The_Meathead wrote: »

YandereGirlfriend wrote: »

Q. Do you have understanding, knowledge and/or insight in what addons that are "private" / "non-official" and used in PVP? Do and do you have plans to monitor or limit the behavior of such addons? - Idinuse

A. We’d like to provide a bit on our philosophy before answering this question. From a technical sense, in our perspective, there is no such thing as a private or unofficial mod. All mods are technically unofficial, since we don’t have a verification process.
Now in the sense that a “private” add-on is something someone made and didn’t post it for wider distribution, we do have a way to keep track of those by user. However, that does not give a clear indicator of what every add-on does. We go by reports and behaviors. So, if we see behavior that shouldn't be possible, or a user reports that an addon-on someone built is suspected of allowing for actions or behaviors that violate our Terms of Service, we investigate, close any API loopholes we find, and ban anyone caught exploiting. To be fair, the add-on community is rather good at self-managing instances like this. They would rather settle it among themselves without our intervention, as that could lead to everyone unintentionally losing more tools in their creative toolkit.
If you see instances where someone is exploiting through add-on usage, please report it to us so we can properly investigate and reduce the harm done.

With respect, this policy is SO backward.

This overly permissive stance toward the use of API features allows bad actors to run roughshod over the restrictions that are commonly believed to be in place (but in reality ARE NOT) and the burden is somehow on the rest of the community to out them and bring them to justice? Do you realize how unreasonable of a standard that is to set? To successfully bust a private and nefarious add-on you are forcing players to literally infiltrate those groups of users in order to expose them. Or to rely upon the sloppiness of those users to out themselves. Both of which are tasks that should fall upon ZOS not players.

Further, for the cost of add-on performance, particularly on the game conditions of NON-USERS, it is IMO outrageous that there is seemingly no effort being made to track the impact of add-ons that are being run in the wild. Recall that it took a random forum poster to blow the whistle on Bandits and the Map Pins hack that was degrading the performance of users and non-users alike. It wasn't an add-on dev or ZOS technical staff. It was a motivated player with Wireshark. That should never happen!

Make these add-on devs prove that their mods are behaving as they claim. Make them prove that they are only impacting the user of the mod. This burden should always fall upon add-on devs and their users and never on non-users.

It was alluded to that ZOS was monitoring the server overhead of the new data-sharing library. May we have a report on those findings? Is it being actively monitored or is it simply able to be monitored but nobody is really checking-in on it? IMO, it feels bad to know that common server resources are being siphoned away to transact the essentially private requests of add-on users. No matter how large or small those requests may be. It is unofficial and unsupported software, after all.

Finally, may we finally have a TEST of removing add-ons (and at the very least data-sharing add-ons) from Cyrodiil? It boggles the mind that, among all of the other iteration in Vengeance, this was never even attempted. Even if you think you know the answer it's worth doing anyway to gather actual hard data under real-world conditions. Just as with Map Pins... the conventional wisdom was that the hack was harmless... until it was actually scrutinized and that turned out emphatically not to be the case. This could well turn out to be the case again.

Very well said.

I've always been tremendously suspicious a certain small group on PC NA is using some sort of AddOn or 3rd party interactions, as they are the only one of their kind (that I've ever run into) that generates the same sort of lag that the most impactful ball groups do.

I rarely if ever see lag in Cyrodiil, not even in the biggest zerg on zerg Faction Stack fights, unless multiple or specific individual Ball Groups are present. That alone has always made me wonder just why certain ones are so much more damaging to server performance (seriously, after so much gameplay, I can identify when specific ones arrive before I even see them just by the type of lag, because I don't see it otherwise.) To me, the possibility that AddOns and their interaction are playing a role seems VERY probable, but I admit I'm far from expert.

The fact a particular small group that's less than half ball group size manages to do the same (and I've seen Zone Chat wide complaints to know I'm not alone in noticing) kinda screams 3rd party something to me, because they certainly couldn't be generating the same amount of ability calculations as a much larger Ball Group, let alone multiple, in a similar area, right?

