Cyrodiil Test 5 - Big Success?

Artorias24 · October 2020

So Yesterday the 5th test launched in Cyro. Limiting group size to Maximum of 12 and all ally targeting abilities only work on group members.

And all i can say is that prime time has never been so "playable". Sure there was lag but it wasnt so bad that it made me quit like normally. Thats a really good step in the right direction.

Make cyro great again.

Qbiken · October 2020

The limitations of group size is absolutely amazing and is one of the better things ZOS has done for PvP since launch. Hopefully this test will become permanent. For me the performance improvement during primetime was noticeably better yesterday than any of the other tests.

Wing · October 2020

huh, now that you mention it prime time pvp for me was pretty free of lag, even had huge sieges with 40+ a side, was able to move and fire skills no problem.

that being said i didnt mind the individual cooldowns of the last test, as i dont spam anything the game considers an AoE, but im strictly solo so dont know if that matters.

but huh, turns out it was the ball groups after all. . .

. . .fancy that.

dinokstrunz · October 2020

From my experience today lag still occurred when the organised ball groups showed up or large three way faction fights but it wasn't anywhere near as horrific as the previous test weeks, I will probably continue to monitor over the coming days. I'm hopeful the next week or two will be promising.

Artorias24 · October 2020

There was the Hammer at Chal and a huuge zerg at faregyl with the scroll. A 12 man ball group jumped into them and got the scroll and was fighting on faregyl lumber. Then we also joined the fight. 4 Blues, 12 yellows and 20+ Reds. Lag was there but still playable.

Looking forward for the next days and see If it stays like that.

MincVinyl · October 2020

dinokstrunz wrote: »

From my experience today lag still occurred when the organised ball groups showed up or large three way faction fights but it wasn't anywhere near as horrific as the previous test weeks, I will probably continue to monitor over the coming days. I'm hopeful the next week or two will be promising.

We will still see lag occur from groups aoe hitting each other during this test(what zos probably thought was the issue originally). For sure 50 allies keeping buffs/hots/smarthealing on each other without these calcs going away by any means was going to be the bulk of the lag. Think enemy dots/effects can be purged off, but ally hots/effects will remain and keep stacking.

What is nice is how this is probably the least intrusive out of any of the tests and seems to make a massive difference.

I hope zos can take ideas for other ways to fix the 50v50 aoe fights causing lag though. They need to honestly find ways to spread combat out or limit how many calculations players can output on enemies without ruining aoe.

Spreading combat out would be as simple as making the resources worth more in keep seiges. My concept would be to make them the rez points while a keep is flagged. If you die within keep/res range you could rez at an owned resource every 5 mins. This goes for defender and attacker. FCs would no longer be able to be placed within keep range on either side. Ap for res take/def are worth exceedingly more while X number of seige is up on both def/atk side.

The one thing I wish they brought back from way back was to make over time effects not stack from multiple sources(through battlespirit). This would still allow for aoes to be unchanged, keeping the integrity of the combat system whole. At the same time this keeps dots viable in small fights due to higher class diversity. However it will prevent persistent calculations from lingering on enemy players. Future proc/dot metas could be avoided aswell like how the sloads/soul meta would have never happened. Catapults(beyond the most calculation dense seige there is) wouldn't be spammed everywhere at breaches.

Curious_Death · October 2020

i read it and i cant believe... do we play same cyrodiil? i got lags when zerg focus me - 3 sec unable to do anything after rolldodge - only move u can do is rollodge again

Wing · October 2020

MincVinyl wrote: »

dinokstrunz wrote: »

From my experience today lag still occurred when the organised ball groups showed up or large three way faction fights but it wasn't anywhere near as horrific as the previous test weeks, I will probably continue to monitor over the coming days. I'm hopeful the next week or two will be promising.

We will still see lag occur from groups aoe hitting each other during this test(what zos probably thought was the issue originally). For sure 50 allies keeping buffs/hots/smarthealing on each other without these calcs going away by any means was going to be the bulk of the lag. Think enemy dots/effects can be purged off, but ally hots/effects will remain and keep stacking.

