edward_frigidhands wrote: »

MorallyBipolar wrote: »

Seeing how essentially everyone went back to GH as soon as it became available and skipped vengeance all together there is an undeniable answer to the OP now.

No. Vengeance is not viable.

All these players , who by their own statements never set foot in Vengeance, claiming it was dead after GH opened. They can't seem to understand that 1 bar Vengeance often had many more players than 3 or poplocked GH. Of course they don't understand, they didn't go into vengeance.

Just a couple nights ago, with GH open, had a huge 3 faction fight in Vengeance over BRK, over an hour, well over 100 ad and 100 EP . Yes, the bars were only 1-2. DC also showed up with about 30 players. This was in late prime time.

Hugely fun battle, 3-4 holes in BRK, AD made it to the inner, pushed them out, in again. Finally eP pushed out and flanked AD and won the battle. In the end a 165k tick.

Yes, off hours it was pretty empty, but GH is also.

Strengths of VG: AvA is a blast. They boosted defense with oils so smaller force could win this time. No immortal god mode, ball groups strolling into the keep impervious to any counters

Melee is possible in VG, Ability combinations matter, a balance of defense and offense is critical, no saving yourself with proc sets or hugely excess heals. I had more fun meleeing in battles than I have for years in GH: in GH you are constantly pulled or run over by BG.

Last night saw an AD ball group working as a team and they were really effective. Not immortal, but they proved that teamwork gave an edge over the pugs.

Weaknesses of VG: limited build variety (improved this time with perks, which are essentially CP). Limited combinations (essentially one per class, eg NB was soul shred, merciless, assasins blade after dotting them up). Horses still too slow. ability range too short in keep defense. limited options for solo players.

I went back into GH several times and it was fun to have my speed, my sets, my CP. It would be simple to fix GH (from my perspective as someone who isn't in groups very often):
1) Change RoA to every 30 sec (like DC), reduce radius to 8m, make it apply CC immunity
2) make VD only work for solo players
3) delete warden Charm
4) limit cross heals to 3
I would prefer all proc sets to only give stats, to re-emphasize skill over proc crutching, but that will never happen.

I think whatever amount of players are "boycotting" will be counter balanced by the amount of players who dont even know greyhost is back because they dont frequent forums or see zone chat gossip, which is a lot of players.

Artisian0001 wrote: »

Lord_Hev wrote: »

MincMincMinc wrote: »

What sucks for us is that vengeance probably could have been loads better. Dare I say the "eso classic" people want.

In the ideal scenario they would have done the vengeance pve/pvp split skills and item code. Done the "alpha" test with the basic rules in the first test. Then they should have immediately worked on making vengeance closer to a middle ground game with all the core game elements people want. Like consumables, basic stat sets, enchants, etc.

What probably happened was that the corporate side of things demanded constant engineering answers and number reports to justify spending money on PvP. Thus we got stuck doing the tests as they developed vengeance little by little.

Very much this. They've demonstrated the technical format of being able to literally give us a replica 1.5 server in the form of a PvP campaign. If it had all the passives to make the classes feel more distinct and gave dynamic ult gen, Vengeance would be vastly superior lol.

People said the same thing about wanting no proc but that camp was dead immediately. People who ask for the "glory days" of ESO to come back again just want a scenario where players are bad at PvP when the game wasn't as old and knowledge wasn't as vast. The average player has improved to a point where they don't just light attack and sit in a stun for 5 seconds until they die (some still do but this isn't the average.) Realistically there were a lot of broken aspects of the game back in those days, the game is at a more balanced point than it was the vast majority of patches, regardless of what people want to complain about. The glory days of beating on fodder players are gone, this happens with every game as it ages.

I'm a hardline 1.5 want-er but I never saw any future in the no-proc campaign. Similar to thinking Vengeance is a facsimile to the old days, it's not even close. There is some truth to the whole "people as a whole have improved" and so it wouldn't totally be the same, yes this is true. But it goes deeper than that. When I talk about 1.5 days, I'm talking about specific under-the-hood mechanics that were in place. Things like soft-caps which prevented hyper-min-max homogenization specializations. Dynamic ult gen which rewarded fighting outnumbered behavior in a risk vs reward manner. You hit multiple enemies, you build faster ult, while the outnumbering force in a strict relative term generates less ultimate to spam on you. And by extension yes, there were a limited number of sets which is where the no-proc supporters hearkened to. No-proc failed because it was trying to apply one single facet from the "old days" while maintaining every other change that deteriorated or bloated the game as a cohesive whole. And ofc, there's the restrictions issue in the current growing environment. So ultimately as much as I hate proc sets, I also don't see their removal as something feasible.

