lmao

L_Nici wrote: »

So much effort for nothing but a test...looks more like a completely new PvP mode to me... can we maybe get back to the root and just fix the existing PvP with existing methods?

Maybe it’s just not possible? Can’t think of any other reason

Mattymoo92 wrote: »

L_Nici wrote: »

So much effort for nothing but a test...looks more like a completely new PvP mode to me... can we maybe get back to the root and just fix the existing PvP with existing methods?

Maybe it’s just not possible? Can’t think of any other reason

Marto wrote: »

Mattymoo92 wrote: »

L_Nici wrote: »

So much effort for nothing but a test...looks more like a completely new PvP mode to me... can we maybe get back to the root and just fix the existing PvP with existing methods?

Maybe it’s just not possible? Can’t think of any other reason

It's definitely not possible.

Using the old methods (just optimizing what's already there) is what ZOS did from 2019 to 2024, and it clearly didn't work. There were some overall improvements to server calculations, but not enough for a smooth PVP experience.

So now they're developing Vengeance, which actually addresses the performance issue, and finally delivers on one of the most requested changes to ESO: Balancing PVE and PVP separately.

The hope was with those old tests was that it was one or two systems just not being optimized. For instance maybe adding aoe caps would limit the distribution. Just think of the worse case scenario of a single button click

• Aoe hits 10 enemies
• dot ticks 20 times
• Each tick does 10 proc effects (status effects, 4 potential proc sets, enchants, etc)
• Each tick interacts with 5 slottables and passive effects
• Each proc effect does 1-10 ticks
• Each enemy gets buffs/debuffs etc
• ............etc 10x20x10x5x10x......... vs a single target spammable which is 1xmaybe a proc or status effect.

We are joking if people ever thought that the aoe portion of this issue was the silver bullet. Sure the original aoe 10x was the distribution method, but even if you only hit one person its still an insane amount of calculations on the server. ALL of these layers are the issue.

Zos had the choice of either doing more strip tests where you could go down the list and disable each of these layers one at a time. Then after that didnt work they would have to do combined strip tests guessing which systems are the worst. So we are talking years of constant tests to maybe guess at an answer.......Then you basically have to redesign the game from scratch. Or jump ahead and begin from scratch anyways and introduce one system at a time.

Ideally as you recreate these systems and layers you would test soft control methods of preventing abuse when not needed. For instance:

• AOE: you could make far more single target aimed heals instead of aoe smart heals
• Aoe: You could only give aoe to certain morphs or perhaps Ultimates
• Aoe: You could place AoE caps on certain spammed morphs and maybe have ultimates uncapped to feel impactful since they cannot be spammed.
• Dots/hots/procs: You could make these not stack like they used to. Not only preventing BIS abuse and promoting diverse builds, but it cuts away overlap during large group play where people are casting into the void.
• Status effects: You could remove the %chance on each tick and instead only have guaranteed sources like through enchants and poisons, making these systems more impactful build and theorycraft wise.

MashmalloMan wrote: »

"It's just a test guys."
Best part, as all this is happening, we've noticably had next to no balance adjustments for the 500+ bad sets or the handful of clearly over budget sets that everyone is running. 4 years of incomplete hybridization. Next to no meaningful class balance adjustments outside of their set balance standard pass on passives with U46.

If it's not the future... then who is green lightning the time and resources wasted on this? We get it, less calculations, less aoe, less buff/debuff overlap and set variation equals better performance, so what exactly are we even "testing" anymore?

The real "test" is to see if they can develop a simplified, performant, permanent mode, into a playable state the playerbase enjoys enough so they can inevitably abandon efforts on ever fixing the base game cyrodiil.

Leave up the Vengence campaign for a month with no incentives, no golden pursuit, no bonus ap/xp, just let people decide what they find more enjoyable and I think they'll get their answer pretty quickly.

To the first point, say they do make those changes and complete hybridization. Doesn't it seem pointless if the testing finds that it all has to be redone anyways? Even doing the random strip away tests like I talked about above they could spend years and still not find a "source" of the lag, we all know deep down that the lag is from ALL of the systems across the board being bloated and without restrictions over the years. So random strip tests wont solve the problem, which only leaves you with wide sweeping power creep bloat reduction simplifications for systems or to start from scratch. Or just let the game die as is I suppose.

