Vitality loss if you DC? Fix the problem ZOS

sshogrin · October 31

There is now a vitality loss if a player DCs during a dungeon/trial run.
I find this to be a horrible decision on ZOS's part since they still have yet to address the lag/rubber banding/frame freeze/DC issues that have plagued the game for over 9 months. There's even a thread that has more than 74 pages (as of this posting) regarding these issues that has been going for close to 5 months.
I understand the vitality loss for PTE, but for DCing? How about if ZOS actually fix these issues. Many of us have posted our trace route and find an issue that is most likely the ISP ZOS uses since we get massive packet loss right before their servers.
@ZOS_Kevin can this be fixed ASAP? Or at least fix the connection issues...this isn't on the client end, this is on ZOS's end.

LadyGP · October 31

Good luck.

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/658253/zos-massive-spike-in-ping-lag-in-recent-days-what-gives#latest

sarahthes · October 31

sshogrin wrote: »

There is now a vitality loss if a player DCs during a dungeon/trial run.
I find this to be a horrible decision on ZOS's part since they still have yet to address the lag/rubber banding/frame freeze/DC issues that have plagued the game for over 9 months. There's even a thread that has more than 74 pages (as of this posting) regarding these issues that has been going for close to 5 months.
I understand the vitality loss for PTE, but for DCing? How about if ZOS actually fix these issues. Many of us have posted our trace route and find an issue that is most likely the ISP ZOS uses since we get massive packet loss right before their servers.
@ZOS_Kevin can this be fixed ASAP? Or at least fix the connection issues...this isn't on the client end, this is on ZOS's end.

Well, if people wouldn't exploit by disconnecting or porting out of the trial to skip mechanics on trifecta runs they wouldn't need to add stuff like this.

This was added to stop a specific exploit. It only triggers in combat.

Edit: the timing is kind of bold though.

MashmalloMan · October 31

sarahthes wrote: »

sshogrin wrote: »

There is now a vitality loss if a player DCs during a dungeon/trial run.
I find this to be a horrible decision on ZOS's part since they still have yet to address the lag/rubber banding/frame freeze/DC issues that have plagued the game for over 9 months. There's even a thread that has more than 74 pages (as of this posting) regarding these issues that has been going for close to 5 months.
I understand the vitality loss for PTE, but for DCing? How about if ZOS actually fix these issues. Many of us have posted our trace route and find an issue that is most likely the ISP ZOS uses since we get massive packet loss right before their servers.
@ZOS_Kevin can this be fixed ASAP? Or at least fix the connection issues...this isn't on the client end, this is on ZOS's end.

Well, if people wouldn't exploit by disconnecting or porting out of the trial to skip mechanics they wouldn't need to add stuff like this.

This was added to stop a specific exploit. It only triggers in combat.

Edit: the timing is kind of bold though.

As with most of these consumer UNfriendly decisions, the acts of 0.01% shouldn't decide how 99.9% of the rest of the population plays the game.

This is similar to how they handle the amount of sets and skills gutted due to requiring "in combat" like BRP DW because apparently, some people I've never heard of, we're swapping the set out before a boss fight... for like 14s of 6% DMG. News flash, big whoop lol.

ZOS is quick to destroy the functionality, and worse yet, fun of things just to prevent "exploits" to things no one cares about with half-baked solutions. I'm not going to pretend I know how to fix the vitality problem off the top of my head, but for sets and abilities they could easily code in that BRP DW can't be removed while Blade Cloak is active. Instead, they choose easy, low effort solutions, to practically non existent problems that inevitably cause more harm than good.

Best part is, they're taking this moral high ground that you shouldn't cheat a no death run, while being completely comfortable with players selling them for millions of gold, to which it's probably used to buy crowns, effectively a real world currency. Make any of it make sense?

sarahthes · October 31

MashmalloMan wrote: »

sarahthes wrote: »

sshogrin wrote: »

There is now a vitality loss if a player DCs during a dungeon/trial run.
I find this to be a horrible decision on ZOS's part since they still have yet to address the lag/rubber banding/frame freeze/DC issues that have plagued the game for over 9 months. There's even a thread that has more than 74 pages (as of this posting) regarding these issues that has been going for close to 5 months.
I understand the vitality loss for PTE, but for DCing? How about if ZOS actually fix these issues. Many of us have posted our trace route and find an issue that is most likely the ISP ZOS uses since we get massive packet loss right before their servers.
@ZOS_Kevin can this be fixed ASAP? Or at least fix the connection issues...this isn't on the client end, this is on ZOS's end.

