Honestly - Is Vengeance Viable?

Artisian0001 · December 16

ceruulean wrote: »

"Artisian0001 wrote:

What are these random out of touch arguments from people on the forums? Do you guys actually even PvP? Your metric for super serious PvPs includes IC players, vengeance players, and BG players? What? IC has almost no population and is generally used for farming telvar for currency. Vengeance is for those that strictly do not want competition and higher skilled gameplay, but only a numbers fight. BGs are also lacking in population because there is no real leaderboard based on win percentage, solely on time played. The best PvP players are without a shadow of a doubt, those who play in current GH and try to fight equal or greater numbers than those they currently have in their group. The "super serious" ones are the ones that make comps and builds for every single person in their group to be optimized so they can fight as many people as they can. Not randoms running around in IC to fight mobs. Good players will pop in every now and then to try and find a fight, but they are few and far between.

So if you want to test your pvp build, where do you go? Into the time sink of horse-riding Cyrodiil? Of course not. Serious PvPers test their builds in smaller scale settings so they can iterate quickly. BGs are no CP and have a slightly different meta than CP enabled places, but otherwise yes, the better players are found dueling there. Otherwise, let me know why there are so many rank 50 Grand Overlords that crumple to a forum-going PvE carebear in Venegance.

Maybe back in 2018 when the population was higher and there was actual competition and strategy in Cyrodiil, I'd believe that CP Cyro required skill of the chess kind. Zone chat was full of spies and people calling out plays and doing psychological mind games and whatnot. But nowadays, the population caps are low and it's mostly ball groups fighting zergs and waiting for some other ball group to contest them, and they're dueling for 10 minutes with no one dying. I suppose these GvG need to be pre-arranged in Discord nowadays with exclusive signups like vet trials. So fun.

Do you have any idea what a non sequitur is? Sure, you can test a build quicker by inviting a random person standing next to you to duel, what does that have to do with being a serious PvP player? Nothing. The best PvP players, the ones who go in cyro by themselves and kill multiple people, or the ones that play in groups and kill groups many times their size, the sane people who play in these groups are the ones who place in or win dueling tournaments, 2v2, 4v4, 6v6, tournaments etc. These same people will tell you that BGs, IC, and Vengeance especially are not the route for "super serious" PvP. Note as well how you are changing your point of super serious PvP to quick testing. That's how you know someone is wrong.

Again, the super serious PvP players and the best are those who make compositions for each person they choose to play with in their group and fight groups of people greater than theirs. Your other point of nobody dying in a 10 minute ballgroup fight just shows me how out of touch you are. I can link you several clips of the best group killing people constantly in GvGs while they are being outnumbered, and not just against zone pugs or bad groups, but the best groups. It sounds as if you are just echoing the common talking point from people who don't actually ever participate in any GvGs when you say nobody dies.

fizzybeef · December 16

So the time has shown now, nobody wants to play Vengeance anymore, as soon GH is back up.
@ZOS can you finally stomp that project now?

fizzybeef · December 16

MorallyBipolar wrote: »

Stamicka wrote: »

What are you guys even trying to preserve with Grey Host?

I ask that genuinely. It’s barely a PvP zone at this point cause it’s extremely dead. We haven’t seen good combat adjustments in so many years that I’ve lost count. Subclassing hasn’t been a positive thing for PvP either.

If you guys succeed in getting ZOS to scrap Vengeance, Grey Host will continue to die anyway.

If you’re holding out for ZOS to fix PvP through incremental tweaks as it is right now, you’re going to be disappointed.

So many of PvP’s issues exist because of PvE balancing. ZOS has been trying to make higher damage in PvE easier to achieve for years now. This is why status effects are such an overtuned and free damage source. It’s also why there’s so many broken group buff sets that can be combined to give even small coordinated groups 1000+ extra weapon damage, very easy access to Major Force, and much more. Heal stacking likely remains in the game because of PvE balancing as well. Tweaking that too much could make certain Veteran trials too difficult for the average group.

A lot of times ESO’s direction is unclear, but one thing that has been clear and consistent throughout the years is that ZOS wants to boost veteran PvE participation rates through making damage easier to achieve. PvP is in a deep hole largely due to balancing efforts around that goal and the hole will continue to get deeper for as long as PvE and PvP are balanced together. We are well past the point where Battle Spirit is enough to keep things in check.

ZOS will not walk back on their casual oriented PvE balancing efforts. As long as they continue down that path, PvP balance will get worse and worse. By advocating for Grey Host you guys are basically acting like ZOS will eventually and successfully address balance concerns in a way that keeps PvErs and PvPers happy. You guys really think they’re going to pull that off despite their track record and the fact that there’s so much more complexity (subclassing) to keep in mind now? It’s not going to happen.

Yes Vengeance has poor balance, a low skill ceiling, and it’s way too simple. However, it’s 100% separate from PvE and all of its issues are addressable without consequences elsewhere. It doesn’t have to have the balance that it does now.

So maybe some of you guys hate Vengeance as it is, that’s understandable. Instead of trying to get it scrapped completely, try to get it balanced correctly though. Grey Host will only sink deeper into it’s hole as it continues to be balanced with PvE.

Don’t ruin PvPs opportunity to be completely separated from PvE. It’s more productive to bring attention to the overtuned healing, lack of mobility skills, low skill ceiling, etc. in Vengeance. If they actually address those issues, we could get somewhere.

Sorry. I bought a product from ZOS and I expect ZOS to support that product they're still selling to this day. This is not an unreasonable expectation in any capacity.

If ZOS can't make GH run smoothly, they can't make a version of vengeance that will either. Plus, I'll feel robbed if they take a decade of set grinding away from me to the point that I will never buy any ZOS/Bethesda product ever again.

THIS

ceruulean · December 16

Artisian0001 wrote: »

Again, the super serious PvP players and the best are those who make compositions for each person they choose to play with in their group and fight groups of people greater than theirs. Your other point of nobody dying in a 10 minute ballgroup fight just shows me how out of touch you are. I can link you several clips of the best group killing people constantly in GvGs while they are being outnumbered, and not just against zone pugs or bad groups, but the best groups. It sounds as if you are just echoing the common talking point from people who don't actually ever participate in any GvGs when you say nobody dies.

Sure, show some videos with proper commentary and explanations and CMX, equal numbers and gear sets used, and how you outplayed the other team. I would love to see this type of content because I don't find any on YouTube.

Edit: oh look I found one that takes place in IC. Proves my point that serious PvPers go to ic.

https://youtu.be/YMPdOTEFuyo?si=SqHUAnPT3Dy_rqB7

fizzybeef · December 16

ceruulean wrote: »

Artisian0001 wrote: »

Again, the super serious PvP players and the best are those who make compositions for each person they choose to play with in their group and fight groups of people greater than theirs. Your other point of nobody dying in a 10 minute ballgroup fight just shows me how out of touch you are. I can link you several clips of the best group killing people constantly in GvGs while they are being outnumbered, and not just against zone pugs or bad groups, but the best groups. It sounds as if you are just echoing the common talking point from people who don't actually ever participate in any GvGs when you say nobody dies.