Likely they have to keep doing the tests to justify continuing to work on pvp at all. The higher ups would be expecting results after month long projects of rewriting existing code.

Sure you could leave the current vengeance campaign up for a month.....but whats the point? Itd be comparing an alpha test to a game with 10 years of development. We will see this week2 of Vengeance4. That will be the time to hard press zos to make sure they develop vengeance with the notion of bringing sets and normal ESO build elements back instead of the perk and loadout system. Which I think most people would agree would be the best solution as it retains all the build systems people like while reducing bloat across the board that is unnecessary.

MashmalloMan wrote: »

No it does not seem pointless, it seems unacceptable. 4 years is a long time with no end in site, imagine you conceived a child in Jan 2022, it would now be speaking full sentences and walking on its own today. It's beyond the point of the playerbase having to come up with excuses and defend what is potentially their thought process. I have no doubt that you're correct, but it doesn't make it right. In no service anywhere in the world should you have to wait 4 years+ for something to finish, let alone returning paying customer base that is only given broken promises.

Plus, what you're probably referring to is what ZOS is also locked in on; reworking consumables for potions, poisons, and food/drinks. No one actually cares about this part, they could take another 4 years to adjust this for all we care.

Most people just want Major Prophecy/Savagery and Sorcery/Brutality on their pots and they would be happy with the unfinished state it's in because it doesn't really effect them any more.

Inevitably, they will combine weapon/spell into 1 value as they stated so I fail to see how this would potentially require a redesign in the future. It would reduce the calculations on the server and the number of buffs to track. It's a net gain, but again, this is above us. We shouldn't have to make excuses or justifications for them.

Yeah the consumables post they made makes no sense at all. No reason the major/minors couldn't be combined and call it good for now. No reason why class lines cant give minor brutality/sorcery or minor savagery/prophecy. I cannot fathom why they dont just make this simple change. I can understand putting off the recoding of every calculation in the game involving WD/SD and Wcrit/Scrit while they wait for test results........the crazy thing is that in vengeance why do they still have weapon damage and spell damage. There is literally no reason to have them on freshly coded skills.

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Yes the transparency and communication has been horrible. What I don't understand is that the devs still appear to be in PR hype mode where they don't want to be clear and make statements because it may affect a "launch day" hype effect. There is no hype in eso anymore. Look at the steamcharts and recent releases, there is no population spike. As a company you should be transitioning away from the hype big release pump and dump stock trader mentality and just work on communicating with the daily crowd.

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Oh zos is 100% inflating the interest. What most anti vengeance people argue though ignores the fact that we need new people in pvp. Which is going to be counter to what the 1337 pvpers want, or atleast the people that actually think they are top tier. No matter what there is going to be a give and take.

Do you want better performance ...................... Or do you want proc soup with 10 passive proc effects on every skill?
Do you want more population........................... Or do you want to keep pvp gated to new players?

MashmalloMan wrote: »

We all know it's a work in progress, but the closer they get to what we like about ESO as you said, the more reason there seems to be to just adjust the core experience to meet performance requirements the opposite direction. Let's not forget they're the ones that keep digging this hole. We've requested for years to put some type of cap on aoe healing or reduction. Update 35 was their grand plan to reduce complexity of rotations, but they made dots 20-30s long. If even mail lasting 30 days was an issue vs 14, imagine what 10s dots going to 20-30s did? I mean clearly they think it's one of the problems because dots are like 5s in Vengence and aoe dots are non existent.

Again, if I didn't think the campaign was taking up resources for developing the parts of the game I care about, then I wouldn't care, but it clearly is. I hope I'm wrong, but patch after patch we're told to keep waiting as if we have the memory of a gold fish. It's insulting. More recently we're told by the lead dev that he sees no issue with the 500+ older sets and apparently is scared to adjust them because of vertical power creep in a game with only 12 available slots and countless underbudget, objectively, and mathematically bad sets based on their own standards I could nit pick for days.

To me idc honestly so long as they continue their efforts towards some form of pvp. If they cancel vengeance right now that means cyro will be ignored completely and as power creep continues with pve releases they will just slowly reduce the pop cap until cyro is a 12v12v12 gamemode. If anything replacing u50 and nocp would be the best way. However they would still have to do vengeance only tests regardless for data capture. My ideal world would be where we see them slowly introduce core systems into vengeance restandardizing them as they go. Then implementing them in live once functional. Or just have the u50/nocp veng server slowly become more and more preferred due to development to the point where they can close GH.