Well, if people wouldn't exploit by disconnecting or porting out of the trial to skip mechanics they wouldn't need to add stuff like this.

This was added to stop a specific exploit. It only triggers in combat.

Edit: the timing is kind of bold though.

As with most of these consumer UNfriendly decisions, the acts of 0.01% shouldn't decide how 99.9% of the rest of the population plays the game.

This is similar to how they handle the amount of sets and skills gutted due to requiring "in combat" like BRP DW because apparently, some people I've never heard of, we're swapping the set out before a boss fight... for like 14s of 6% DMG. News flash, big whoop lol.

ZOS is quick to destroy the functionality, and worse yet, fun of things just to prevent "exploits" to things no one cares about with half-baked solutions. I'm not going to pretend I know how to fix the vitality problem off the top of my head, but for sets and abilities they could easily code in that BRP DW can't be removed while Blade Cloak is active. Instead, they choose easy, low effort solutions, to practically non existent problems that inevitably cause more harm than good.

Best part is, they're taking this moral high ground that you shouldn't cheat a no death run, while being completely comfortable with players selling them for millions of gold, to which it's probably used to buy crowns, effectively a real world currency. Make any of it make sense?

You shouldn't be able to port out while in combat period, but sometimes you get stuck in combat while dead so they can't ban PTE entirely. A vit loss for porting out is acceptable. I suspect the only way they could code this is by leaving the trial triggering it, so the timing is a bit bold given the current situation, but there's been a rash of exploits used for both Unstoppable and Mind Mender that really need to be prevented. TTT also, and GH and IR. All of these trials have death-causing mechanics that can be cancelled by strategic teleporting.

Many, many crashes are client side and not due to problems with the game or server. I don't know if you've noticed, but the bulk of crashes in a group tend to happen to the same 1 or 2 people over and over again. Typically it's an add-on issue or a hardware or driver problem. These are different from server wide hangs that we sometimes see affect an entire group at once.

Trifecta carries violate TOS most of the time as the bulk of them require account sharing and are paid for with real money or purchased. They shouldn't be brought up in this conversation, but addressed in their own right.

Dagoth_Rac · October 31

If the server had sufficient exception handling to recognize a server-side issue and mark it as not-vitality-impacting, it would probably have sufficient exception handling to recognize a server-side issue and ... not crash. The fact that there is a crash is pretty clear evidence that something happened that the server was not exp0ecting and could not handle. So all it sees is you were connected and now you are not. Was that server side? Did you hit Alt-F4 when things in your no-death run got uncomfortable? The server literally does not know.

I think it is fine to request more work on fixing server side crashes. But the very nature of a crash implies uncaught exceptions and thus no way to exit cleanly and keep notes about whether vitality should be affected. So as long as game cannot really tell difference between a server side crash and client-side shenanigans, and as long as seemingly every high-end group will use every "you-call-it-an-exploit-but-I-call-it-feature" to get around intended combat mechanics, ZOS will close the loopholes.

Varana · October 31

sarahthes wrote: »

sshogrin wrote: »

There is now a vitality loss if a player DCs during a dungeon/trial run.
I find this to be a horrible decision on ZOS's part since they still have yet to address the lag/rubber banding/frame freeze/DC issues that have plagued the game for over 9 months. There's even a thread that has more than 74 pages (as of this posting) regarding these issues that has been going for close to 5 months.
I understand the vitality loss for PTE, but for DCing? How about if ZOS actually fix these issues. Many of us have posted our trace route and find an issue that is most likely the ISP ZOS uses since we get massive packet loss right before their servers.
@ZOS_Kevin can this be fixed ASAP? Or at least fix the connection issues...this isn't on the client end, this is on ZOS's end.

Well, if people wouldn't exploit by disconnecting or porting out of the trial to skip mechanics on trifecta runs they wouldn't need to add stuff like this.

This was added to stop a specific exploit. It only triggers in combat.

Edit: the timing is kind of bold though.

If they had a decently coded game, they could distinguish between PTEing and a crash/disconnect.

BahometZ · October 31

What an insane move.

sarahthes · October 31

Varana wrote: »

sarahthes wrote: »

sshogrin wrote: »

There is now a vitality loss if a player DCs during a dungeon/trial run.
I find this to be a horrible decision on ZOS's part since they still have yet to address the lag/rubber banding/frame freeze/DC issues that have plagued the game for over 9 months. There's even a thread that has more than 74 pages (as of this posting) regarding these issues that has been going for close to 5 months.
I understand the vitality loss for PTE, but for DCing? How about if ZOS actually fix these issues. Many of us have posted our trace route and find an issue that is most likely the ISP ZOS uses since we get massive packet loss right before their servers.
@ZOS_Kevin can this be fixed ASAP? Or at least fix the connection issues...this isn't on the client end, this is on ZOS's end.

