Jaraal wrote: »

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Amottica wrote: »

Jaraal wrote: »

S0Z0H wrote: »

But they are trying to keep costs down super low right now while they are being observed by Microsoft since they were bought out recently.
There are contract agreements I think they have to keep, in order for everything to stay cool for ZOS. And one major thing ZOS is trying to do, is show Microsoft they are hugely profitable while having a tiny operation cost. That's the big impression they are trying to give and to maintain , so they can ask Microsoft for more funds and be priority over other games to get more money.

But how do they expect to be profitable when players are leaving in droves in disgust? They've had a couple of months to see that there's a huge backlash against AWA in the form that dropped on the PTS. Yet they chose to go all in on it. Surely the investors at MS are aware of this?

But if they do not leave in droves then what does that mean?

Over 1/5 of the Steam players have left since this hit the PTS, and the number gets larger every day. I guess it depends on your definition of "droves."

https://steamcharts.com/app/306130

I would suggest that looking at the 30 day moving average vs month to month and looking at this across the next few months will give a much better indication of what effect this may have had. Character-based achievements vs account side, to me, seems to be such a trial reason to leave a game, one of the best MMORPGs available today. If they did leave because of this change then it seems we will never see them here again as it seems this cannot be undone and we are discussing something for the heck of it.

Case in point, go back a couple of years ago, before Covid. Steam charts show a drop in average and peak players for about three months. Then it picked back up where it left off. Changes made to ESO were not the issue. WoW released an update, players went and checked it out but quickly returned to ESO because this is a better game. I cannot recall if that was Azeroth or Shadowlands.

Adding here.

The post after this one I quoted suggested Zenimax could roll back the game to before this update. Of course, they can. I expect they have a backup to the live game for when they do major updates.

However, that is extremely unlikely. People have been up in arms about change to this game at times and I have not seen anything that suggested Zenimax has ever rolled back the game as a result. Every day that passes makes it more of a certainty they will not roll back the game.

I think the players and ZOS may have very different definitions of what "performance" means. Most players would equate performance to meaning the game runs smoother, less lag, more responsive, and an overall improved game experience. While I have no idea if they do or not, ZOS may define it as being able to add more content without having to invest in more hardware, which means just keeping the status quo expenditure & game experience wise, while continuing with the yearly releases of chapters, DLC's, etc. So focusing on performance, may not actually mean a better game experience to the player, just the same experience.

I only wonder about this, because hardware investment is by far the easiest and most effective way to add performance across the board to any application/game/whatever. It is costly though, especially if regular replacements and upgrades haven't been happening at regular intervals all along. If that is the case, it would probably be in the $2-4m range (maybe even more) to implement all at once now. Which would be a pretty tough pill to swallow and why they keep trying to code/design their way out of this hole.

Anyhow, as much as they talk about improving performance, I can not recall them ever saying anything about improving their infrastructure to address performance issues. Which I would assume they would be doing, if they had ever done so.

Gaeliannas wrote: »

I think the players and ZOS may have very different definitions of what "performance" means. Most players would equate performance to meaning the game runs smoother, less lag, more responsive, and an overall improved game experience. While I have no idea if they do or not, ZOS may define it as being able to add more content without having to invest in more hardware, which means just keeping the status quo expenditure & game experience wise, while continuing with the yearly releases of chapters, DLC's, etc. So focusing on performance, may not actually mean a better game experience to the player, just the same experience.

I only wonder about this, because hardware investment is by far the easiest and most effective way to add performance across the board to any application/game/whatever. It is costly though, especially if regular replacements and upgrades haven't been happening at regular intervals all along. If that is the case, it would probably be in the $2-4m range (maybe even more) to implement all at once now. Which would be a pretty tough pill to swallow and why they keep trying to code/design their way out of this hole.

Anyhow, as much as they talk about improving performance, I can not recall them ever saying anything about improving their infrastructure to address performance issues. Which I would assume they would be doing, if they had ever done so.

Very insightful! Definingly food for thought. Very well written.
But as far as not wanting to spend money on new hardware or not being able to spend that much, in 2016 (?) they had a contest with grand prize of $1 million dollars. They had another contest to send the winner and a friend on a exotic vacation.
They bought a commercial spot during the Super Bowl to push the Morrowind Chapter. And we know how expensive Super Bowl ads are. They have the capital.

No, the "cost" of this performance is our characters history and re-playability.

dzugarueb17_ESO wrote: »

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Amottica wrote: »

dzugarueb17_ESO wrote: »

Amottica wrote: »

Character-based achievements vs account side, to me, seems to be such a trial reason to leave a game, one of the best MMORPGs available today.

