I gave it a lot of benefit of the doubt until "Scenario 2" was put on the table. Not even, "Implement what we've learned, limited and controversial as it is, into the game as it exists and go from there," but close all existing Cyrodiil campaigns and open one or two Vengeance ruleset campaigns.

It was a test to see how much they could neuter PvP.

They sure did a lot of stressing it's a test for something that might become a permanent campaign. They should've said at the start that if the testing goes well it has the potential to be another campaign mode alongside Gray Host (do we even know whats going to happen with under 50 and ravenwatch?). That said, they might not have thought it an option at the time.

Perhaps the results of the first test round(s) surprised them as to the source and scope of the problem and their initial ideas had to be reassessed and it turned out that GH as it stands is not fixable as far as allowing large player numbers with acceptable performance on the server side. Just a thought.

Investigations of problems do not always yield the answers one wants to hear. And sometimes those results require a significant change in what was originally thought to be a viable solution.

No, Liars

moderatelyfatman wrote: »

Yet out of the two Tests so far, we are yet to see any testing on the Grey Host and Blackreach Campaign or even a test campaign with some minor disabling of features that can still preserve the majority of the original campaigns. The devs should have a pretty decent idea of what is causing the performance drop and an improvement of as little as 5% per player could be enough to pull Cyrodiil back into a playable state.

I find this sort of posts have always been wishful thinking.

ESO is a giant blob of horribly entangled systems with subsystems within subsystems written over a decade by people who aren't there any more. "Just do minor thing X and all will be fine" seems a very ... rose-tinted look at ESO's issues.

And the latest post about Cyrodiil performance essentially stated that even if they did something to improve performance by a small amount, players will find a way (unintentionally) to bring the game back into its bad state. Which means that even if they did that little thing to make it 5% better, this will be gone in a few months. And then they have to do the next little thing. Slowly chipping away at Cyrodiil - i.e. exactly what they have done over the last years.

And so yes - they've done what they announced. Strip back everything to its bare minimum to see what the underlying infrastructure can handle, and build back from that. At no point in that announcement did they say that this was to be incorporated into Blackreach.
It seemed to work, so they try to make it permanent.

Testing gives data, data informs decisions. No tin-foil hat needed.

This isn't a matter of honesty. It's a matter of factual validity.

ZOS sold us on vengeance being a test gather data that was to be used to improve normal live Cyrodiil.

Now they're saying they're not even going to try to fix anything to do with normal live Cyrodiil and we're going to get vengeance like it or not.

This is not a matter of opinion. It's a fact of history.

tomofhyrule wrote: »

Yes and No.

At the beginning, I think it was true that it was just a test. But the large population (and a lot of the feedback) likely inspired them to consider Vengeance as a Campaign of its own alongside Grey Host.

Their mistake there was then not saying that at the time.

But as we see, Vengeance 1 did so well because it was new and people were curious, and there was an AP bonus for going in, and there was a Golden Pursuit pushing people in. That definitely had an artifically inflated population, and the population we have now in Vengeance without any carrots pushing anyone in is more likely what we'd really see. Everyone can claim all they want that Vengeance 3 failed because of the competing event, but a permanent Vengeance will have to necessarily compete against events. And if it can't survive that, well...

Vengeance is clearly "PvP for non-PvPers." It should not replace Grey Host. The fact that they have not categorically taken that off the table is a problem.

And that's why ZOS is only presenting numbers from the first "test". Where are the numbers from the subsequent tests when player numbers were way down and performance was still trash?

Test 1 received a lot of positive feedback, with many saying they would like to see this as a permanent campaign. Others, like myself, saw it as an opportunity to rebuild cyrodiil from the ground up by suggesting more customization options so that the end goal would nearly similar to current cyrodiil but more performant (I personally saw it as something to replace ravenwatch. No CP, Stat/No proc sets only with an actual curated list, PvP specific skills, etc. Similar customization to what we currently have but without the overpowered proc sets and healing). I think the player fanfare from the 1st test made them commit to continue developing vengeance as its own game mode rather than intending it to be one from the beginning. Vengeance 1 was really basic, so I would wager the amount of time it took to bring it up was low in case players didn't like the idea.

Personally, I think vengeance is still far off from being a game mode that's fun to play daily. Sustain needs to be better, skill morphs should be included even if it's a basic swap from magic to physical damage so skills can cost stamina, individuality needs more improvement so that 1 player can do something against 3 or more players without it being an instant loss, I'm not entirely a fan of the kiss/curse perk options since they feel like a net 0 upgrade though it could still work out if you had the ability to choose 1 perk without a curse, damage aoe caps have to be increased or removed so zerg vs zerg doesn't become 1 hour attrition battles, attackers need more siege options since defenders can sit on oils all day and prevent any advancement, and some more minor tweaks that I can't think of at the moment.

The name Vengeance has always given me the impression that this was all a psi-op bait and switch, where the test was how much we were willing to give up, versus Performance.

No. The validity of the 'test' was ruined as soon as they put questions in the survey regarding enjoyability.

If they were testing numbers and lag, why would they include questions like that in the survey?