Sure, show some videos with proper commentary and explanations and CMX. I would love to see this type of content because I don't find any on YouTube.

lol ?

BardokRedSnow · December 16

Stamicka wrote: »

BardokRedSnow wrote: »

Stamicka wrote: »

BardokRedSnow wrote: »

Stamicka wrote: »

What are you guys even trying to preserve with Grey Host?

I ask that genuinely. It’s barely a PvP zone at this point cause it’s extremely dead. .

This is not true, as stated again and again. If GH is dead, Vengeance was worse.

Maybe Vengeance was more dead, I don’t care cause Grey Host is still dead too. You’re comparing dead to even more dead, it’s a waste of time.

Do you realize how low population is? I logged in for Whitestrake’s Mayhem and even when I did that, Blackreach was never filled when I logged on… and that was near prime time.

I remember logging into ESO on a regular weekday and there were 4+ campaigns with multiple bars, 2 of them would be completely pop locked. I also met a ton of players over the years and VERY few of them still play the game. PvP is so very far from lively like it once was and there’s a lot of reasons for that, but a lot of it comes back to performance and balance.

The point I’m making is: Grey Host’s problems cannot be fixed without impacting PvE. Vengeance’s problems can. That’s a huge deal if you ever want positive PvP balance adjustments.

These are COVID numbers you’re referring to mostly, it hasn’t been like this authentically across the board since then, and since it’s very earliest days. The only thing that’s really changed is Zos lowering the campaign population cap.

Everything now in eso is pretty dead in comparison to those high peak times which steam charts support and you can see for yourself. Greyhost is pop locked every evening when people get off from work. If you have gripes with anything it’s not Greyhost, the game itself is dipping in total logins.

Apply this logic to pve and see how much sense it makes. I can’t get a quick game in the middle of the day for dungeons so let’s get rid of dungeons as we know them and replace it with vengeance style layouts instead and make it play like dark souls, focus on skill and mechanics.

I’m not even talking about COVID numbers, I’m talking 2015-2016. Even PvP during COVID was dead compared to what it once was. It’s been declining for years now. I started on Xbox NA. Every night a campaign named Haderus and Scourge reliably filled to pop lock. Then Thornblade, Skeleton Key, and Skull of Corruption, all had multiple bars of population while the other 2 were pop locked. This is back when population caps were significantly higher than they are now. ESO has lost a massive amount of PvPers and it’s directly due to performance and balance.

edward_frigidhands wrote: »

Stamicka wrote: »

edward_frigidhands wrote: »

Stamicka wrote: »

What are you guys even trying to preserve with Grey Host?

I am not sure how else to say this but...probably the actual bloody game that we bought.

I’m not sure how else to say this but… that game died a long time ago.

It sucks, but at this point if you ever want that game back, some serious changes will need to be made. Those changes will not happen while PvE and PvP are balanced together. ZOS just can’t get it right and they’ve shown it time and time again.

The game is still here. Albeit a little changed. I will take that over the other game that I didn't buy which is the Vengeance campaign. I don't want it and it seems I am not alone.

I don't need serious changes. I don't need separate pvp balancing. I don't need the old game back.

I want the game to move forward with adequate maintenance into it's systems, code and hardware. Unfortunately, this involves an investment of resources and efforts that ZOS leadership chose to put into a cancelled game.

This isn't my fault and I am not interested in the next cheapest alternative in the form of the Vengeance campaign.

This is definitely not the game I or any other veteran PvPer purchased. It hasn’t been for a long time.

Console numbers are a very different thing, can't speak on it, but PCNA is still populated, seemingly more consistently than console. Console players also have a larger young audience for obvious reasons, and also currently xbox has lost a ton of players because of game pass prices

Dunno where you're at now but pcna weekdays always took a nosedive in pop, so if you're here with us now, yea, we work lol and we're not teenagers. No shade, its just an obvious fact the console population is younger and affected by different factors.

Covid this was massively different, which is why I brought it up.

Artisian0001 · December 16

ceruulean wrote: »

Artisian0001 wrote: »

Again, the super serious PvP players and the best are those who make compositions for each person they choose to play with in their group and fight groups of people greater than theirs. Your other point of nobody dying in a 10 minute ballgroup fight just shows me how out of touch you are. I can link you several clips of the best group killing people constantly in GvGs while they are being outnumbered, and not just against zone pugs or bad groups, but the best groups. It sounds as if you are just echoing the common talking point from people who don't actually ever participate in any GvGs when you say nobody dies.

Sure, show some videos with proper commentary and explanations and CMX, equal numbers and gear sets used, and how you outplayed the other team. I would love to see this type of content because I don't find any on YouTube.

This is available on multiple Twitch channels. There are a lot of ballgroup players that stream. Novellli leads the best group in the game and will sometimes stream but there isn't commentary. Citats also streams with his AD group as well as xzyleighx. Why does having CMX matter? I checked the stuff you publicly posted and it's evident you don't play at the highest level, but needing CMX for a GvG is something only someone who has zero knowledge of it would ask for, everyone uses the actual logs in the game that give way more information.

You can watch any of like 10 streamers on Twitch who stream ballgroup gameplay and they all kill other groups equal to theirs in size, as does any ballgroup aside from the 20+ plus ones that are just zergs.

Also the video you linked is taken place in IC underground in a bugged spot, this doesn't back your point at all, these players are cyro players they just went to IC because it has no population to do the tournament lol

aetherix8 · December 16

BardokRedSnow wrote: »

And just to update everyone on pop, gh was stupid packed yesterday night. A lot of fights, even more than Friday night. PCNA

That’s awesome. That allows us to remove yet another bad faith argument from this discussion: “with each mandated Veng less and less players are coming back to GH” aka “Veng is the death of PvP”.

aetherix8 · December 16

imPDA wrote: »

aetherix8 wrote: »

Veng, meanwhile, isn't even finished yet and it's been more than one year that devs have been working on it.

You can't know for sure how long it took to develop current Vengeance. They are working on DK new skills for 5 (or 6) months already - with this in mind, I would say, Vengeance was planned 2 or 3 years ago And it is finished, no new features will be added, only balancing between damage/healing will happen in the next year, so only numbers will change, according to dev letter.

My impression is that Vengeance was already on the table when ZOS deleted no-proc. And yes, apparently no new systems will be added, but that doesn’t mean ZOS won’t expand what’s already in place, namely perks and loadouts.

imPDA · December 16

Stamicka wrote: »

This does not address the ridiculous amount of free damage in live PvP through status effects and procs. It also doesn’t really address the overtuned sets or buff stacking. It might address heal stacking if those added skill lines have heals that are specifically made not to stack.