What is nice is how this is probably the least intrusive out of any of the tests and seems to make a massive difference.
I hope zos can take ideas for other ways to fix the 50v50 aoe fights causing lag though. They need to honestly find ways to spread combat out or limit how many calculations players can output on enemies without ruining aoe.

Spreading combat out would be as simple as making the resources worth more in keep seiges. My concept would be to make them the rez points while a keep is flagged. If you die within keep/res range you could rez at an owned resource every 5 mins. This goes for defender and attacker. FCs would no longer be able to be placed within keep range on either side. Ap for res take/def are worth exceedingly more while X number of seige is up on both def/atk side.

The one thing I wish they brought back from way back was to make over time effects not stack from multiple sources(through battlespirit). This would still allow for aoes to be unchanged, keeping the integrity of the combat system whole. At the same time this keeps dots viable in small fights due to higher class diversity. However it will prevent persistent calculations from lingering on enemy players. Future proc/dot metas could be avoided aswell like how the sloads/soul meta would have never happened. Catapults(beyond the most calculation dense seige there is) wouldn't be spammed everywhere at breaches.

aside from the combat mechanics on a tech level that they are messing with now, Cyro needs some changes on a strategic level.

for instance the concept of de throne is that two factions will de throne the third, this entails 3 factions fighting at a single keep.

this is by design.

that design needs to change, if the game cannot handle it, dont encourage it. there are other systems in place in Cyro that just are or promote bad gameplay, and these are things ZOS needs to change.

Chilly-McFreeze · October 2020

Artorias24 wrote: »

So Yesterday the 5th test launched in Cyro. Limiting group size to Maximum of 12 and all ally targeting abilities only work on group members.

And all i can say is that prime time has never been so "playable". Sure there was lag but it wasnt so bad that it made me quit like normally. Thats a really good step in the right direction.

Make cyro great again.

I had to avoid ESO for the last weeks. Does the current test mean I have to join a group if I want to heal somebody with my stick? And isn't it a bit early to praise such change after one evening?

Cheezits94 · October 2020

Chilly-McFreeze wrote: »

Artorias24 wrote: »

So Yesterday the 5th test launched in Cyro. Limiting group size to Maximum of 12 and all ally targeting abilities only work on group members.

And all i can say is that prime time has never been so "playable". Sure there was lag but it wasnt so bad that it made me quit like normally. Thats a really good step in the right direction.

Make cyro great again.

I had to avoid ESO for the last weeks. Does the current test mean I have to join a group if I want to heal somebody with my stick? And isn't it a bit early to praise such change after one evening?

Yes, you can't heal people outside of your group.

And my PVP guild didnt notice a lot of difference regarding Lag yesterday.. Gray Host PC EU. We were happy with game performance in the beginning of our raid yesterday, but we had only smaller fights and things usually go rather well there anyways.
Once the whole DC faction showed up at Ash amd the whole AD faction tried to defend, things were as bad as always.

Oh, and they broke the undaunted bubble. The synergy does not work anymore. No ressources from it, no heal either.

MKintr · October 2020

Maybe there was no visible lag, but attacks still did not fire very often.
Gameplay was a mess with mini-groups all over the map, small sieges that took forever and so on. This test only favours discord voice chat groups that can coordinate the same group sizes as before, while all others are left behind. I found gameplay the worst with this test. Large groups with players that contribute their skills and gear to the whole are the core of cyrodiil PvP.

d3adpain · October 2020

there's still lag but the its was kinda playable, dmg did register and abilities did work
breaking cc and immobilized was really clunky though , next week should be better
week 1 also had good results, aoe tests also showed that there's so many skills with aoe checks

alainjbrennanb16_ESO · October 2020

Artorias24 wrote: »

So Yesterday the 5th test launched in Cyro. Limiting group size to Maximum of 12 and all ally targeting abilities only work on group members.

