing something yes if the sh... piles up so big in a special topic and threads and thousands of ppl are putting so much effort in to scream: we have a problem here, then things start maybe.

4. I think the developers and the staff cares but the guys with the money who make the decissions and hire these guys dont.

-> If i think back some years i felt the same like zos is doing something and they are doing something yes, but not enough for this amount of player base and money from it they have. I cant help to have gotten disillusioned about this.

alcoraptor · August 2020

Comparing general performance to MYM is a false comparison. What they did during MYM was to drastically increase the server capacity for a finite period, knowing they were going to have significantly more players in Cyrodiil and the current infrastructure couldn't handle it.
That comes with its own costs, and it is not a long term solution - it's like saying (since we apparently like car metaphors in ESO) "I need to get to work faster next week, so I'm going to rent a Ferrari" - it works, but it doesn't address the root cause of the problem.

The devs have hinted at various points through the performance updates that the amount of calculations the servers now have to do is causing the lag.
They are adjusting proc sets with update 27, and changing many of the sets (including monster sets) to only affect group members - this all points to them knowing exactly where the issue lies.
AOEs, presumably, are a further optimisation to this - like proc sets they need to ping an area and do multiple calculations, which all adds to the lag.

I think they know they need to strike a balance between playability and server load - each of these tests appears to be designed to check that balance in a slightly different way.
They're not ideal, but I think we can all agree that they're the lesser of two evils when it comes to Cyro performance

Sarannah · August 2020

The_Lex wrote: »

Dusk_Coven wrote: »

Well I can agree that no matter how it turns out, even just setting up this test will cost them an unwarranted amount of time and resources toward Cyrodiil. Far too much to possibly be worth it in the end, but at least they are trying to save it.

On the contrary, the amount of time and resources necessary to fix this broken mess of a game is most certainly warranted.

You put it really harsh, but I do agree they have to fix Cyrodiil. As the knowledge they gain from fixing Cyrodiil could affect everything else in the game as well, in a positive way. After some time it could maybe even allow for more gamemodes like massive town sieges, 50vs50 player battlegrounds, massive PvE content, and such.

But it all comes down to how they fix Cyrodiil, and if what they learned can be applied everywhere else in the game. Including future content.

BXR_Lonestar · August 2020

Honestly, the whole experimenting with the cooldowns is just telling me that they're trying to tell us the pace of combat needs to slow down. Sure, there are things that they can do to reduce the number of calculations that occur in order to improve performance, but if that doesn't fully resolve the issue, the next step is to examine the pace of combat. In that case, the elephant in the room is that high APM players are contributing to poor server performance when gathered in large numbers because their high rate of attack is adding to the number of calculations that need to be made (Crit or no crit? How much damage per hit? Proc status chance Y/N? Damage reduced by resistance/shields Y/N? glyph proc'd Y/N?, etc.). IMO, resolving this by fixing animation cancelling (block/bash, barswap, etc. - as opposed to light attack weaving, which is fine IMO) needs to be part of the fix.

I'm sure that this will turn off a lot of people from the game, but TBH, it may ALSO get more players engaged in the game as well. For many in my group, our LEAST favorite part of ESO is the combat system. Nobody actually enjoys feeling like they have to button mash in a certain order in order to have just an "acceptable" DPS rate.

I'm not trying to lay blame for poor server performance on high APM players, as I am sure there is a LOT of contributing factors to the poor server performance, but IMO, this needs to be part of the conversation. You can't tell me that if an average player can achieve 60 APM per minute (assuming 1 second Global cool down) that a player who can achieve 120-150 APM with block/bash/barswap cancelling is not contributing to the problem when a large number of players are on the same area. That applies to both PVE and PVP.

Cronopoly · August 2020

I'm surprised their code was NOT profiled before pushing it live, over and over for years to get us to this point.
ZOS should know their speeds and bandwidth of (Memory, CPU, I/O processors on "hah" Server Motherboards, database cache, attached storage, enterprise firewalls) as well as network retransmission rates. Not to mention, limits should have been placed on Skills long ago.

Sometimes I wonder if IT teams just use Ping and think they are ok.

If we are here it clearly means someone did not articulate the above and take it serious. It literally is not rocket science. Either you staff the position of someone who looks ACROSS IT towers and can advise on the right end to end decisions or you don't.