Unability to replay the game from scratch is a trivial reason to you?

I have not experienced a real issue with my new character. The ones I have read about, some seem to be something that will be fixed and the others are not that important to me.

So yes based on my actual experience so far I have not experienced an inability to play this new character.

Many of those cant and wont be fixed, and that's obvious - because the data was irreversibly deleted. Moreover, ZOS didn't even acknowledged anything of those as a bug, despite thousands of angry posts already! Thats what the thread is about - the direction they're taking. Not important to you, you personally haven't noticed anything wrong (first they came for the roleplayers, and I did not speak out, right?), and a successful MMO can't be possibly run into the ground, right?

The OPs post boils down to ZOS should fix their code and hire extra resources so there is no opportunity cost in terms of reduced features, which would be good practice if they are long term planners. I suspect however managers rather than tech leads have too much control.
Its not cheap though, this is the state of the game:

- WVW - Broken and not remotely fit for purpose. Requires an acknowledged (finally) major rewrite of the core code. Huge cost, probably equivalent to a 2- 5 of expansions worth of dev resource.
- BG, Impacted by performance issues and animation cancelling and build issues. Unattractive to new players, dead population. Significant redesign required.
- Housing - broken. ZOS cynically market large housing even though they had to put a hard limit on the amount of furniture because the engine cannot cope. Assume big build to instance housing sections or change core engine.
- Dungeons and raids. Buggy, performance issues. Almost certainly should be considered in core engine redesign.

The only thing that actually works in ESO is open world PVE in general and gfx, which is good. The above represents years of work that will likely be watered down based on past record.

Just pointing out that the Steam average player count for the last thirty days has now crashed to the lowest level since December 2019. The significance of that (beyond it being a long time ago and pre-pandemic) is that it's the month after the Undaunted event had to be cancelled within hours because it broke the servers, after possibly the worst six months performance-wise in the history of the game, with the dungeon finder barely usable for long periods of time and having to be drastically reworked. December 2019 is what the player numbers looked like after months of such severe performance woes that anything now still pales by comparison; the game lost more than a third of its player base in the second half of that year.

That after ESO's pandemic boom and a couple of pretty successful years since, they're now back down at those numbers does not sound like a game in a healthy state.

Stamicka wrote: »

Blocking and Barswapping
During the “year of performance” ZOS changed the way block and barswapping worked. It is significantly slower than it once was and it is very noticeable for endgame players. I have seen PVE tanks as well as PvPers complain about the clunkiness of block and barswap. This clunkiness only started occurring after the “performance improving” changes were made to these features.

One of the most aggravating things for me in this game (save for recently issues) is bar swapping. I'll bar swap... or at least think I did. In reality I'm mashing the wrong buttons, wasting resources, and doing nothing useful. Depending on circumstances, I may not even realize it for a few seconds. What's more, even when it does work, it's still a lost GCD.

matterandstuff wrote: »

Just pointing out that the Steam average player count for the last thirty days has now crashed to the lowest level since December 2019. The significance of that (beyond it being a long time ago and pre-pandemic) is that it's the month after the Undaunted event had to be cancelled within hours because it broke the servers, after possibly the worst six months performance-wise in the history of the game, with the dungeon finder barely usable for long periods of time and having to be drastically reworked. December 2019 is what the player numbers looked like after months of such severe performance woes that anything now still pales by comparison; the game lost more than a third of its player base in the second half of that year.

That after ESO's pandemic boom and a couple of pretty successful years since, they're now back down at those numbers does not sound like a game in a healthy state.

You just answered yourself. Because of restrictions being lifted, people are able to GO OUT and do other things now besides being lock inside the house. I'm sure many people were ONLY playing ESO because there was little else TO DO... just because we're losing them as a player doesn't mean the game has gotten worse or that it had somehow improved during the pandemic, if anything it got WORSE during the pandemic but again, people kept playing because they couldn't go out and do anything else. I'm honestly not surprised to see the numbers going down as places open up again and are starting to get back to having life off the computer. I just wish ZOS would get their people back to the office so they could start working together as an in-person team to figure this stuff out instead of continuing to try to do everything remotely... which clearly IS NOT WORKING.

Jaraal wrote: »

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matterandstuff wrote: »

Just pointing out that the Steam average player count for the last thirty days has now crashed to the lowest level since December 2019. The significance of that (beyond it being a long time ago and pre-pandemic) is that it's the month after the Undaunted event had to be cancelled within hours because it broke the servers, after possibly the worst six months performance-wise in the history of the game, with the dungeon finder barely usable for long periods of time and having to be drastically reworked. December 2019 is what the player numbers looked like after months of such severe performance woes that anything now still pales by comparison; the game lost more than a third of its player base in the second half of that year.