And all i can say is that prime time has never been so "playable". Sure there was lag but it wasnt so bad that it made me quit like normally. Thats a really good step in the right direction.

Make cyro great again.

i did not have the same, lag, combat bugs, horse mount bug, greyed out skills and not being able to bar swap, also no cc immunity and desyncing, and if that was not bad enough you had these mini ball groups and there was lots in ravenwatch eu last night chasing down one person, i find when more than 2 on 1 person is when the issues start to happen, and the mount bug i never had for first 4 weeks of test, mount bug always hapeens with ball groups, iam not saying grouping is the issue but it is how they act as a group

Agalloch · October 2020

MKintr wrote: »

Maybe there was no visible lag, but attacks still did not fire very often.
Gameplay was a mess with mini-groups all over the map, small sieges that took forever and so on. This test only favours discord voice chat groups that can coordinate the same group sizes as before, while all others are left behind. I found gameplay the worst with this test. Large groups with players that contribute their skills and gear to the whole are the core of cyrodiil PvP.

This.

Cyrodiil PVP is about large battles...and was the core of ESO advertising before launch.

Cyrodiil was intented to be like :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfeMROJhXSY

And yes, at start we had huge pvp battles .. but . cut after "lighting patch".

ZOS give our Cyrodiil PVP back!

Thanks!

Svenja · October 2020

Basically, things were as bad as always. Smaller fights on Lumbermills etc. were okay, but they usually are.
Gray Host PC EU here.

Once we joined bigger keep fights, the usual things occurred. These usual things are:
- skills greyed out
- skills not greyed out but not firing regardless
- unable to break free
- no cc immunity whatsoever after a break free
- position desyncs (still unable to use skills even 10m outside of a negate)
- health/damage desyncs: people getting oneshot by siege and then the death recap shows 6 ballista ticks

Oh and yes, they broke Orbs. You are now able to use the synergy over and over without cooldown, but it doesn't give the heal and no ressources return either. Even when the caster is in the same group as you.
I made a short video. The magicka I am getting back here is my regular 2k recovery, but not the amount I'd get from the synergy:

https://youtu.be/ReVEFoSJLKQ

forthwinds · October 2020

Performance tonight was better than I've seen it in years on PC/NA Grey Host. There seems to be a cc immunity bug that was introduced but relogging seems to fix it. It felt like I was in PvE with how smooth skills were going off tonight. Glad ZOS could find a fix for cyro though!

Wing · October 2020

Agalloch wrote: »

MKintr wrote: »

Maybe there was no visible lag, but attacks still did not fire very often.
Gameplay was a mess with mini-groups all over the map, small sieges that took forever and so on. This test only favours discord voice chat groups that can coordinate the same group sizes as before, while all others are left behind. I found gameplay the worst with this test. Large groups with players that contribute their skills and gear to the whole are the core of cyrodiil PvP.

This.

Cyrodiil PVP is about large battles...and was the core of ESO advertising before launch.

Cyrodiil was intented to be like : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfeMROJhXSY

And yes, at start we had huge pvp battles .. but . cut after "lighting patch".

ZOS give our Cyrodiil PVP back!

Thanks!

just for clarity.

the "lighting" aspect of the patch is not what caused the lag.

that same patch more data was moved server side rather then client side (due to hacking and exploits, anyone remember the gold mat duplication back at launch, and everyone thought the economy would never recover?) this caused the server to be pinged more for combat information rather then leaving it in and trusting the client, the net result being more packets, and more lag.

so yeah, blame the exploiters XD

and even then it didnt stop, cheat engine was used by many (even though lots of PvP'ers CLAIMED that people were just bad and needed to get good, anyone remember blinxy btw?)

this led to one weekend, i feel like it was around ZOS Christmas break (or some holiday) a couple players exploited the crap out of PvP, flying around keeps, spamming meteor ultimate's, making it clear that YES there were exploits and YES people could use them.

they got banned, and ZOS claimed they cracked down on cheats.

however it was often claimed you could still use cheat engine and various other hacks as long as you kept values within a reasonable level, like regen values and damage numbers.

so PvP in this game has lost all trust from many vet players, hard to believe everything is legit and people are all playing fair when it so clearly did exist.