Well, if people wouldn't exploit by disconnecting or porting out of the trial to skip mechanics on trifecta runs they wouldn't need to add stuff like this.

This was added to stop a specific exploit. It only triggers in combat.

Edit: the timing is kind of bold though.

If they had a decently coded game, they could distinguish between PTEing and a crash/disconnect.

How do they tell the difference between a crash and someone pulling their ethernet cable?

Soarora · October 31

MashmalloMan wrote: »

sarahthes wrote: »

sshogrin wrote: »

There is now a vitality loss if a player DCs during a dungeon/trial run.
I find this to be a horrible decision on ZOS's part since they still have yet to address the lag/rubber banding/frame freeze/DC issues that have plagued the game for over 9 months. There's even a thread that has more than 74 pages (as of this posting) regarding these issues that has been going for close to 5 months.
I understand the vitality loss for PTE, but for DCing? How about if ZOS actually fix these issues. Many of us have posted our trace route and find an issue that is most likely the ISP ZOS uses since we get massive packet loss right before their servers.
@ZOS_Kevin can this be fixed ASAP? Or at least fix the connection issues...this isn't on the client end, this is on ZOS's end.

Well, if people wouldn't exploit by disconnecting or porting out of the trial to skip mechanics they wouldn't need to add stuff like this.

This was added to stop a specific exploit. It only triggers in combat.

Edit: the timing is kind of bold though.

As with most of these consumer UNfriendly decisions, the acts of 0.01% shouldn't decide how 99.9% of the rest of the population plays the game.

This is similar to how they handle the amount of sets and skills gutted due to requiring "in combat" like BRP DW because apparently, some people I've never heard of, we're swapping the set out before a boss fight... for like 14s of 6% DMG. News flash, big whoop lol.

ZOS is quick to destroy the functionality, and worse yet, fun of things just to prevent "exploits" to things no one cares about with half-baked solutions. I'm not going to pretend I know how to fix the vitality problem off the top of my head, but for sets and abilities they could easily code in that BRP DW can't be removed while Blade Cloak is active. Instead, they choose easy, low effort solutions, to practically non existent problems that inevitably cause more harm than good.

Best part is, they're taking this moral high ground that you shouldn't cheat a no death run, while being completely comfortable with players selling them for millions of gold, to which it's probably used to buy crowns, effectively a real world currency. Make any of it make sense?

I, too, thought surely no one’s actually going to pte exploit. Especially after we had pte in combat disabled for a time. But no, it happened. And once it happens once, it’ll just keep happening. You can’t kill an idea. Yes, the timing is bad because the servers are struggling. But then again, how often are you surviving someone crashing in combat? I lost dawnbringer twice now to people crashing. They die while they’re crashing.

PeacefulAnarchy · November 1

sarahthes wrote: »

Varana wrote: »

sarahthes wrote: »

sshogrin wrote: »

There is now a vitality loss if a player DCs during a dungeon/trial run.
I find this to be a horrible decision on ZOS's part since they still have yet to address the lag/rubber banding/frame freeze/DC issues that have plagued the game for over 9 months. There's even a thread that has more than 74 pages (as of this posting) regarding these issues that has been going for close to 5 months.
I understand the vitality loss for PTE, but for DCing? How about if ZOS actually fix these issues. Many of us have posted our trace route and find an issue that is most likely the ISP ZOS uses since we get massive packet loss right before their servers.
@ZOS_Kevin can this be fixed ASAP? Or at least fix the connection issues...this isn't on the client end, this is on ZOS's end.

Well, if people wouldn't exploit by disconnecting or porting out of the trial to skip mechanics on trifecta runs they wouldn't need to add stuff like this.

This was added to stop a specific exploit. It only triggers in combat.

Edit: the timing is kind of bold though.

If they had a decently coded game, they could distinguish between PTEing and a crash/disconnect.

How do they tell the difference between a crash and someone pulling their ethernet cable?

What mechanics does pulling your ethernet cable save you from? When you crash, whether server caused, alt f4 caused or ethernet cable pull caused, you remain in the instance for some time before disappearing. If your character is able to survive 10+ seconds without dying with no input then I'm pretty sure you don't need to crash your game to survive the mechanic.

