Mathius_Mordred wrote: »

If this means no ball groups and no bombers I'll be well happy!

Ball groups and bombers make it more fun! At least I think they do. Nothing more satisfying than jumping from the top floor and chaining their healer down to a swarm of sharks below. Bombers..... just gotta tip your hat. High risk high reward.

Major_Mangle wrote: »

Stridig wrote: »

It's not a "mode". It's a test for a short period of time.

The EXACT same thing was said a few years back when no proc was only " a test for a short period of time" and see where that lead....

Similar patterns are now seen with a small but extremely vocal minority praising these tests and spewing borderline propaganda how "good and refreshing" theae tests are. It's the same all over again and I don't see anything good come out of this.

sarahthes wrote: »

n333rs wrote: »

The only hope is that it never reaches the live servers as the mode is the single most anti-fun, anti-enjoyment thing in existence and hopefully they the developers never attempt to reuse anything from the mode for the good of the game

So you don't want them to try to figure out how deep the code deficit that makes cyrodiil lag actually is?

If the price is an unrecognisable stripped down preset PvP then I'd rather have some manageable lag during primetime Cyrodiil (Cyrodiil performance for the last few months has unironically not been that bad). After the no proc fiasco I've very little faith/trust in these kind of tests.

"Similar patterns are now seen with a small but extremely vocal minority praising these tests and spewing borderline propaganda how "good and refreshing" theae tests are. It's the same all over again and I don't see anything good come out of this."

Can we please stop pretending that players whose takeaways from the tests that don't align with yours are somehow being disingenuous? It's not that hard to imagine that other people's experience is not identical to yours. At the very least, let's attribute ignorance before we attribute malice, yeah? We all want the Cyrodil PvP experience to be the best it can be. Pretending there is a group of vocal bad actors that don't want Cyrodil to improve so badly that they would come on the forums and lie about their experience is absurd.

Tonturri wrote: »

I don't mind that ZOS is seemingly making a genuine attempt to figure out what's causing performance issues. My beef is that they also seem to expect players to work like actual employees in service to it. I'm sure some don't mind, and will even enjoy it, but the testing environment they've made strips out a lot of what I find enjoyable about pvp - figuring out a build and customizing my character. I'll give it a go and I hope they get some really good, actionable data.

I don’t mind helping out with the testing myself. There just isn’t a good way for them to test large scale PvP in house. Besides, they’d be playing locally on their server with no internet lag so it wouldn’t be a good test anyway.

If there are enough people on this new campaign I might even be able to bring my old stamplar back for some fun. She wasn’t even running proc sets back then, before they nerfed templar to nothingness in PvP, so she might do well again. She just does daily crafting writs now, such a shame since she used to be a lot of fun.

It would be great to get better performance back (though I personally only rarely suffer any disconnects) and reduce or eliminate the carry sets, and bring back skill based gameplay.

katanagirl1 wrote: »

Tonturri wrote: »

I don't mind that ZOS is seemingly making a genuine attempt to figure out what's causing performance issues. My beef is that they also seem to expect players to work like actual employees in service to it. I'm sure some don't mind, and will even enjoy it, but the testing environment they've made strips out a lot of what I find enjoyable about pvp - figuring out a build and customizing my character. I'll give it a go and I hope they get some really good, actionable data.

I don’t mind helping out with the testing myself. There just isn’t a good way for them to test large scale PvP in house. Besides, they’d be playing locally on their server with no internet lag so it wouldn’t be a good test anyway.

If there are enough people on this new campaign I might even be able to bring my old stamplar back for some fun. She wasn’t even running proc sets back then, before they nerfed templar to nothingness in PvP, so she might do well again. She just does daily crafting writs now, such a shame since she used to be a lot of fun.

It would be great to get better performance back (though I personally only rarely suffer any disconnects) and reduce or eliminate the carry sets, and bring back skill based gameplay.

I'm still having a delightful time on my melee magicka templar, but I have all the other classes leveled as well and it's unfortunate how it compares to them, and how much power is in beam (I don't like running it, but recently slotted it a few days ago after seeing how much I was missing out on).