Exactly, when you make them to be separate skills, you can do whatever you want - decrease status effect damage, chance of applying, change healing and shield stacking, etc. Sets are a bit different, I don't know if they can make separate rules for them in PvP and PvE and balance them over time, but I do know they can create separate skill lines for PvP. You highlighted balance as a big problem of current PvP - and this approach would resolve it, and we can see this approach in action, I only wish it would be done for GH.

ceruulean · December 16

Artisian0001 wrote: »

This is available on multiple Twitch channels. There are a lot of ballgroup players that stream. Novellli leads the best group in the game and will sometimes stream but there isn't commentary. Citats also streams with his AD group as well as xzyleighx. Why does having CMX matter? I checked the stuff you publicly posted and it's evident you don't play at the highest level, but needing CMX for a GvG is something only someone who has zero knowledge of it would ask for, everyone uses the actual logs in the game that give way more information.

You can watch any of like 10 streamers on Twitch who stream ballgroup gameplay and they all kill other groups equal to theirs in size, as does any ballgroup aside from the 20+ plus ones that are just zergs.

Also the video you linked is taken place in IC underground in a bugged spot, this doesn't back your point at all, these players are cyro players they just went to IC because it has no population to do the tournament lol

I don't see much worth watching. Here's a 12v12 from 2 years ago from one of the names you dropped and it's 16 minutes long which proves that there used to be metas with 10+ min duels:

It's pretty telling that you're telling me to go find examples and I really can't find anything recent post-sibclassing that looks exciting. Mostly zerg baiting and fighting inexperienced players.

Anyway, ZoS shouldn't cater to the highest level of hardcore player. This reddit post links a study that the Call of Duty developers did: https://www.reddit.com/r/elderscrollsonline/s/y4RxOPrt3V

In short, when devs disabled skill-based matchmaking like their vocal hardcore crowd called for, casual players reported more frustration and quitting. Then even the top percentile drains out. As the lower skilled players quit, the pool consists of only high skill players, however within that group their relative percentiles drop. So if you were a top 10th player, but the bottom rung all quit, you slide down to 50th best, as an example. Then even these people quit as the population shrinks. So the study proves that matching people of similar skill is important for sustained gameplay.

Sure, Greyhost can be where the high skilled players compete with each other. The hardcore crowd is perfectly happy to stay within that bracket for the rest of the games life. Just don't be surprised when it collapses because there's no room for lower skilled players anymore.

Any serious PvE uses logs/CMX for metrics. Idk what you think serious high level PvP play is supposed to look like without those, and without commentary to explain decisions.

MincMincMinc · December 16

Pvp pop declined after craglorn was released. Early on pvp was treated as THE endgame where everything funneled into it as the endless time waster parkinglot. Which worked for a while, but people got bored of a non changing map or gamemode. Inevitably pve people got bored and farmed all the incentives. It doesn't help that more PVE dlc got released while at the same time incentives got taken away from campaign rewards.

Other games employ tactics like

map rotation where each campaign the base spawns rotate.
map tweaks like blocking or changing paths. For instance zos could block the main bridges/gates for ash gate or alessia bridge.
Map additions like zos could drop in more assets within a day's work around several keeps. A good example is the aleswell town could be beefed up and moved closer to the keep to incentivize close quarters combat.
keep re-arrangement, zos could have made variations in the keeps like having fort ash build onto the mountain or have alessia built onto the river.

Zos preferred giving the pve crowd daily chores and login rewards instead of having them learn and participate in pvp modes. Funny enough the less pvp servers got diluted by light attacking pve players, the more the servers thickened with calc intensive pvp players. Partly why I bet MyM events used to be better performing because the servers would get diluted out with pugs instead of only ball groups.

Lucasl402 · December 16

MorallyBipolar wrote: »

Poss wrote: »

Lucasl402 wrote: »

Grey Host has been part of the game since inception (maybe not with same name). ZOS should fix the game they created not waste time creating something new that won't help their business in any capacity.

ESO was originally marketed as a PvP game too, Cyrodiil was literally the endgame.

It sure was. Now ZOS is refusing to even try to fix Grey Host, which was an original part of the game from the beginning.

So a few points here.

First, ZOS should fix the PvP they originally designed into the game. They can fix it. It might take some effort or investment they don't want to make, but it can be done. They've done it before. They can do it again. So ZOS stating they're not even going to try fixing their product going forward is a vendor saying they're selling a product they're not going to support. This is obviously a highly self destructive business and public relations decision.

Second, if ZOS can't make their premier PvP work smoothly and reliably as it is now, they're not going to be able to make some other new system work smoothly and reliably either.

And third, if the last three days are any indication, essentially nobody will play vengeance with or without an alternative. The last three nights prime time PC NA has been pop locked for Grey Host and vengeance hasn't even filled one bar of population. Almost nobody likes vengeance.

Any investments into vengeance should be ceased immediately to save resources so ZOS can invest in actually fixing their game as opposed to creating something totally different. I mean, what's happened to all those "THEY'RE WORKING ON IT!" explanations and commitments to the player base?

100%

Lucasl402 · December 16

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.

Yep, pretty obvious if you think about it for even a second or two.

xR3ACTORx · December 16

Lucasl402 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.

Yep, pretty obvious if you think about it for even a second or two.

ZOS probably suffers from what's called brain drain, but that's speculation from me.

Lucasl402 · December 16

xR3ACTORx wrote: »

Lucasl402 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.

Yep, pretty obvious if you think about it for even a second or two.

ZOS probably suffers from what's called brain drain, but that's speculation from me.

It's never a good sign when a games creator and leading dev quits or gets fired. (still not sure if he quit or got fired, but he's not with ZOS anymore either way)

Artisian0001 · December 16

ceruulean wrote: »

Artisian0001 wrote: »

This is available on multiple Twitch channels. There are a lot of ballgroup players that stream. Novellli leads the best group in the game and will sometimes stream but there isn't commentary. Citats also streams with his AD group as well as xzyleighx. Why does having CMX matter? I checked the stuff you publicly posted and it's evident you don't play at the highest level, but needing CMX for a GvG is something only someone who has zero knowledge of it would ask for, everyone uses the actual logs in the game that give way more information.

You can watch any of like 10 streamers on Twitch who stream ballgroup gameplay and they all kill other groups equal to theirs in size, as does any ballgroup aside from the 20+ plus ones that are just zergs.

Also the video you linked is taken place in IC underground in a bugged spot, this doesn't back your point at all, these players are cyro players they just went to IC because it has no population to do the tournament lol

I don't see much worth watching. Here's a 12v12 from 2 years ago from one of the names you dropped and it's 16 minutes long which proves that there used to be metas with 10+ min duels: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2071122145

It's pretty telling that you're telling me to go find examples and I really can't find anything recent post-sibclassing that looks exciting. Mostly zerg baiting and fighting inexperienced players.

Anyway, ZoS shouldn't cater to the highest level of hardcore player. This reddit post links a study that the Call of Duty developers did: https://www.reddit.com/r/elderscrollsonline/s/y4RxOPrt3V

In short, when devs disabled skill-based matchmaking like their vocal hardcore crowd called for, casual players reported more frustration and quitting. Then even the top percentile drains out. As the lower skilled players quit, the pool consists of only high skill players, however within that group their relative percentiles drop. So if you were a top 10th player, but the bottom rung all quit, you slide down to 50th best, as an example. Then even these people quit as the population shrinks. So the study proves that matching people of similar skill is important for sustained gameplay.