Rkindaleft · November 1

Not really part of the OPs topic, but as there has been discussion about PTE I will say I would not support a change where you are unable leave instance while in combat until they actually start to fix combat related bugs. They already tried to do this last year in the so called "QoL" update but it just made things more annoying and tedious because of how often bugs that impede progress actually occur.

moderatelyfatman · November 1

Exactly how much of a problem is it that players are PTEing so avoid dying in a trifecta run?
Compare that to the numbers of players who are now going to be adversely affected because they crashed or got logged out during the game through no fault of their own.

ZOS's response is akin to a doctor dealing with a paper cut by amputating a limb.

@sarahthes
"Many, many crashes are client side and not due to problems with the game or server. I don't know if you've noticed, but the bulk of crashes in a group tend to happen to the same 1 or 2 people over and over again. Typically it's an add-on issue or a hardware or driver problem. These are different from server wide hangs that we sometimes see affect an entire group at once."

I really don't think most of the issues are client side. If that's true, then why don't I and many other players have frequent crashes while playing other MMOs? For GW2 I've been logged out only once (excluding a couple of instances when my internet failed) in over 300 hours. I have been doing group content in overland and instanced Raids on a regular basis (2/week for the last 2 months) and not one player has been logged out or crashed yet! I haven't played FF14 as long but I can easily go 5-8 hours without anything happening.
In contrast, ESO can crash or log me out multiple times in an hour. When I'm in trials, often up to half the group can get logged out and it's not always the same people.

sarahthes · November 1

moderatelyfatman wrote: »

Exactly how much of a problem is it that players are PTEing so avoid dying in a trifecta run?
Compare that to the numbers of players who are now going to be adversely affected because they crashed or got logged out during the game through no fault of their own.

ZOS's response is akin to a doctor dealing with a paper cut by amputating a limb.

@sarahthes
"Many, many crashes are client side and not due to problems with the game or server. I don't know if you've noticed, but the bulk of crashes in a group tend to happen to the same 1 or 2 people over and over again. Typically it's an add-on issue or a hardware or driver problem. These are different from server wide hangs that we sometimes see affect an entire group at once."

I really don't think most of the issues are client side. If that's true, then why don't I and many other players have frequent crashes while playing other MMOs? For GW2 I've been logged out only once (excluding a couple of instances when my internet failed) in over 300 hours. I have been doing group content in overland and instanced Raids on a regular basis (2/week for the last 2 months) and not one player has been logged out or crashed yet! I haven't played FF14 as long but I can easily go 5-8 hours without anything happening.
In contrast, ESO can crash or log me out multiple times in an hour. When I'm in trials, often up to half the group can get logged out and it's not always the same people.

I can count on one hand the number of times I've crashed in the last 3 months. I have experienced ping spikes and server hangs. I have not disconnected or had a crash to desktop.

In my one raid group it is always the same 3 people who crash over and over. Nobody else does. One guy sometimes disconnects but he's got kinda bad internet.

There are specific add-ons used in raiding that are known to cause crashes but that haven't yet been removed from esoui or minion, as well.

There are also people who disconnect every time they die to a bloody bash in Rockgrove. Whether that's a code issue or an add-on issue I couldn't tell you.

Varana · November 1

sarahthes wrote: »

Varana wrote: »

sarahthes wrote: »

sshogrin wrote: »

There is now a vitality loss if a player DCs during a dungeon/trial run.
I find this to be a horrible decision on ZOS's part since they still have yet to address the lag/rubber banding/frame freeze/DC issues that have plagued the game for over 9 months. There's even a thread that has more than 74 pages (as of this posting) regarding these issues that has been going for close to 5 months.
I understand the vitality loss for PTE, but for DCing? How about if ZOS actually fix these issues. Many of us have posted our trace route and find an issue that is most likely the ISP ZOS uses since we get massive packet loss right before their servers.
@ZOS_Kevin can this be fixed ASAP? Or at least fix the connection issues...this isn't on the client end, this is on ZOS's end.

Well, if people wouldn't exploit by disconnecting or porting out of the trial to skip mechanics on trifecta runs they wouldn't need to add stuff like this.

This was added to stop a specific exploit. It only triggers in combat.

Edit: the timing is kind of bold though.

If they had a decently coded game, they could distinguish between PTEing and a crash/disconnect.

How do they tell the difference between a crash and someone pulling their ethernet cable?

You can re-enter the fight pretty quickly after PTEing.

Disconnecting, even if you manage to do it in a way that makes you leave the fight immediately, takes a few minutes to recover from. Can you still abuse this? I guess so, in rare cases. Is it a problem worth massively effing over others who just suffer from the game's poor performance? Definitely not.