It's supposition on my part, certainly, but what's been stated here doesn't exactly fill me with certainty that it's being carefully monitored either.

Any chance we can get more on that topic, @ZOS_Kevin ? I know people love their AddOns, but I'd MUCH rather go without them in Cyrodiil entirely if they're not being watched with tremendous and constant scrutiny by you guys for their impact on performance.

ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

The_Meathead wrote: »

Any chance we can get more on that topic, @ZOS_Kevin ? I know people love their AddOns, but I'd MUCH rather go without them in Cyrodiil entirely if they're not being watched with tremendous and constant scrutiny by you guys for their impact on performance.

Let me know what the specific questions are and happy to pass them along to the team. Happy to pass them along to see what answers can be provided. (Just as a quick note, since we are getting into the holidays, folks are dropping off, so depending on the questions, we may not get a response in a timely manner will need to address in January. But that should not stop you from posting a follow up. Just wanted to frame response time for you.)

heimdall14_9 wrote: »

Muizer wrote: »

ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

Q. Does the team feel that faction locks are still beneficial considering the current population? - Izanagi.Xiiib16_ESO
A. Yes, we still believe they are beneficial. Faction locks help to reinforce alliance identity and the social aspect of the game. They are more of a social reinforcement rather than a technical issue. Population really isn’t a factor here with the exception of cutting down on spying and strengthening the social contact among active players.

I don't know. I think you should reconsider this, at least partially. Population imbalances are a big problem in Cyrodiil and IMHO it is not outweighed by abstract concepts like allegiance to an alliance. I bet there are many players like myself who don't really care about it and who would gladly switch to a low pop alliance if the incentives are right. If you want to slap an 'identity' on it, call us 'mercenaries' if you will. That's an identity too. It would take a clear split in the reward system of course, with alliance players having a stake in campaign status/outcome which mercenaries would not have, but they may get a bit more AP up front. Then by all means lock alliance players into their factions, but for all I care auto-redistribute the mercenaries on spawning according to pop balance.

thats what everyone said for years WE LOVE moving to low pop alliance while high pop alliance just got bigger and bigger every camp , players want the easy fights not to fight 20v1.. why you think
NO CP/NO PROC camp had LOW POP because it was to HARD to get an kill for most after losing their CP and PROC sets .... so NO players DO NOT move to lower pop to have FAIR fights !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

xDeusEJRx wrote: »

I seriously implore ZOS reconsiders this idea, even though you think it sounds good on paper. A world boss defending keeps only serves to make the top faction even stronger, and especially so if there is any population imbalance.

Imagine wanting to compete in a campaign where a single faction heavily dominates and in order to get the chance to win, you have to fight bosses at every keep when you already are at a numbers disadvantage. It only really helps the top faction keep the map on lockdown because smaller population factions are going to have a harder time contending with a larger faction AND a world boss at each keep.

This will end up causing results like with volundrung. Volundrung was intended to provide necessary shakeups to the map, but in realistically, a lot of times the dominant faction just takes it to lockdown the map even harder than before the hammer dropped.

This will realistically just make it easier for a dominant faction to keep the map on lockdown even more in the same manner that Volundrung very often ends up in the hands of the dominant faction rather than give a small faction a chance.

diamondo wrote: »

Can I just say good questions and answers here.

So glad to hear about dealing with cross healing and also maybe lowering the damage cap. Crit damage is beyond insane, also spec bow really needs to be sorted out it’s an on demand ultimate. Does more damage consistently than a dawn breaker.

If your taking votes, I think like a keep lord would be an amazing addition keeps are way to easy for a small group to take, having some kick arse dude patrolling the keep would be awesome.
The lord could be more powerful within zones of influence I.e. in home keeps he has far more abilities, makes the guards while alive deal more damage.