Sure, Greyhost can be where the high skilled players compete with each other. The hardcore crowd is perfectly happy to stay within that bracket for the rest of the games life. Just don't be surprised when it collapses because there's no room for lower skilled players anymore.

Any serious PvE uses logs/CMX for metrics. Idk what you think serious high level PvP play is supposed to look like without those, and without commentary to explain decisions.

Again, this is all just further proof you don't know anything about the PvP scene in ESO. Tyr has been on the game for a long time and any ballgroup player who has PvPed for more than 2 years will know who they are, I don't know why you are trying to call people inexperienced when the only inexperienced PvPer in the scenario is you, from what you literally have posted yourself on video.

You lack any understanding as well when it comes to GvGs, you can see the members die multiple times and groups will allow the other group to res their members so the fight can continue. You change your stance from "nobody dies for 10 minutes" to this without realize how wrong you are. I thought nobody died, did you not watch the video you linked? There are plenty of deaths, just because they are following the common GvG tradition of letting the other group res doesn't mean no deaths happen just because there isn't a full wipe, that's a different argument entirely, do you want to change that to your argument now? Additionally, you linked a highlighted video from Twitch, Twitch doesn't save broadcasts unless they are highlighted, old ones are automatically deleted and there is a storage limit. The person who's Twitch you linked has multiple VODs on their YouTube from subclassing patches and the other streamers I mentioned have them as well.

In addition, you still lack any understanding when you mention CMX as a metric for end game PvP or BGs. It was used commonly in duels as a means to understand what you are taking a lot of damage from, what your highest source of damage was, what you need to change, but it is never used In GvGs or any type of ballgroup playstyle unless the players are just vastly inexperienced. The guild you are part of for BGs, which I can see from the videos you have posted, got 37-0ed in a BG by the group you posted in this thread in a 4v4. I understand you think you know where higher skill players are, and that's great for lower skill players to attempt venturing into higher skill PvP, and this can exist in BGs for sure, but randomly queing into a BG usually puts you against people that aren't any good because the MM isn't great. Cyro often has ballgroups that are attempting to fight out numbered and when GvGs commonly happen and people die ALL THE TIME it's common courtesy to let the group res when they lose their puller or a certain amount of people so the fight can continue.

Artisian0001 · December 16

fizzybeef wrote: »

So the time has shown now, nobody wants to play Vengeance anymore, as soon GH is back up.
@ZOS can you finally stomp that project now?

As much as I'd like them to allocate more resources to actually fixing the problems in GH, I think keeping it up will only show them that they are out of touch with what the community wants when it continues to get smaller and smaller. Along with the fact that some people actually do enjoy it, albeit a lot less, but allowing the small portion of them to play it is fine. They just need to, for once, dial in on cyro PvP and minimizing the issues it has. It's one of the main reasons people are still around, even with how bad it can get during volendrung spawns.

MincMincMinc · December 16

Artisian0001 wrote: »

fizzybeef wrote: »

So the time has shown now, nobody wants to play Vengeance anymore, as soon GH is back up.
@ZOS can you finally stomp that project now?

As much as I'd like them to allocate more resources to actually fixing the problems in GH, I think keeping it up will only show them that they are out of touch with what the community wants when it continues to get smaller and smaller. Along with the fact that some people actually do enjoy it, albeit a lot less, but allowing the small portion of them to play it is fine. They just need to, for once, dial in on cyro PvP and minimizing the issues it has. It's one of the main reasons people are still around, even with how bad it can get during volendrung spawns.

The issue with live GH cyrodil is the game itself. To fix it involves cutting out half the sets in the game, cutting down on proc effects like poisons, status effects, passives. Then gutting skills so they dont have multiple paragraph parts to them. Major rule changes would have to be reverted like how over time effects used to not stack. Tons of other game design needs to change like how everyone moves 2x the old run speed and mount speed letting players not get ganked. Groups easily converge without being split up by gankers and side objectives artificially spreading the population out.

Its quite literally making a new game from scratch at this point. Which is where many hoped vengeance would lead to with the pve/pvp split skills, but no plan from zos has been released or discussed to this extent.

Artisian0001 · December 16

MincMincMinc wrote: »

Artisian0001 wrote: »

fizzybeef wrote: »

So the time has shown now, nobody wants to play Vengeance anymore, as soon GH is back up.
@ZOS can you finally stomp that project now?

As much as I'd like them to allocate more resources to actually fixing the problems in GH, I think keeping it up will only show them that they are out of touch with what the community wants when it continues to get smaller and smaller. Along with the fact that some people actually do enjoy it, albeit a lot less, but allowing the small portion of them to play it is fine. They just need to, for once, dial in on cyro PvP and minimizing the issues it has. It's one of the main reasons people are still around, even with how bad it can get during volendrung spawns.

The issue with live GH cyrodil is the game itself. To fix it involves cutting out half the sets in the game, cutting down on proc effects like poisons, status effects, passives. Then gutting skills so they dont have multiple paragraph parts to them. Major rule changes would have to be reverted like how over time effects used to not stack. Tons of other game design needs to change like how everyone moves 2x the old run speed and mount speed letting players not get ganked. Groups easily converge without being split up by gankers and side objectives artificially spreading the population out.

Its quite literally making a new game from scratch at this point. Which is where many hoped vengeance would lead to, but no plan from zos has been released or discussed to this extent.

I don't necessarily agree. The procs can obviously cause issue with performance, but a lot of the issue is redundancies and IMO the biggest issue has been and always will be memory leak. When the latest midyear/whitestrakes happened, the servers slowly went under heavier and heavier load and the game was really bad in cyro. When midyear was over and the double AP and reward boxes were no longer there, the additional campaigns stayed up and there was no maintenance because they continued to keep them open until the end of the month. Even when population wasn't high and there weren't giant groups going around the game was AWFUL just because of the fact that the servers hadn't gone under maintenance. How you even manage to get memory leak that bad is beyond me, but that's the biggest issue. In addition, the game comes under huge load when volendrung comes out every time. If you are in cyro and there are 50 people on each alliance, but those fights are all spread out, load on the server is okay, but when you bring everyone together, even if the numbers are the same or less, the strain becomes much worse. I like volendrung but it should be removed IMO just because of how bad the performance becomes. Vengeance was made to give a new experience to PvP but the main reason was to address performance issues and allow more people to play, so the main issue isn't balance but performance that should be addressed, and fixing the issue of memory leak which has existed for such a long period of time, just that issue alone would make performance day and night.

MincMincMinc · December 16

Artisian0001 wrote: »

MincMincMinc wrote: »

Artisian0001 wrote: »

fizzybeef wrote: »

So the time has shown now, nobody wants to play Vengeance anymore, as soon GH is back up.
@ZOS can you finally stomp that project now?