Chaos2088 · October 2020

I really do not like the smaller grps.

Its pushing big raids to the pvp guilds, gunna push alot of randoms out that sometimes would stick around and join.

I hope this is not going to be the new normal when testing is over.

Sarousse · October 2020

Same here. By far the better week. Everything was responsive, except in very few situations.

gatekeeper13 · October 2020

Performance still trash. In No-CP campaign yesterday evening (EU), performance was trash and everyone in chat zone was complaining about the lag. Your character was literally frozen the moment you approached a ball group.

Ball groups were still unkillable without negate.

alainjbrennanb16_ESO · October 2020

gatekeeper13 wrote: »

Performance still trash. In No-CP campaign yesterday evening (EU), performance was trash and everyone in chat zone was complaining about the lag. Your character was literally frozen the moment you approached a ball group.

Ball groups were still unkillable without negate.

and half the time the negate had no effect

gatekeeper13 · October 2020

alainjbrennanb16_ESO wrote: »

gatekeeper13 wrote: »

Performance still trash. In No-CP campaign yesterday evening (EU), performance was trash and everyone in chat zone was complaining about the lag. Your character was literally frozen the moment you approached a ball group.

Ball groups were still unkillable without negate.

and half the time the negate had no effect

Ofc it didnt since desyncs wont let it work.

alainjbrennanb16_ESO · October 2020

gatekeeper13 wrote: »

alainjbrennanb16_ESO wrote: »

gatekeeper13 wrote: »

Performance still trash. In No-CP campaign yesterday evening (EU), performance was trash and everyone in chat zone was complaining about the lag. Your character was literally frozen the moment you approached a ball group.

Ball groups were still unkillable without negate.

and half the time the negate had no effect

Ofc it didnt since desyncs wont let it work.

i was in there with mos last night in same campaign and found the chicken play of 12 on 1 more of an issue, but it was a pain this test, well i say test, just limiting group size is not good

HankTwo · October 2020

I really like all aspects of this test:

- Performance was noticeable better. While it was far from perfect, I had less lag yesterday than most days during the other tests, which were far more disruptive to gameplay imo.
- It makes skills like cauterize, rapid regen, and so on reliable in solo play.
- It makes healers in general much more reliable in small to mid scale group play --> no more radiating regen on random players in sneak that arent even involved in the fight.
- It reduces cross healing in large, random faction stacks, which lets fight end faster.
- Ideally group size reduction will lead to more groups overall and therefore more spread out action on the map.

synnerman · October 2020

Nope performance was still laggy in large fights in PC/EU and still only the 1st test that made the difference out of all the tests so far.

zvavi · October 2020

synnerman wrote: »

Nope performance was still laggy in large fights in PC/EU and still only the 1st test that made the difference out of all the tests so far.

Nobody was in the first test...

colossalvoids · October 2020

See only benefits with this test, on top of improved performance can actually reliably self heal with resto without jumping away from others, in group heals are not wasted on randoms roaming around and limiting further group size can help with spreading people around, possibly.

red_emu · October 2020

Wing wrote: »

MincVinyl wrote: »

dinokstrunz wrote: »

From my experience today lag still occurred when the organised ball groups showed up or large three way faction fights but it wasn't anywhere near as horrific as the previous test weeks, I will probably continue to monitor over the coming days. I'm hopeful the next week or two will be promising.

We will still see lag occur from groups aoe hitting each other during this test(what zos probably thought was the issue originally). For sure 50 allies keeping buffs/hots/smarthealing on each other without these calcs going away by any means was going to be the bulk of the lag. Think enemy dots/effects can be purged off, but ally hots/effects will remain and keep stacking.