I think it's important for testing to be fun, though, and I'm dubious about how much of a turnout ZOS is gonna get with everything so striped down. I hope I'm in the minority. That said, it will be interesting to see what's effective with everything striped out - it looks like it's class skills only, which means templar healers could very well be extremely valuable again, at least in that very limited environment.

Since our stats constantly change in combat, the server needs to dynamically calculate every single tick of damage or healing on dozens of players. That may cause a major performance drop when many players affect each other, even when on average the server is powerful enough to barely break a sweat.

The bad state of overland performance (npcs popping in with a huge delay, enemies aggroing before you even see them), may be a side effect of moving more and more server capacity to PVP to try and improve performance there.

Throwing more and more power at a problem has its limits, though, sometimes far more can be accomplished by thinking outside of the box and changing the way you approach the task at hand.

This is a test to see how much performance impact the dynamic calculations actually have. If this turns out to be a major factor, ZOS can start to optimize the code or think about alternatives, like normalizing numbers in PVP or letting part of the calculations be done by the client, which then would require stronger anti-cheat measures.

Toanis wrote: »

Since our stats constantly change in combat, the server needs to dynamically calculate every single tick of damage or healing on dozens of players. That may cause a major performance drop when many players affect each other, even when on average the server is powerful enough to barely break a sweat.

The bad state of overland performance (npcs popping in with a huge delay, enemies aggroing before you even see them), may be a side effect of moving more and more server capacity to PVP to try and improve performance there.

Throwing more and more power at a problem has its limits, though, sometimes far more can be accomplished by thinking outside of the box and changing the way you approach the task at hand.

This is a test to see how much performance impact the dynamic calculations actually have. If this turns out to be a major factor, ZOS can start to optimize the code or think about alternatives, like normalizing numbers in PVP or letting part of the calculations be done by the client, which then would require stronger anti-cheat measures.

I don’t think there has been any moving of server capacity to PvP. It is one single instance, unlike zones in PvE. You can’t split it up. They could actually save some capacity by removing all but the main Gray Host campaign and Blackreach because the others are constantly empty.

DeadlySerious wrote: »

ZOS hasn't even tried to do some of the things that would make the current system far, far less calculation intensive before trying to create an entirely new system. The approach to this problem is not making sense to me.

Yes, you don't understand the approach to the problem.

What they're doing is finding out where the fault(s) lie in the chain of systems.

Much like diagnosing a faulty part of a PC. You strip it bare and slowly add each part one by one until you find the thing causing the problem.

What they're doing, is stripping the mode bare and seeing if there's a problem inherent in the core of the mode.

They will likely then add in each other system back in (Such as skill morphs, proc sets etc) until they find what aspects are truly causing the problems. Once they know what is causing the problems, they can take measures to address them.

This is far more effective than just doing bunches of stuff without knowing exactly what is causing the problems. Like, if proc sets aren't the issue and you faff around with proc sets for a few years... You've done nothing.

The premise of this methodology isn't that this new TEST is the basis of their new vision for the mode (If it was, it wouldn't be an OPTIONAL campaign touted as a TEST. It'd simply be the new mode. Much like how they implemented the new BG's replacing the old ones)

It's simply a way of fault finding to figure out exactly what the problem actually is. By checking things one system at a time. Instead of working on the assumption that the problem is proc sets/crosshealing/buff stacking/CPs or any number of potential sources.

Taril wrote: »

What they're doing, is stripping the mode bare and seeing if there's a problem inherent in the core of the mode.

There are some curious redesigns, like how does stapling a burst heal to Cloak improve performance?

Stridig wrote: »

It's not a "mode". It's a test for a short period of time.

And it is helpful for someone to explain why they do not like something. Just saying I do not want it does not provide any meaningful feedback. Whether it relates to a test or change Zenimax is making or made does not matter.

Devs will swipe left and move on to any feedback that does not offer noteworthy information to help them make changes.