That after ESO's pandemic boom and a couple of pretty successful years since, they're now back down at those numbers does not sound like a game in a healthy state.

As of today, it's the biggest 30 day percentage drop since February of 2016, and still dropping.

It speaks for itself.

The numbers also show that the average amount of players playing via steam is 13,807.7. The last time it was like this was December of 2019.

The peak amount of players is currently at 26,541. The last time it was this low was technically December of 2021, but also March of 2020.

March 2020 was when the pandemic was really only just starting and December 2019 was still pre pandemic. The numbers only say that the game is only going back to pre pandemic numbers now that everyone is going home. So of course the population gain is going to be a large negative percentage.

I'm not saying people HAVEN'T left the game and stopped playing because of the issues going on. But the numbers certainly do not indicate that yet, and should not be used as an argument yet for people leaving in droves because of game issues. Besides those are just Steam numbers. They are only a mild idea on how the actual game pop is going. So all in all, wait until we have more certain results of people leaving angry vs leaving due to pandemic restrictions lifting.

DarrowLykos wrote: »

Servers = Spit and duct tape = more money coming in, less money going out. (Common problem in a lot of businesses)

Business first, game second.

Which usually ends up backfiring completely. You know... when the problem needing the "spit and duck tape" solution becomes worse and worse. So rather then paying the maybe highish cost now to repair it when it needs to, you just keep adding that duct tape on. Until later down the road it becomes so bad that you're looking at a massive repair or replace job, which wouldn't have had to happened at all if you just did a proper fix in the beginning.

This isn't a ZOS exclusive thing. This is a corporation thing. Because not wanting to spend a bit of money now, only to have to spend ten times that much later, is SO much more smart...

RisenEclipse wrote: »

Which usually ends up backfiring completely. You know... when the problem needing the "spit and duck tape" solution becomes worse and worse. So rather then paying the maybe highish cost now to repair it when it needs to, you just keep adding that duct tape on. Until later down the road it becomes so bad that you're looking at a massive repair or replace job, which wouldn't have had to happened at all if you just did a proper fix in the beginning.

This isn't a ZOS exclusive thing. This is a corporation thing. Because not wanting to spend a bit of money now, only to have to spend ten times that much later, is SO much more smart...

OT a bit, but this is why I always say, "Cheap and frugal aren't the same thing; they're opposites."

Lumsdenml wrote: »

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Stamicka wrote: »

Account Wide Achievements
This is the most recent change that was done for the sake of performance.

I don't think this was the sole reason it was done. I think a lot of people (despite what the vocal minority on the forums say) asked for this, and they just mentioned that one of the side benefits is that it would help with performance. I'd say we are too early in to say if that is true or not, but I don't think performance was the driving reason for this.

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Stamicka wrote: »

Cyrodiil Populations
Instead of working towards a solution to allow for smooth large scale PvP battles

There is leterally an entire thread entitled "ESO PvP Update – January 2022" where they tell you they are working on a solution to this issue.

There's a difference between asking for account-wide achievements and being happy with the way in which it was implemented. That is very clear from the discussions both on this forum and on the PTS forum. Many of those who want account-wide achievements don't want to lose individual character progression tracking, and when polls and other threads have asked about account-wide achievements it turned out that most contributors on both sides of the argument were happy with the compromise of having character-based achievements with an account-wide achievement summary.

TPishek wrote: »

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Jaraal wrote: »

matterandstuff wrote: »

Just pointing out that the Steam average player count for the last thirty days has now crashed to the lowest level since December 2019. The significance of that (beyond it being a long time ago and pre-pandemic) is that it's the month after the Undaunted event had to be cancelled within hours because it broke the servers, after possibly the worst six months performance-wise in the history of the game, with the dungeon finder barely usable for long periods of time and having to be drastically reworked. December 2019 is what the player numbers looked like after months of such severe performance woes that anything now still pales by comparison; the game lost more than a third of its player base in the second half of that year.

That after ESO's pandemic boom and a couple of pretty successful years since, they're now back down at those numbers does not sound like a game in a healthy state.

As of today, it's the biggest 30 day percentage drop since February of 2016, and still dropping.

It speaks for itself.

I would guess that the drop had more to do with the fact people couldn't stay connected or log in at all, rather than something a majority of people probably don't even notice.

A majority didn't notice? Pretty sure everyone in my entire guild noticed the horrendous performance and bugs, if they were able to log in. Our Discord has been blowing up about it for the past week... everyone noticed.