As much as I'd like them to allocate more resources to actually fixing the problems in GH, I think keeping it up will only show them that they are out of touch with what the community wants when it continues to get smaller and smaller. Along with the fact that some people actually do enjoy it, albeit a lot less, but allowing the small portion of them to play it is fine. They just need to, for once, dial in on cyro PvP and minimizing the issues it has. It's one of the main reasons people are still around, even with how bad it can get during volendrung spawns.

The issue with live GH cyrodil is the game itself. To fix it involves cutting out half the sets in the game, cutting down on proc effects like poisons, status effects, passives. Then gutting skills so they dont have multiple paragraph parts to them. Major rule changes would have to be reverted like how over time effects used to not stack. Tons of other game design needs to change like how everyone moves 2x the old run speed and mount speed letting players not get ganked. Groups easily converge without being split up by gankers and side objectives artificially spreading the population out.

Its quite literally making a new game from scratch at this point. Which is where many hoped vengeance would lead to, but no plan from zos has been released or discussed to this extent.

I don't necessarily agree. The procs can obviously cause issue with performance, but a lot of the issue is redundancies and IMO the biggest issue has been and always will be memory leak. When the latest midyear/whitestrakes happened, the servers slowly went under heavier and heavier load and the game was really bad in cyro. When midyear was over and the double AP and reward boxes were no longer there, the additional campaigns stayed up and there was no maintenance because they continued to keep them open until the end of the month. Even when population wasn't high and there weren't giant groups going around the game was AWFUL just because of the fact that the servers hadn't gone under maintenance. How you even manage to get memory leak that bad is beyond me, but that's the biggest issue. In addition, the game comes under huge load when volendrung comes out every time. If you are in cyro and there are 50 people on each alliance, but those fights are all spread out, load on the server is okay, but when you bring everyone together, even if the numbers are the same or less, the strain becomes much worse. I like volendrung but it should be removed IMO just because of how bad the performance becomes. Vengeance was made to give a new experience to PvP but the main reason was to address performance issues and allow more people to play, so the main issue isn't balance but performance that should be addressed, and fixing the issue of memory leak which has existed for such a long period of time, just that issue alone would make performance day and night.

I would agree volundrung needs to be removed, been saying it since day one. The game already couldnt handle large groups back then.

You are just assuming there is a memory leak issue though with only anecdotal evidence. I have not see signs of memory leak issues for the server. If this was present zos would have changed all campaigns to be week long campaigns instead of 30 day.

Vengeance is supposed to be a test bed baseline to measure how much any future change contributes (if they give up on changes veng will just stay as it is for new players to learn in, its atleast better than the 0 pop under 50 campaign to learn in).

IMO engineering wise I think they may be better off just jumping ahead to introducing core systems you KNOW will have to be in a final game for players to be happy. Like item sets, passives, gear, potions, attributes, mundus. Even if there was only a handful of sets to put together. They should really have this datapoint as a barebones core game state. If veng was closer to alpha this would be more like a beta. Then after beta you could start introducing more complex skill or proc effects. Starting off with the last passive or skill in a tree or maybe only ultimates.

Artisian0001 · December 16

MincMincMinc wrote: »

Artisian0001 wrote: »

MincMincMinc wrote: »

Artisian0001 wrote: »

fizzybeef wrote: »

So the time has shown now, nobody wants to play Vengeance anymore, as soon GH is back up.
@ZOS can you finally stomp that project now?

As much as I'd like them to allocate more resources to actually fixing the problems in GH, I think keeping it up will only show them that they are out of touch with what the community wants when it continues to get smaller and smaller. Along with the fact that some people actually do enjoy it, albeit a lot less, but allowing the small portion of them to play it is fine. They just need to, for once, dial in on cyro PvP and minimizing the issues it has. It's one of the main reasons people are still around, even with how bad it can get during volendrung spawns.

The issue with live GH cyrodil is the game itself. To fix it involves cutting out half the sets in the game, cutting down on proc effects like poisons, status effects, passives. Then gutting skills so they dont have multiple paragraph parts to them. Major rule changes would have to be reverted like how over time effects used to not stack. Tons of other game design needs to change like how everyone moves 2x the old run speed and mount speed letting players not get ganked. Groups easily converge without being split up by gankers and side objectives artificially spreading the population out.

Its quite literally making a new game from scratch at this point. Which is where many hoped vengeance would lead to, but no plan from zos has been released or discussed to this extent.

I don't necessarily agree. The procs can obviously cause issue with performance, but a lot of the issue is redundancies and IMO the biggest issue has been and always will be memory leak. When the latest midyear/whitestrakes happened, the servers slowly went under heavier and heavier load and the game was really bad in cyro. When midyear was over and the double AP and reward boxes were no longer there, the additional campaigns stayed up and there was no maintenance because they continued to keep them open until the end of the month. Even when population wasn't high and there weren't giant groups going around the game was AWFUL just because of the fact that the servers hadn't gone under maintenance. How you even manage to get memory leak that bad is beyond me, but that's the biggest issue. In addition, the game comes under huge load when volendrung comes out every time. If you are in cyro and there are 50 people on each alliance, but those fights are all spread out, load on the server is okay, but when you bring everyone together, even if the numbers are the same or less, the strain becomes much worse. I like volendrung but it should be removed IMO just because of how bad the performance becomes. Vengeance was made to give a new experience to PvP but the main reason was to address performance issues and allow more people to play, so the main issue isn't balance but performance that should be addressed, and fixing the issue of memory leak which has existed for such a long period of time, just that issue alone would make performance day and night.

I would agree volundrung needs to be removed, been saying it since day one. The game already couldnt handle large groups back then.

You are just assuming there is a memory leak issue though with only anecdotal evidence. I have not see signs of memory leak issues for the server. If this was present zos would have changed all campaigns to be week long campaigns instead of 30 day.

Vengeance is supposed to be a test bed baseline to measure how much any future change contributes (if they give up on changes veng will just stay as it is for new players to learn in, its atleast better than the 0 pop under 50 campaign to learn in).

IMO engineering wise I think they may be better off just jumping ahead to introducing core systems you KNOW will have to be in a final game for players to be happy. Like item sets, passives, gear, potions, attributes, mundus. Even if there was only a handful of sets to put together. They should really have this datapoint as a barebones core game state. If veng was closer to alpha this would be more like a beta. Then after beta you could start introducing more complex skill or proc effects. Starting off with the last passive or skill in a tree or maybe only ultimates.

The memory leak isn't at all an assumption when it happens constantly. Players who have played the game long enough know to reset their game, to alt f4 and completely relaunch their game after a minute when they are put offline to reset it. Certain addons have made it worse but even disabling everything doesn't fix the problem. The midyear month long server performance got progressively worse, even after the event was over and population in cyro went down because it wasn't reset. The issue is obvious and needs to be fixed.

Stamicka · December 16

Artisian0001 wrote: »

MincMincMinc wrote: »

Artisian0001 wrote: »

fizzybeef wrote: »

So the time has shown now, nobody wants to play Vengeance anymore, as soon GH is back up.
@ZOS can you finally stomp that project now?