From my own pov; if I'm going to play in a special rule-set campaign, then they need to just quit beating around bush and just give a full replica old-school server to test with. Not the gimmicky vengeance where everything is just strip-bear with new sky ambience and enb lighting. All passives, all sets in the modern age, all classes, Champion points enabled. But have soft-caps, dynamic ult gen, out of combat ultimate generation, regenerate stamina while blocking, ground oils, group-cap back to 24, etc etc, I can't remember all the other stuff that have been "removed." Point I'm getting at is, I want a "test" where we clash all the current mess like hybridization and pit it in the -same- environment with all the other legacy stuff active simultaneously. Kinda like a sloppy joe, see if it can cook something interesting. It's a test, let's have some real fun with it.

Lord_Hev wrote: »

Artisian0001 wrote: »

Lord_Hev wrote: »

MincMincMinc wrote: »

What sucks for us is that vengeance probably could have been loads better. Dare I say the "eso classic" people want.

In the ideal scenario they would have done the vengeance pve/pvp split skills and item code. Done the "alpha" test with the basic rules in the first test. Then they should have immediately worked on making vengeance closer to a middle ground game with all the core game elements people want. Like consumables, basic stat sets, enchants, etc.

What probably happened was that the corporate side of things demanded constant engineering answers and number reports to justify spending money on PvP. Thus we got stuck doing the tests as they developed vengeance little by little.

Very much this. They've demonstrated the technical format of being able to literally give us a replica 1.5 server in the form of a PvP campaign. If it had all the passives to make the classes feel more distinct and gave dynamic ult gen, Vengeance would be vastly superior lol.

People said the same thing about wanting no proc but that camp was dead immediately. People who ask for the "glory days" of ESO to come back again just want a scenario where players are bad at PvP when the game wasn't as old and knowledge wasn't as vast. The average player has improved to a point where they don't just light attack and sit in a stun for 5 seconds until they die (some still do but this isn't the average.) Realistically there were a lot of broken aspects of the game back in those days, the game is at a more balanced point than it was the vast majority of patches, regardless of what people want to complain about. The glory days of beating on fodder players are gone, this happens with every game as it ages.

I'm a hardline 1.5 want-er but I never saw any future in the no-proc campaign. Similar to thinking Vengeance is a facsimile to the old days, it's not even close. There is some truth to the whole "people as a whole have improved" and so it wouldn't totally be the same, yes this is true. But it goes deeper than that. When I talk about 1.5 days, I'm talking about specific under-the-hood mechanics that were in place. Things like soft-caps which prevented hyper-min-max homogenization specializations. Dynamic ult gen which rewarded fighting outnumbered behavior in a risk vs reward manner. You hit multiple enemies, you build faster ult, while the outnumbering force in a strict relative term generates less ultimate to spam on you. And by extension yes, there were a limited number of sets which is where the no-proc supporters hearkened to. No-proc failed because it was trying to apply one single facet from the "old days" while maintaining every other change that deteriorated or bloated the game as a cohesive whole. And ofc, there's the restrictions issue in the current growing environment. So ultimately as much as I hate proc sets, I also don't see their removal as something feasible.

From my own pov; if I'm going to play in a special rule-set campaign, then they need to just quit beating around bush and just give a full replica old-school server to test with. Not the gimmicky vengeance where everything is just strip-bear with new sky ambience and enb lighting. All passives, all sets in the modern age, all classes, Champion points enabled. But have soft-caps, dynamic ult gen, out of combat ultimate generation, regenerate stamina while blocking, ground oils, group-cap back to 24, etc etc, I can't remember all the other stuff that have been "removed." Point I'm getting at is, I want a "test" where we clash all the current mess like hybridization and pit it in the -same- environment with all the other legacy stuff active simultaneously. Kinda like a sloppy joe, see if it can cook something interesting. It's a test, let's have some real fun with it.

I'm not against that at all, but this stuff always falls on deaf ears. Good luck getting them to do that when their vengeance baby has already died out with the smallest amount of competition. I agree with both comments above but there's no way something else actually gets put in place when they already spent time on this, and will probably continue to, to no avail. They will listen to the small minority of loud players rather than the ones who actually participate and make up the PvP community.

blktauna wrote: »

BardokRedSnow wrote: »

blktauna wrote: »

BardokRedSnow wrote: »

xylena wrote: »

BardokRedSnow wrote: »

the statistics the devs will be reading

You mean the ones that had them make Vengeance in the first place?

GH will never grow in population. Vengeance will.

Big fish in a small pond fear the ocean.