People get upset at losing one week of abysmal GH pvp, yet I have been waiting since like clockwork for cyrodil to get back to a semi decent state. So for me its like they have already wasted 8 yeards of "company resources" so I just don't see the worry of losing a few months so far to vengeance...or even another year at this point.

I don;t know what people were expecting.

Vengeance was a test. It was a test to see if ZOS could have the large scale battles with good performance they envisaged for Cyrodiil if they removed much of the overcomplicated calculations that have historically tanked the server.

Some people seemingly interpreted this test as "can ZOS finally discover whatever was tanking the server and then press a magic button so Grey Host (GH) would have excellent performance." That was not going to happen. ZOS already tried a whole bunch of tests in the past to limit the calculations on Live: smaller groups, skill cooldowns, no proc sets, no buffs/heals outside group, etc., and even all of these at the same time, and none of that worked. They tried raising the pop caps and decided that was a no go. How exactly would a test that removed all the calculations in the game while having a much higher pop cap end up with keep all the calculations and have a performant Cyrodiil?

Because the Vengeance I test showed it was possible to have a performant Cyrodiil with big battles and it had positive reception, they have continued in that direction. I don't think things have changed. What ZOS is doing is trying to press the envelope to see just how many calculations (i.e., how much character customization) we can have before Vengeance turns into GH.

Where I think it is fair to critique ZOS is even when they have something people seemed genuinely excited about, they still don't communicate clearly as to their vision and intention. They have not come out and said that GH would continue to be supported even if a Vengeance was implemented on Live. They hinted on their latest Livestream that the Live PvP we have now would continue to be supported. But hinting is not clear communication. It's quite clear that as much as many people like Vengeance, quite a few people who enjoy the PvP on Live do not. They are paying customers. They have to participate in this dubious season pass model, and ZOS can't even communicate to them what they would be paying for. They haven't even come out and tell us their plans for Vengeance. This is unacceptable.

So we have to guess and speculate. It looks like ZOS intends some form of Vengeance campaign will be a PvP option. A lot of people are saying it. What isn;t clear is whether or not GH will remain an option. It should. ZOS has supported different versions of PvP for over a decade now. Things would be a whole lot easier if they came out and told us.

What @MashmalloMan brings up is another important matter.

Like many people, I am disappointed that there isn't any meaningful combat changes. But, unlike many folks here, I was 100% expecting there to be no meaningful combat changes. Did people pay attention to the titles that were on the reddit AUA?

Associate Content Director, Associate Content Director, Narrative Director, Gameplay Design Director, Executive Producer, Creative Director, Studio Head, and, "Combat & PvP Director." The combat team is a tiny part of ZOS. It got even smaller when Combat & PvP were merged into the office of the same person (which happened years and years ago, late 2018 I think). I've said for years the pace of ZOS's combat updates were too slow, too uneven, and too incomplete. People always pushed back on me and said, "Well it's not the "combat" update. Really? People were satisfied with one combat update a year? That's low expectations. Back in 2015 and 2016, when I wasn;t being charged an annual pass, I was getting meaty combat changes every update. I often disagreed with what ZOS was doing. But you know what we didn't have? Incomplete systems like Hybridization. Placeholder terrible skills like Gravelord's sacrifice just waiting to be updated. We had some confidence that even if Templars weren't competitive, they would get an update before I graduated college.

As much as I enjoy Vengeance, if I were a competitive PvE player, ran progression trials, or were really invested in trying to play a solo class rather than subclassing, I would cancel my sub and not buy the annual pass. ZOS isn't an indie studio; ESO has nearly made 2 billion dollars according to numerous reports. Yet the studio sees combat as a minor part of the ESO experience such that they can pretend the same office can develop Vengeance while addressing all the unfinished combat problems that still plague the game from update 35, unfinished Hybridization, subclassing, and scribing. It's really hard not to draw a connection between Vengeance and the scant changes in Update 48.

People would be a lot more receptive to Vengeance if they were told that GH would continue to be an option for them and the needed combat changes that affect the whole game were not put on hold.