What is nice is how this is probably the least intrusive out of any of the tests and seems to make a massive difference.
I hope zos can take ideas for other ways to fix the 50v50 aoe fights causing lag though. They need to honestly find ways to spread combat out or limit how many calculations players can output on enemies without ruining aoe.

Spreading combat out would be as simple as making the resources worth more in keep seiges. My concept would be to make them the rez points while a keep is flagged. If you die within keep/res range you could rez at an owned resource every 5 mins. This goes for defender and attacker. FCs would no longer be able to be placed within keep range on either side. Ap for res take/def are worth exceedingly more while X number of seige is up on both def/atk side.

The one thing I wish they brought back from way back was to make over time effects not stack from multiple sources(through battlespirit). This would still allow for aoes to be unchanged, keeping the integrity of the combat system whole. At the same time this keeps dots viable in small fights due to higher class diversity. However it will prevent persistent calculations from lingering on enemy players. Future proc/dot metas could be avoided aswell like how the sloads/soul meta would have never happened. Catapults(beyond the most calculation dense seige there is) wouldn't be spammed everywhere at breaches.

aside from the combat mechanics on a tech level that they are messing with now, Cyro needs some changes on a strategic level.

for instance the concept of de throne is that two factions will de throne the third, this entails 3 factions fighting at a single keep.

this is by design.

that design needs to change, if the game cannot handle it, dont encourage it. there are other systems in place in Cyro that just are or promote bad gameplay, and these are things ZOS needs to change.

I think a good idea would be to make the keeps way harder to take and scale the guards/gates/walls to the number of enemy players near the keep.

Currently you can take a keep within 4-5 minutes and once you start the chain of capturing a keep after keep, players are naturally drawn to follow in whichever direction the keeps are flipping. If it was harder to zerg a keep, rather than apply some strategy, I think people might spread out more?

TequilaFire · October 2020

It is a lot of fun coordinating multiple 12 man groups.
One group can siege while another takes the resources then rejoin and reinforce the sieging group.
Feel sorry for solo zerg surfers though.

relentless_turnip · October 2020

Wing wrote: »

Agalloch wrote: »

MKintr wrote: »

Maybe there was no visible lag, but attacks still did not fire very often.
Gameplay was a mess with mini-groups all over the map, small sieges that took forever and so on. This test only favours discord voice chat groups that can coordinate the same group sizes as before, while all others are left behind. I found gameplay the worst with this test. Large groups with players that contribute their skills and gear to the whole are the core of cyrodiil PvP.

This.

Cyrodiil PVP is about large battles...and was the core of ESO advertising before launch.

Cyrodiil was intented to be like : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfeMROJhXSY

And yes, at start we had huge pvp battles .. but . cut after "lighting patch".

ZOS give our Cyrodiil PVP back!

Thanks!

just for clarity.

the "lighting" aspect of the patch is not what caused the lag.

that same patch more data was moved server side rather then client side (due to hacking and exploits, anyone remember the gold mat duplication back at launch, and everyone thought the economy would never recover?) this caused the server to be pinged more for combat information rather then leaving it in and trusting the client, the net result being more packets, and more lag.

so yeah, blame the exploiters XD

and even then it didnt stop, cheat engine was used by many (even though lots of PvP'ers CLAIMED that people were just bad and needed to get good, anyone remember blinxy btw?)

this led to one weekend, i feel like it was around ZOS Christmas break (or some holiday) a couple players exploited the crap out of PvP, flying around keeps, spamming meteor ultimate's, making it clear that YES there were exploits and YES people could use them.

they got banned, and ZOS claimed they cracked down on cheats.

however it was often claimed you could still use cheat engine and various other hacks as long as you kept values within a reasonable level, like regen values and damage numbers.

so PvP in this game has lost all trust from many vet players, hard to believe everything is legit and people are all playing fair when it so clearly did exist.

I have seen a site that still sells ESO cheat software. I forwarded I reported, but never heard anything back.

SpacemanSpiff1 · October 2020

lag is still pretty bad. and ball groups are back in force.