Maybe if you keep saying it despite reality, it'll become true.

Vengeance has only shrunk since it's conception.

says who?

Says who, says the players all in Grey Host and not Vengeance the dead campaign. Which has been dead since after the first test once incentives were gone.

You do this every thread. Add something to the conversation as an adult or ignore my posts.

Brother seriously. When you give a real answer you will stop being challanged. You do not know what number each bar represents in each campaign. You do not go into Vengence, so yes bring the receipts and the questions stop.

I've done my civic duty and gone into Vengeance at least once during every phase of the testing.

As such, I can easily report that prime time fights that I was involved in never came close to the scale of V1. V1 fights, even as someone who did not enjoy the combat, did make me sit up and say, "Okay, this is actually different in a good way."

Since then... in V2, V3, and now V4... fights feel, at best, exactly the same size as Grey Host fights - and often smaller. They feel exactly the same magnitude as Grey Host... just with nerfed everything, which is simply not something that I find appealing or want to spend any more than the bare minimum of time interacting with.

There isn't some hidden horde of players constantly popping-off in Vengeance when the bars are 1-1-1. Sometimes things simply are as they appear.

blktauna wrote: »

BardokRedSnow wrote: »

blktauna wrote: »

BardokRedSnow wrote: »

xylena wrote: »

BardokRedSnow wrote: »

the statistics the devs will be reading

You mean the ones that had them make Vengeance in the first place?

GH will never grow in population. Vengeance will.

Big fish in a small pond fear the ocean.

Maybe if you keep saying it despite reality, it'll become true.

Vengeance has only shrunk since it's conception.

says who?

Says who, says the players all in Grey Host and not Vengeance the dead campaign. Which has been dead since after the first test once incentives were gone.

You do this every thread. Add something to the conversation as an adult or ignore my posts.

Brother seriously. When you give a real answer you will stop being challanged. You do not know what number each bar represents in each campaign. You do not go into Vengence, so yes bring the receipts and the questions stop.

The mods literally just cleaned up in here for this sort of thing. Just saying "Says who" is not a challenge or productive to your argument, this is a discussion. And every time you look in Vengeance, the map is painted red, and the only time one does see a bar there it is EP alone. Whether or not it is fully dead or partially dead, it is still less active than Greyhost.

edit: Was I should say as the test is over with. Not a single day alongside greyhost was vengeance more active.

Artisian0001 wrote: »

If the people who were tasked with making vengeance were instead tasked with reducing performance issues in Greyhost by improving and cleaning up existing code, reducing redundancies, fixing the decade old issue of memory leak without having to take the entire server down, reducing unnecessary particles and calculations, along with an enormous list of other things I can name, the community would be happier, and more people would be able to play PvP while at the same time having less performance issues. Like I said before, this just falls on deaf ears because the minority is loud and complains, and will never cease complaining because they just want to be able to avoid everything they dislike (players more skilled than them, players in groups larger than theirs, mechanics they don't like.)

They are the same people. Read the quote from the engineering team (emphasis mine):

Over time, pre hardware upgrade, we recognized that the combination of new systems, ability complexity scope creep, uncapping of area effects, etc, was drastically pushing the limit of what we and players considered 'a reasonable expectation of increased latency at higher populations', and we either needed to adjust populations further, or investigate the issue at its core. In attempt to avoid hindering player experience too much, we opted for the latter. Two efforts immediately began to account for this - a general pass on gameplay systems focused on optimization in mass PvP environments, and the hardware upgrade. While the former would inevitably become a long-term effort, evolving into today's Vengeance campaign, the hardware upgrade provided an immediate measurable result that was easily noticeable and overwhelmingly positive.

...

This was somewhat expected with limited changes to gameplay, and after some investigation the result simply led us back to the secondary efforts noted above, and is in part why we've made such a drastic shift towards something like Vengeance more recently. Even before exploring Vengeance, we made many changes that aimed to reduce some of the load that comes with hundreds of players engaging in combat - some of these changes were very visible and announced (early changes to core mechanics like sprint and block, area effect improvements, etc.), while others were made silently in the background with no expected changes to gameplay experience. These changes resulted in noticeable improvements in specific scenarios, but had no impact on others, and it can be difficult to identify problem areas and make improvements while not drastically changing player experience across the game as a whole.

...

While the results of Vengeance are overwhelmingly positive from a performance standpoint, we've already identified degradation at the same levels as Greyhost, albeit at much lower frequencies.

The engineers tried to improve GH and decided it's not worth trying anymore in its current state, so they're moving to a cleaner environment like Vengeance. Vengeance isn't perfect either, there's problems with the server coding itself, so the devs will have to figure out how to improve that.