That said, so many times in Industry someone buys as an example some HP $100K server with no idea of the bandwidth of the I/O Processor (that sits between memory/CPU/Storage)and the companies teams must deal with what is purchased by some idiot in mgmt.

25 year IT professional for a 20+ billion dollar company.

volkeswagon · August 2020

mb10 wrote: »

So if they remove all skills and make it light or heavy attack only I should give them credit too?

I would give them credit for making the game simple and accessible to the handicap.

TineaCruris · August 2020

Nemesis7884 wrote: »

They do care and they are trying to improve Cyrodiil - pvp players are not forgotten...

Do I like the approach they are taking? No, as a Templar main I am highly concerned that my class basically gets wrecked, and seeing how long any type of skill revision takes them I have huge doubts they will be able to simply rework all classes (AGAIN)...

That being said, we are out of options and need to look for solutions where we find them...so people should approach this with open minds and participate in the tests if they can....

1 Corinthians 13:11

The only thing that needs to happen is ZOS needs to invest in server resources for cyrodiil....as they just did for the MYM event.

Crash427 · August 2020

So, punish players and bring them down is the solution?

Be careful what you ask for. It's happened before where people thought a change they wanted would hurt those evil ballgroups and high APM players but really it ended up making life harder for casuals and pugs.

Serude · August 2020

Why dont they just move some of the calculations back to the client side like it was at release and police the cheaters? I feel like that was how the game was designed and should be played.

Scion_of_Yggdrasil · August 2020

BXR_Lonestar wrote: »

Honestly, the whole experimenting with the cooldowns is just telling me that they're trying to tell us the pace of combat needs to slow down. Sure, there are things that they can do to reduce the number of calculations that occur in order to improve performance, but if that doesn't fully resolve the issue, the next step is to examine the pace of combat. In that case, the elephant in the room is that high APM players are contributing to poor server performance when gathered in large numbers because their high rate of attack is adding to the number of calculations that need to be made (Crit or no crit? How much damage per hit? Proc status chance Y/N? Damage reduced by resistance/shields Y/N? glyph proc'd Y/N?, etc.). IMO, resolving this by fixing animation cancelling (block/bash, barswap, etc. - as opposed to light attack weaving, which is fine IMO) needs to be part of the fix.

I'm sure that this will turn off a lot of people from the game, but TBH, it may ALSO get more players engaged in the game as well. For many in my group, our LEAST favorite part of ESO is the combat system. Nobody actually enjoys feeling like they have to button mash in a certain order in order to have just an "acceptable" DPS rate.

I'm not trying to lay blame for poor server performance on high APM players, as I am sure there is a LOT of contributing factors to the poor server performance, but IMO, this needs to be part of the conversation. You can't tell me that if an average player can achieve 60 APM per minute (assuming 1 second Global cool down) that a player who can achieve 120-150 APM with block/bash/barswap cancelling is not contributing to the problem when a large number of players are on the same area. That applies to both PVE and PVP.

I have been spitting on animation cancelling since I joined ESO. Do I do it? Yes, because you're basically required to, and it feels like everything since has been balanced to account for it. How backwards... yet we have to run tests to find the gap between the floor and ceiling, when the ceiling capitalizes on doing something never mentioned or intended to even be included in the game??? If it was a snake....

It's already bad enough that gear and CP make more of a difference in a players performance than an individuals actual skill/playstyle. Thank the divines that DD can deal XX weapon dmg... sure wish they'd get out of red, block aggro, or dodge the mob ever so often though.... but its fine, continue to work on your rotation please...but thats another topic. Signed, an annoyed healer.

Animation cancelling, though its not the only culprit, is definitely another straw on the camels back. Slower, not SLOW, but just slightly slower combat, is not going to be the end of the world. People dropping in seconds is a glaring sign something isnt right.

Another area to look into... combat and non-combat pets... its war, and the centralize zone of the conflict! Just turn off pets in cyrodiil, and make one more necessary change.... force sorcs to manage their pets, making them despawn (return to oblivion) after X seconds, like it should have been from the beginning. Warden bears are an ultimate, which is why they get to stay out indefinitely, only respawning automatically with the proper morph. No other combat pets in game stay permanently. Its time to finish the continuity.