As much as I'd like them to allocate more resources to actually fixing the problems in GH, I think keeping it up will only show them that they are out of touch with what the community wants when it continues to get smaller and smaller. Along with the fact that some people actually do enjoy it, albeit a lot less, but allowing the small portion of them to play it is fine. They just need to, for once, dial in on cyro PvP and minimizing the issues it has. It's one of the main reasons people are still around, even with how bad it can get during volendrung spawns.

The issue with live GH cyrodil is the game itself. To fix it involves cutting out half the sets in the game, cutting down on proc effects like poisons, status effects, passives. Then gutting skills so they dont have multiple paragraph parts to them. Major rule changes would have to be reverted like how over time effects used to not stack. Tons of other game design needs to change like how everyone moves 2x the old run speed and mount speed letting players not get ganked. Groups easily converge without being split up by gankers and side objectives artificially spreading the population out.

Its quite literally making a new game from scratch at this point. Which is where many hoped vengeance would lead to, but no plan from zos has been released or discussed to this extent.

Vengeance was made to give a new experience to PvP but the main reason was to address performance issues and allow more people to play, so the main issue isn't balance but performance that should be addressed, and fixing the issue of memory leak which has existed for such a long period of time, just that issue alone would make performance day and night.

Balance and performance both need to be addressed because PvP will continue to decline otherwise. If they address performance, but not balance, people will still avoid PvP. If they address balance, but not performance, then Cyrodiil is still unplayable and the population caps are too low to keep it fun.

MincMinc is totally right and they articulated what I was trying to say much better than me. The first Vengeance test performed pretty well and held a ton of people. They should've tested more aggressively by adding as much as they could while maintaining the performance and population caps of Vengeance 1. Instead they conducted tests months apart and added very little at a time.

I think it's likely they could've maintained the performance and population of Vengeance 1 even after adding simple stat based sets, more skills, and a bit more complexity to the existing skills. At some point we would end up with something closely resembling 2015-2016 PvP in ESO. Damage and healing values could be tweaked as needed without worrying about PvE at all. There was a reason PvP had such massive populations and a steady influx of new players back then. One Tamriel was one of the biggest PvP mass exoduses I have ever seen and that's the patch when the procs and heavy armor builds really started to get out of control. Grey Host is significantly worse than even One Tamriel Cyrodiil was. It's no surprise PvPers refuse to return and new players quit after staying in for just a few minutes.

Think about how much needs to be calculated in an environment like Grey Host vs. an environment like Vengeance. A single light attack in Grey Host does it's own damage, can proc a proc set, can proc an enchant, the enchant can proc a status effect, then the proc set can proc a status effect. All of that is impacted by CP and there's probability calculations needed for those damage events. That's a lot of instances of damage from one small action and from a gameplay perspective it's extremely low skill and effortless. I think it's better for both performance and balance if a player is more directly responsible for the damage they deal in PvP environments. You should actually have to use and time abilities to be effective. If you agree with me here, then ask yourself how Grey Host will address the issue of free effortless damage without having terrible consequences for PvE. Battle Spirit alone can't fix that.

Theignson · December 16

Artisan: "The best PvP players are without a shadow of a doubt, those who play in current GH and try to fight equal or greater numbers than those they currently have in their group. The "super serious" ones are the ones that make comps and builds for every single person in their group to be optimized so they can fight as many people as they can. "

Ceruulean: "Maybe back in 2018 when the population was higher and there was actual competition and strategy in Cyrodiil, I'd believe that CP Cyro required skill of the chess kind. Zone chat was full of spies and people calling out plays and doing psychological mind games and whatnot. But nowadays, the population caps are low and it's mostly ball groups fighting zergs and waiting for some other ball group to contest them, and they're dueling for 10 minutes with no one dying. I suppose these GvG need to be pre-arranged in Discord nowadays with exclusive signups like vet trials. So fun."

It is interesting that most of the posts are from people who refused to go into VG or who refused to go into GH. Having played extensively in both gives some perspective.

The main "skill" in current GH ballgroups is staying on crown (not always easy to do if you have never tried it at max speed) and everyone keeping their HOTs/shields up. If you do this, current GH ballgroups are very hard to kill. They have insane damage mitigation. This doesnt prevent their damage output, mainly due to RoA. RoA pulls all the fish together so the BG dumps its damage. Rinse, repeat every 8 seconds. It is mindless god mode. Thousands of posts have been made trying to explain to ZOS how RoA ruined PvP. To no effect. For over 2 years every single BG or small man has been using this boring, stale, repetitive,broken meta.

The irony is that in VG you actually had to have skill, since there were no proc sets to automate key actions. People complain it is only numbers in VG, not true. Sure if you tried to take your 8 man through 6 flaming oils and 5 meatbags and run into 30 players, you would get dissolved-- but that is actually more challenging than current god-mode.

I did see a ballgroup in VG that used careful allocation of abilities and coordination to destroy pugs. It was an AD ballgroup and they proved that coordination and planning could prevail. They defeated bigger zergs. But it was much, much more challenging to achieve this in VG than GH.

AvA battles were much more fun in VG; no god mode ballgroups running around the keep for 45 minutes, instead huge battles with hundreds of players that were hard to predict; several times with lower numbers we won keep battles due to proper use of defensive siege and good timing of pushing out.

Of course outside of prime time VG was dead and was a nightcap fiasco with EP taking the whole map. But this is also a problem in GH.

I would vote for both zones to continue, VG and GH, with reasonable adjustments in both over time to improve them. And I would continue to play in both.

Artisian0001 · December 16

Theignson wrote: »

Artisan: "The best PvP players are without a shadow of a doubt, those who play in current GH and try to fight equal or greater numbers than those they currently have in their group. The "super serious" ones are the ones that make comps and builds for every single person in their group to be optimized so they can fight as many people as they can. "

Ceruulean: "Maybe back in 2018 when the population was higher and there was actual competition and strategy in Cyrodiil, I'd believe that CP Cyro required skill of the chess kind. Zone chat was full of spies and people calling out plays and doing psychological mind games and whatnot. But nowadays, the population caps are low and it's mostly ball groups fighting zergs and waiting for some other ball group to contest them, and they're dueling for 10 minutes with no one dying. I suppose these GvG need to be pre-arranged in Discord nowadays with exclusive signups like vet trials. So fun."

It is interesting that most of the posts are from people who refused to go into VG or who refused to go into GH. Having played extensively in both gives some perspective.

The main "skill" in current GH ballgroups is staying on crown (not always easy to do if you have never tried it at max speed) and everyone keeping their HOTs/shields up. If you do this, current GH ballgroups are very hard to kill. They have insane damage mitigation. This doesnt prevent their damage output, mainly due to RoA. RoA pulls all the fish together so the BG dumps its damage. Rinse, repeat every 8 seconds. It is mindless god mode. Thousands of posts have been made trying to explain to ZOS how RoA ruined PvP. To no effect. For over 2 years every single BG or small man has been using this boring, stale, repetitive,broken meta.