ZOS_Kevin · November 1

Hi all, we've shared this thread on the Vitality change with the team. However as of right now, this is working as intended.

code65536 · November 1

sarahthes wrote: »

How do they tell the difference between a crash and someone pulling their ethernet cable?

That's irrelevant. Someone's ISP going belly-up, someone pulling the plug, a cat tripping over the power cord, killing the process via Task Manager, etc., will all appear identical to the server. But who cares?

The abuses are all with PTE, because PTE is instant. Z'Maja targeting me with a heavy attack and I'm not the tank? I can leave the instance before that thing even hits me. If my ISP glitches out or I lose power or I kill ESO in Task Manager, I don't disappear. I will stand there doing absolutely nothing for a lengthy period of time. And as someone else pointed out already, if you are in a situation that's so non-threatening where just standing still for half a minute doesn't kill you, then why did you need to disconnect anyway?

It's the instant nature of PTE that makes it open to abuse. I've never heard of anyone unplugging their network cable as a way to abuse a mechanic. (Though I suppose claiming technical difficulties can be an effective way to bail out of a group without hurting anyone's feelings, but that's not anything that should concern ZOS.)

sshogrin · November 1

ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

Hi all, we've shared this thread on the Vitality change with the team. However as of right now, this is working as intended.

Can we actually fix the server issues of disconnects finally?
I see major packet loss right before the ZOS servers. Is this a problem with your ISP? It's the last server in the trace route, so that points to an issue there.

acastanza_ESO · November 1

ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

Hi all, we've shared this thread on the Vitality change with the team. However as of right now, this is working as intended.

With the current state of the ESO servers and their perpetual lack of stability, this is completely unacceptable and will only reinforce the apparent death spiral as end game players leave.

BahometZ · November 1

ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

Hi all, we've shared this thread on the Vitality change with the team. However as of right now, this is working as intended.

This is not a great response for the many people who are invested in end game raiding and for whatever reason suffer from regular disconnections. Honestly yet another reason to put less time in to this game, and play games that for whatever reason don't have regular disconnections.

Murderhound · November 1

This is a dumpster fire waiting to happen. You want people to stop running the hardest achievement content in the game. This is the way. Your game isn't even stable enough to keep people in the instance 100% of the time. So maybe, try not be so heavy handed trying to stop a small percentage of players from doing this.

o_Primate_o · November 1

I understand the desire to have vit drop with a DC as ppl could force a dc (quit game), but if they do that, then they (ZOS) needs to address the dc issues ppl have. Or worse, maybe after one or two dcs in a raid then vit starts dropping.

IIBonesII · November 1

ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

Hi all, we've shared this thread on the Vitality change with the team. However as of right now, this is working as intended.

As others have pointed out, given the current state of the servers, I find this completely unacceptable. Who even thought this was a good idea? I get the PTE reason.. but for dc'ing? No. Nope. Not with these servers. You don't get to swerve on fixing bugs and dc issues and also add penalties to dc'ing in trial instances. How does this even make sense to *literally anyone*

SaintJohnHM · 2:32PM

@ZOS_Kevin No. No. ZOS's terrible server performance leads to DCs in trifecta runs ALL THE TIME. Don't make your game punish us for bad servers and connection.

PrincessOfThieves · 3:10PM

code65536 wrote: »

sarahthes wrote: »

How do they tell the difference between a crash and someone pulling their ethernet cable?

That's irrelevant. Someone's ISP going belly-up, someone pulling the plug, a cat tripping over the power cord, killing the process via Task Manager, etc., will all appear identical to the server. But who cares?

The abuses are all with PTE, because PTE is instant. Z'Maja targeting me with a heavy attack and I'm not the tank? I can leave the instance before that thing even hits me. If my ISP glitches out or I lose power or I kill ESO in Task Manager, I don't disappear. I will stand there doing absolutely nothing for a lengthy period of time. And as someone else pointed out already, if you are in a situation that's so non-threatening where just standing still for half a minute doesn't kill you, then why did you need to disconnect anyway?

It's the instant nature of PTE that makes it open to abuse. I've never heard of anyone unplugging their network cable as a way to abuse a mechanic. (Though I suppose claiming technical difficulties can be an effective way to bail out of a group without hurting anyone's feelings, but that's not anything that should concern ZOS.)

This. I am not a super experienced player, but I don't see how people could exploit dcing in dungeons and trials.
Every time I was in a trial and someone crashed, I could see their character linger there and take damage for a while before they finally disappear.
This is a very weird change considering the current state of the game, I hope it will be reverted back.