Source: https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/comment/8399676/#Comment_8399676

xylena wrote: »

BardokRedSnow wrote: »

Not a single day alongside greyhost was vengeance more active.

What metrics are you using? Your gut feelings?

It was about the same to me, the 1 circle zerg fight and 1 pvdoor fight. I didn't actually play that much because I'm sick of these "tests" just give us the real thing already. Cyro loses a lot of appeal without a persistent environment, which these "tests" do NOT provide.

Vengeance 1-1-1 = (0 to 100) + (0 to 100) + (0 to 100) = population range of 0 to 300.

Grey Host Lock-Lock-Lock = 120 + 120 + 120 = 360 with more waiting in the queue.

xylena wrote: »

YandereGirlfriend wrote: »

Vengeance 1-1-1 = (0 to 100) + (0 to 100) + (0 to 100) = population range of 0 to 300.

Grey Host Lock-Lock-Lock = 120 + 120 + 120 = 360 with more waiting in the queue.

For how many hours per day? I'd estimate 18 hours where it's 1/1/1 Vengeance vs 1/1/1 Gray Host, both pretty dead but GH is an officially identified corpse at 1 bar.

This is going around in circles - prime time North American hours are highly obviously what matter for PC-NA.

During those hours the verdict was unanimous and in Grey Host's favor.

BardokRedSnow wrote: »

I think whatever amount of players are "boycotting" will be counter balanced by the amount of players who dont even know greyhost is back because they dont frequent forums or see zone chat gossip, which is a lot of players.

Some of the people who like Gray Host are in the very same PvP groups that are also boycotting, afaik. They know full well that Grey Host is active because their PvP guilds them. I'm not saying everyone is but I've seen enough of zone chat to know it's a thing.

Gray Host's population cap is pretty small.

reazea wrote: »

MorallyBipolar wrote: »

spartaxoxo wrote: »

This isn't it's final form so it's hard to say. No new stuff is being added but they're going to be looking at its damage/healing balance.

If they can't fix Grey Host they can't develop a new system that will work properly either.

How is this self evident truth not obvious to everyone?

This isn't exclusive to Vengeance but this forum just has a lot of hard copers/white knighters.

Despite most of us being here for years, and watching them put out bug filled updates and a failure to deliver on promises time and time again, it's genuinely bewildering there are still people that think we're all just being negative and we need to just "wait and see."

spartaxoxo wrote: »

BardokRedSnow wrote: »

I think whatever amount of players are "boycotting" will be counter balanced by the amount of players who dont even know greyhost is back because they dont frequent forums or see zone chat gossip, which is a lot of players.

Some of the people who like Gray Host are in the very same PvP groups that are also boycotting, afaik. They know full well that Grey Host is active because their PvP guilds them. I'm not saying everyone is but I've seen enough of zone chat to know it's a thing.

Gray Host's population cap is pretty small.

The players who refuse to play vengeance now will continue to refuse to play vengeance in the future. So your argument is that ZOS should mandate vengeance?

Vengeance has been a fail by every measure. It will continue to fail for one very simple, very obvious reason: If ZOS can't make Grey Host run smoothly they can't make vengeance run smoothly either. No rational person is going to accept a decade of grinding gear sets and CP being taken away from them so they can prosper in PvP.

MorallyBipolar wrote: »

xylena wrote: »

YandereGirlfriend wrote: »

prime time North American hours are highly obviously what matter for PC-NA

They don't matter enough to keep the server active 24/7. Yes, this means it is dead.

Dead for you maybe. The side by side "test" showed that essentially nobody will play vengeance even if it's the only option. This isn't an opinion. This is what we saw for a week of side by side vengeance and GH.

We get it. You don't like Cyrodiil PvP anymore. That's you. The rest of us still want ZOS to do their jobs and fix normal live Cyrodiil. Fixing normal live Cyrodiil will bring more people back to ESO while mandated vengeance will drive the what's left of the PvP community from the game.

Discussion on pop doesn’t even matter, ZOS will find the only positives from the “test”, 100% they won’t bring up anything negative about the population. It’ll all be about the perks and interactions when fighting “big” battles.

GH people, all we can hope for is that our bars fill up everyday cause then it’s really hard to justify shutting it down.

Artisian0001 wrote: »

Why does GH need to be pop locked all day?

people work jobs other than American 9-5

people live in other time zones

no meaningful AvAvA or campaign score because the map is 1 color 12 hours a day

all your prime time faction progress erased by like 10 guys fighting npcs and doors

people want to PvP when there are no ball groups running

but all these players have long given up