The irony is that in VG you actually had to have skill, since there were no proc sets to automate key actions. People complain it is only numbers in VG, not true. Sure if you tried to take your 8 man through 6 flaming oils and 5 meatbags and run into 30 players, you would get dissolved-- but that is actually more challenging than current god-mode.

I did see a ballgroup in VG that used careful allocation of abilities and coordination to destroy pugs. It was an AD ballgroup and they proved that coordination and planning could prevail. They defeated bigger zergs. But it was much, much more challenging to achieve this in VG than GH.

AvA battles were much more fun in VG; no god mode ballgroups running around the keep for 45 minutes, instead huge battles with hundreds of players that were hard to predict; several times with lower numbers we won keep battles due to proper use of defensive siege and good timing of pushing out.

Of course outside of prime time VG was dead and was a nightcap fiasco with EP taking the whole map. But this is also a problem in GH.

I would vote for both zones to continue, VG and GH, with reasonable adjustments in both over time to improve them. And I would continue to play in both.

I have been in both. Vengeance is only a numbers game. You can win 1v1s and 1v2s sure, when the players are very unskilled like the people Ceruulean has put in their videos who are levels 23, 28, 30, etc. who have spent no time in PvP and are just trying out the PvP, which I am fine with. I am also fine with both existing as I have stated, but by far the lowest skill ceiling right now is the Vengeance campaign. Does that matter? No, not really, the person who originally brought up the topic of skill wasn't me, Vengeance was brought about originally just because of performance issues and I am fine with that, but this thread is about the population of Vengeance and it is far below GH and Vengeance is still relatively new, and dropping in population, which is a bad sign. The devs should pay attention to the campaign people actually want to play, more so than the lower populated one at least. If people have fun in Vengeance let them play there, but allocating time and resources to a campaign less people want to play is silly.

MincMincMinc · December 16

Stamicka wrote: »

Artisian0001 wrote: »

MincMincMinc wrote: »

Artisian0001 wrote: »

fizzybeef wrote: »

So the time has shown now, nobody wants to play Vengeance anymore, as soon GH is back up.
@ZOS can you finally stomp that project now?

As much as I'd like them to allocate more resources to actually fixing the problems in GH, I think keeping it up will only show them that they are out of touch with what the community wants when it continues to get smaller and smaller. Along with the fact that some people actually do enjoy it, albeit a lot less, but allowing the small portion of them to play it is fine. They just need to, for once, dial in on cyro PvP and minimizing the issues it has. It's one of the main reasons people are still around, even with how bad it can get during volendrung spawns.

The issue with live GH cyrodil is the game itself. To fix it involves cutting out half the sets in the game, cutting down on proc effects like poisons, status effects, passives. Then gutting skills so they dont have multiple paragraph parts to them. Major rule changes would have to be reverted like how over time effects used to not stack. Tons of other game design needs to change like how everyone moves 2x the old run speed and mount speed letting players not get ganked. Groups easily converge without being split up by gankers and side objectives artificially spreading the population out.

Its quite literally making a new game from scratch at this point. Which is where many hoped vengeance would lead to, but no plan from zos has been released or discussed to this extent.

Vengeance was made to give a new experience to PvP but the main reason was to address performance issues and allow more people to play, so the main issue isn't balance but performance that should be addressed, and fixing the issue of memory leak which has existed for such a long period of time, just that issue alone would make performance day and night.

Balance and performance both need to be addressed because PvP will continue to decline otherwise. If they address performance, but not balance, people will still avoid PvP. If they address balance, but not performance, then Cyrodiil is still unplayable and the population caps are too low to keep it fun.
MincMinc is totally right and they articulated what I was trying to say much better than me. The first Vengeance test performed pretty well and held a ton of people. They should've tested more aggressively by adding as much as they could while maintaining the performance and population caps of Vengeance 1. Instead they conducted tests months apart and added very little at a time.

I think it's likely they could've maintained the performance and population of Vengeance 1 even after adding simple stat based sets, more skills, and a bit more complexity to the existing skills. At some point we would end up with something closely resembling 2015-2016 PvP in ESO. Damage and healing values could be tweaked as needed without worrying about PvE at all. There was a reason PvP had such massive populations and a steady influx of new players back then. One Tamriel was one of the biggest PvP mass exoduses I have ever seen and that's the patch when the procs and heavy armor builds really started to get out of control. Grey Host is significantly worse than even One Tamriel Cyrodiil was. It's no surprise PvPers refuse to return and new players quit after staying in for just a few minutes.

Think about how much needs to be calculated in an environment like Grey Host vs. an environment like Vengeance. A single light attack in Grey Host does it's own damage, can proc a proc set, can proc an enchant, the enchant can proc a status effect, then the proc set can proc a status effect. All of that is impacted by CP and there's probability calculations needed for those damage events. That's a lot of instances of damage from one small action and from a gameplay perspective it's extremely low skill and effortless. I think it's better for both performance and balance if a player is more directly responsible for the damage they deal in PvP environments. You should actually have to use and time abilities to be effective. If you agree with me here, then ask yourself how Grey Host will address the issue of free effortless damage without having terrible consequences for PvE.
Battle Spirit alone can't fix that.

Well summed up.

Engineering wise my approach is more geared towards getting the players in a more confident environment vs what zos did which was bare skeleton and then spend all this time messing with background systems the players dont care about like achievements or pets in pvp. Stuff that could be entirely disabled anyways. To their credit, I bet this is more of an issue of the engineering and combat team has to fight uphill against top brass to justify spending multiple years of work fixing a system that is a decade too late.

If you ever looked into iterative solving there are many different ways to go about it. My suggestion was the divide by two method. Where we have GH at worst performance and Veng1 at best.....where would a more middleground be with the necessary systems in place?

900pop(veng)
750pop?
600pop?
450pop?
300pop(GH)
180pop(New gamemode?)
16pop(BG)

I'd bet if we did the basic essentials of food, mundus, stat sets, morphs, nonproc passives.......we could atleast land somewhere around a 600 population cap. From this more ideal vengeance you would look into rule changes like hot/dot stacking, crosshealing, aoe caps, cost increase structures, etc.

MincMincMinc · December 16

Artisian0001 wrote: »

Theignson wrote: »

Artisan: "The best PvP players are without a shadow of a doubt, those who play in current GH and try to fight equal or greater numbers than those they currently have in their group. The "super serious" ones are the ones that make comps and builds for every single person in their group to be optimized so they can fight as many people as they can. "

Ceruulean: "Maybe back in 2018 when the population was higher and there was actual competition and strategy in Cyrodiil, I'd believe that CP Cyro required skill of the chess kind. Zone chat was full of spies and people calling out plays and doing psychological mind games and whatnot. But nowadays, the population caps are low and it's mostly ball groups fighting zergs and waiting for some other ball group to contest them, and they're dueling for 10 minutes with no one dying. I suppose these GvG need to be pre-arranged in Discord nowadays with exclusive signups like vet trials. So fun."