Major_Mangle wrote: »

Stridig wrote: »

It's not a "mode". It's a test for a short period of time.

The EXACT same thing was said a few years back when no proc was only " a test for a short period of time" and see where that lead....

Similar patterns are now seen with a small but extremely vocal minority praising these tests and spewing borderline propaganda how "good and refreshing" theae tests are. It's the same all over again and I don't see anything good come out of this.

sarahthes wrote: »

n333rs wrote: »

The only hope is that it never reaches the live servers as the mode is the single most anti-fun, anti-enjoyment thing in existence and hopefully they the developers never attempt to reuse anything from the mode for the good of the game

So you don't want them to try to figure out how deep the code deficit that makes cyrodiil lag actually is?

If the price is an unrecognisable stripped down preset PvP then I'd rather have some manageable lag during primetime Cyrodiil (Cyrodiil performance for the last few months has unironically not been that bad). After the no proc fiasco I've very little faith/trust in these kind of tests.

No proc was only " a test for a short period of time" before it turned out that many players actually liked noproc or at least preferred it over proc dot meta in update 27-29 (which was one of the worst metas ever). ZoS continued noproc Cyrodiil in update 29 because most players wanted to continue playing without proc dots.
After that ZoS returned procsets to all campaigns in update 30 so there was no way to play noproc and all players had to build for proc PvP although most dmg procs got nerfed/scaling.
Then in update 31 they created a noproc campaign

Ravenwatch as only nocp (except u50 icereach) campaign was a bad choice because it was a balanced and populated campaign before that did not need change and players that like nocp and players that like noproc are not the same and only few like both.
Procusers left campaign fast because their builds did not work anymore while most noproc players still had friends and home campaign in BR or GH.
Most hated procsets getting nerfed in u30 also made procs less of an issue and players less interested to change campaign to avoid them.
As soon as a campaign is dead nobody goes there anymore. Players did nor return to Ravenwatch after they reintroduced procs either.

What proof do you have for test defenders beeing „a small but extremely vocal minority“? The failure of noproc Ravenwatch?
I rather think the test haters are „a small but extremely vocal minority“ with meta builds profiting from status quo and therefore also playing the most while players without meta builds are usually players currently rather inactive(also in forum) because they have no time farming meta builds and/or loosing fights because worse gear even when playing better (is not fun).

SaffronCitrusflower wrote: »

This current iteration will not work for me, that's for sure.

I'm not sure why ZOS is putting time into developing a new system as opposed to fixing the system they already have in the first place.

I'm guessing because they can't fix it as it stands, or it would have happened already.

Taril wrote: »

DeadlySerious wrote: »

ZOS hasn't even tried to do some of the things that would make the current system far, far less calculation intensive before trying to create an entirely new system. The approach to this problem is not making sense to me.

Yes, you don't understand the approach to the problem.

What they're doing is finding out where the fault(s) lie in the chain of systems.

Much like diagnosing a faulty part of a PC. You strip it bare and slowly add each part one by one until you find the thing causing the problem.

What they're doing, is stripping the mode bare and seeing if there's a problem inherent in the core of the mode.

They will likely then add in each other system back in (Such as skill morphs, proc sets etc) until they find what aspects are truly causing the problems. Once they know what is causing the problems, they can take measures to address them.

This is far more effective than just doing bunches of stuff without knowing exactly what is causing the problems. Like, if proc sets aren't the issue and you faff around with proc sets for a few years... You've done nothing.

The premise of this methodology isn't that this new TEST is the basis of their new vision for the mode (If it was, it wouldn't be an OPTIONAL campaign touted as a TEST. It'd simply be the new mode. Much like how they implemented the new BG's replacing the old ones)

It's simply a way of fault finding to figure out exactly what the problem actually is. By checking things one system at a time. Instead of working on the assumption that the problem is proc sets/crosshealing/buff stacking/CPs or any number of potential sources.

Exactly this. If you want to fix something you have to find the root cause. This is what they do. In a live environment with loads of players generating loads of data.