Kwoung wrote: »

xeNNNNN wrote: »

PvP is the biggest problem for the game honestly in terms of performance but I have started to notice its creeping into PvE a lot too.

Comparatively compared to when I DPS'ed a year ago to doing so now, there is a noticeable lag in abilities meaning my light attacks just refuse to go off when I actually click between abilities. For a magblade or just anyone really I guess, a lot of your damage comes from your light weaving or medium weaving, it makes up for a lot of DPS so when your skill isn't the problem and the latency is then its pretty bad.

I am in Britain and I am getting 73 ms. 73. My normal ping is the vast majority of games is between 21 and 35. This is the case as well in other MMORPGs.

So they definitely have a problem that needs fixing, I am just not sure they know how to based on the fact its been pretty much the same since after the first year of the game. Though during the first year the lag was not that bad at all.

It seems odd that everything ZOS is doing goes against having great performance in their game. Yes, I get they want to make crown sales, keep players interested with new sets, new effects, let everyone customize their characters to look like their favorite superhero if they so desire, but all these things directly affect game performance.

The more unique items and new calculations you inject, the more power it takes to run it. Which is why we are seeing PVE content starting to experience the same issues that PVP has for years, and why PVP has gotten so incredibly bad. Cyrodiil used to have 500+ players running around, all looking different, all doing different things, it took a lot more horsepower to run it than say, a trial with 12 people or a zone with 100 in the instance. But now, enough new items, customizations, calculations and effects have been added, that even those 12 or 100 are feeling the effects of it.

Anyhow, this has been long known and well proven since near the beginning of MMO's. So quite honestly, if ZOS wants to keep pushing new stuff into the game and selling those crown items, they really need to use some of that profit and just pony up and purchase the horsepower to handle it, instead of expecting it to run smoothly on the level of hardware the game was released with.

Even if they nailed their projections perfectly and had a solid 5 year growth plan in place based on their crown/gear/calculations growth (pretty much a standard thing to do) when making the original hardware purchases, we have past that point quite a while back, so todays issues aren't really a surprise.

EDIT: Opps, I forgot to agree! All that aside, ESO is one of the better games I have ever played as well.

I can summarise this in one sentence;

Short term investment for short term gains.

There has been a noticeable trend over the last 10 years over the period where gaming in general somewhat exploded and the lack of long term investment in physical resources. The reason being is that, many investors in various games companies and other corporate entities do not see the game nor the fun it gives people, they just see the bottom line and how they can improve upon that. Unfortunately that usually means that in a video games case, much of the quality of performance goes down hill because the monetisation of the product becomes more important than the stability of the product.

Its extremely hard to argue a pitch to investors where you push for a net loss of money in favour of an unquantifiable outcome. We here could argue between ourselves that, well it obviously would provide a general positive effect which would see a resurgence of players and thus a gain in profit. However when pitching such a thing to investors you would effectively be promising it would happen which means if it fails the investors will lose confidence and your company takes a hit.

I think ultimately someone needs to make a hard call at ZoS and say "this isn't good enough" because while net profit continuously is a endlessly positive thing for a business trying to make money, if it haemorrhages customers as a result of an unwillingness to go above and beyond to fix critical issues and complaints with the product then it will result in a net loss over a long period. ZoS are honestly quite lucky that not everyone likes FF online and that New world has effectively bottled due to horrid game breaking bugs and a lack of content had those two things been different there would be a massive swath of players missing right now. More so than there already is.

I did notice the other thread on the board talking about new hardware? or something along those lines however they need to speed that up. Covid is not a good excuse anymore.

I have been playing ESO since 2014 and unless the world comes to an end I will likely still be playing in 2024.

I tried quite a few MMORPGs in the past. None of them captivated me, other than WOW, for a couple of years.

The thing I believe ESO gets so right is that you can do anything you want. Nothing is gated behind other content. You can be the worst PvPer or the worst PvEer and still be the best master crafter, or the best antiquarian, or filthy rich as a trader. Or, the complete mirror image of that. Choices... that is what it is all about.