It is interesting that most of the posts are from people who refused to go into VG or who refused to go into GH. Having played extensively in both gives some perspective.

The main "skill" in current GH ballgroups is staying on crown (not always easy to do if you have never tried it at max speed) and everyone keeping their HOTs/shields up. If you do this, current GH ballgroups are very hard to kill. They have insane damage mitigation. This doesnt prevent their damage output, mainly due to RoA. RoA pulls all the fish together so the BG dumps its damage. Rinse, repeat every 8 seconds. It is mindless god mode. Thousands of posts have been made trying to explain to ZOS how RoA ruined PvP. To no effect. For over 2 years every single BG or small man has been using this boring, stale, repetitive,broken meta.

The irony is that in VG you actually had to have skill, since there were no proc sets to automate key actions. People complain it is only numbers in VG, not true. Sure if you tried to take your 8 man through 6 flaming oils and 5 meatbags and run into 30 players, you would get dissolved-- but that is actually more challenging than current god-mode.

I did see a ballgroup in VG that used careful allocation of abilities and coordination to destroy pugs. It was an AD ballgroup and they proved that coordination and planning could prevail. They defeated bigger zergs. But it was much, much more challenging to achieve this in VG than GH.

AvA battles were much more fun in VG; no god mode ballgroups running around the keep for 45 minutes, instead huge battles with hundreds of players that were hard to predict; several times with lower numbers we won keep battles due to proper use of defensive siege and good timing of pushing out.

Of course outside of prime time VG was dead and was a nightcap fiasco with EP taking the whole map. But this is also a problem in GH.

I would vote for both zones to continue, VG and GH, with reasonable adjustments in both over time to improve them. And I would continue to play in both.

I have been in both. Vengeance is only a numbers game. You can win 1v1s and 1v2s sure, when the players are very unskilled like the people Ceruulean has put in their videos who are levels 23, 28, 30, etc. who have spent no time in PvP and are just trying out the PvP, which I am fine with. I am also fine with both existing as I have stated, but by far the lowest skill ceiling right now is the Vengeance campaign. Does that matter? No, not really, the person who originally brought up the topic of skill wasn't me, Vengeance was brought about originally just because of performance issues and I am fine with that, but this thread is about the population of Vengeance and it is far below GH and Vengeance is still relatively new, and dropping in population, which is a bad sign. The devs should pay attention to the campaign people actually want to play, more so than the lower populated one at least. If people have fun in Vengeance let them play there, but allocating time and resources to a campaign less people want to play is silly.

The problem with this mentality is that for zos it isnt a matter of this campaign vs that one. If they cant use the vengeance test bed to implement solutions.....they just wont invest into either. Which has been the ongoing plan for the past 10 years. As far as we can tell they have not gotten answers from vengeance so far and are having their design teams work on a mid sized gamemode instead because for GH to not lag they need to cut the population in half again, and at such low pop that the map doesn't function anymore.

It is disappointing to see that they are doing major class reworks considering they have barely scratched the surface on vengeance skill testing. They never tested rule concepts like whether they should let dots or hots stack, whether they should have alot of cross heals, etc. So IMO their planning is setting the whole thing up for failure from the start.......The previous commitments of releasing scribing and subclassing largely unbalanced forced the hand at an early class rework. During probably the worst possible time where it would be crucial to get answers from testing.

YandereGirlfriend · December 16

Honestly, you could probably:

1. Limit unique sticky HOTs to 1x or 2x
2. Limit unique sticky DOTs to 1x
3. Reduce Scribing buffs to 10s
4. Reduce Scribing debuffs to 10s
5. Disable status effects
6. Disable poisons
7. Audit some of the least performant CP
8. BAN DATA-SHARING ADD-ONS

And not much would be lost from the sort of core Grey Host experience that we enjoy today. And in return, we would pocket some unknown but meaningful amount of performance. All without deleting anyone's playstyle or banning sets, buffs, etc..

Would hyper-specific builds be impacted (e.g. Draugrkin status effect cheese)? Sure. But that is like single-digits among Cyrodiil players and at a certain point the good of the many outweighs a small handful of hyper-specific builds.

And philosophically speaking, relatively small details (but with likely huge performance overhead, particularly status effects) like status effects and poisons belong more to small-scale combat venues than they do to AvA and large-scale combat. Weapon enchants (armor enchants are fine as they have no active logic associated with them) are similarly small-scale but used by more players as a meaningful component of their build. Of course, if it could be demonstrated that weapon enchant handling had an outsized performance impact then it is another effect that could likely be disabled.

MincMincMinc · December 17

YandereGirlfriend wrote: »

Honestly, you could probably:

1. Limit unique sticky HOTs to 1x or 2x
2. Limit unique sticky DOTs to 1x
3. Reduce Scribing buffs to 10s
4. Reduce Scribing debuffs to 10s
5. Disable status effects
6. Disable poisons
7. Audit some of the least performant CP
8. BAN DATA-SHARING ADD-ONS

And not much would be lost from the sort of core Grey Host experience that we enjoy today. And in return, we would pocket some unknown but meaningful amount of performance. All without deleting anyone's playstyle or banning sets, buffs, etc..

Would hyper-specific builds be impacted (e.g. Draugrkin status effect cheese)? Sure. But that is like single-digits among Cyrodiil players and at a certain point the good of the many outweighs a small handful of hyper-specific builds.

And philosophically speaking, relatively small details (but with likely huge performance overhead, particularly status effects) like status effects and poisons belong more to small-scale combat venues than they do to AvA and large-scale combat. Weapon enchants (armor enchants are fine as they have no active logic associated with them) are similarly small-scale but used by more players as a meaningful component of their build. Of course, if it could be demonstrated that weapon enchant handling had an outsized performance impact then it is another effect that could likely be disabled.

Yeah its kinda painful to hear zos sounding like they are giving up when none of what we have been saying for a decade now has been tested.Its worse when we see changes like zos introducing phys and mag damage status effects......the whole point was so most weapons used physical attacks and the majority of spammed skills would not do these kinds of calculations. Same goes for most mag spammable skills inclass.

Poison and weapon enchants are right up there in just adding complexity. Not to mention how they pair up with light and heavy attack health desyncs.

Hots and dots or effects in general were never supposed to stack in pvp. Way back when it was changed mainly for pve groups to avoid overlap. However even now adays there are so many options that rarely this would be a small scale issue in pvp. In giant zergs, lets be honest, you would never notice your one dot overlapping. If anything the only rule exceptions I would place would be ultimates which are controlled with a long cooldown.

xylena · December 17

edward_frigidhands wrote: »

I am not sure how else to say this but...probably the actual bloody game that we bought.

GH isn't even remotely close to the original product I bought in 2014.

Instakills were rare and generally only against jank builds.

Ball groups could be scattered by siege.

You could 1v1 gank ball groupers inside their ball.

Classes and weapons defined builds, not gear sets.

Soft caps on stats prevented extreme minmaxing from breaking the meta.

Gameplay pace was slower, but fewer fights stalemated.

This is all much more like Vengeance than GH.