soelslaev wrote: »

Lagzee wrote: »

... made by a company like zenimax, backed by microsoft, with millions of dollars behind it...

Please stop perpetuating this falsehood.

When company A buys company B, the purpose of the purchase is to extract the wealth from company B and transmit that wealth to the owners of company A. That is why whatever brand name product that your dad swore by is now garbage. From Sears tractors to Gibson Les Paul guitars.

It used to be, a small group of dedicated people made a good product, and it got a good reputation; that takes 20 years. Then the original folks are tired and hand it over to the next gen. Then next gen gets an offer they would be fools to refuse. The new owners gamble on lowering cost-of-goods-sold in any and all ways possible and making their money back before the good reputation is ruined by the cheap shoddy products now being delivered. The only difference is that nowadays, technology companies can, in some cases, accelerate this to only 5 years before being bought out.

MS buying Bethesda was not good news. It was the beginning of the end.

Darethran wrote: »

Do any of you even read the Vengeance threads? Zenimax said themselves exactly what the problem was in the last Q&A:

Have you considered that not the Skills, but other things lead to the poor performance? For example certain server side updates, which lead to big performance regressions. Even if you run around alone in Cyrodiil, running can be slowed down, or riding on your mount can be sluggish and get slow downs, without ANYONE being near. - RedJohn_COF

A. Yes, we've considered and tested what contributes to game performance impact and have looked at the various things including physics processes (the things that control destructible states on keeps and such). We’ve looked into collections, outfit stations, quests, inventory, etc. Everything pales in comparison to ability usage combined with passives (this includes item sets, CP, and skill line passives), which is why they were the focus of our Vengeance tests.

You've completely missed the point of the question. Why is improving latency not possible, and what is the root of the issue? Is it the game engine? The server hardware? Changes they made years ago that cannot be reversed, for whatever reason? why cant the game handle item sets, CP, and skill line passives, in large scale combat, without abysmal latency issues? When other games can? what is it about this game that makes it so it cant handle it?

I dont know. But to say we cannot have large scale pvp, without abysmal lag and latency issues, is kind of a big deal. At least without telling us what the root of the issue is.

Like an acceptable answer would be, and im just totally making this up, ""our server hardware is outdated and the cost, time, and effort, that would go into replacing it, is so astronomically high that it is not a viable option. So we can only work on band aid fixes and will never really be able to fix the root of the issue, unless some new technology comes out to make it easier to fix."" that would be acceptable. Very disappointing, but acceptable.

What is not acceptable, to me, is to just say its not possible.

Lagzee wrote: »

soelslaev wrote: »

Lagzee wrote: »

... made by a company like zenimax, backed by microsoft, with millions of dollars behind it...

Please stop perpetuating this falsehood.

When company A buys company B, the purpose of the purchase is to extract the wealth from company B and transmit that wealth to the owners of company A. That is why whatever brand name product that your dad swore by is now garbage. From Sears tractors to Gibson Les Paul guitars.

It used to be, a small group of dedicated people made a good product, and it got a good reputation; that takes 20 years. Then the original folks are tired and hand it over to the next gen. Then next gen gets an offer they would be fools to refuse. The new owners gamble on lowering cost-of-goods-sold in any and all ways possible and making their money back before the good reputation is ruined by the cheap shoddy products now being delivered. The only difference is that nowadays, technology companies can, in some cases, accelerate this to only 5 years before being bought out.

MS buying Bethesda was not good news. It was the beginning of the end.

Darethran wrote: »

Do any of you even read the Vengeance threads? Zenimax said themselves exactly what the problem was in the last Q&A:

Have you considered that not the Skills, but other things lead to the poor performance? For example certain server side updates, which lead to big performance regressions. Even if you run around alone in Cyrodiil, running can be slowed down, or riding on your mount can be sluggish and get slow downs, without ANYONE being near. - RedJohn_COF

A. Yes, we've considered and tested what contributes to game performance impact and have looked at the various things including physics processes (the things that control destructible states on keeps and such). We’ve looked into collections, outfit stations, quests, inventory, etc. Everything pales in comparison to ability usage combined with passives (this includes item sets, CP, and skill line passives), which is why they were the focus of our Vengeance tests.

You've completely missed the point of the question. Why is improving latency not possible, and what is the root of the issue? Is it the game engine? The server hardware? Changes they made years ago that cannot be reversed, for whatever reason? why cant the game handle item sets, CP, and skill line passives, in large scale combat, without abysmal latency issues? When other games can? what is it about this game that makes it so it cant handle it?

I dont know. But to say we cannot have large scale pvp, without abysmal lag and latency issues, is kind of a big deal. At least without telling us what the root of the issue is.

Like an acceptable answer would be, and im just totally making this up, ""our server hardware is outdated and the cost, time, and effort, that would go into replacing it, is so astronomically high that it is not a viable option. So we can only work on band aid fixes and will never really be able to fix the root of the issue, unless some new technology comes out to make it easier to fix."" that would be acceptable. Very disappointing, but acceptable.

What is not acceptable, to me, is to just say its not possible.

My guess would be that, in the process of bolting on more and more new features, proc sets, skill lines, and then increasing the combinations of skills and passives through sub-classing, that they've accrued a considerable amount of technical debt. That is, the newer systems were added onto a foundation that wasn't built with those additions in mind, and wasn't best structured to handle them. This tends to happen with any large scale software that sees continual development, and basically requires either some major refactoring of the codebase, or starting over completely from scratch. I honestly don't envy anyone charged with trying to improve performance at this point.

Sluggy wrote: »

JustLovely wrote: »

You've completely missed the point of the question. Why is improving latency not possible, and what is the root of the issue? Is it the game engine? The server hardware? Changes they made years ago that cannot be reversed, for whatever reason? why cant the game handle item sets, CP, and skill line passives, in large scale combat, without abysmal latency issues? When other games can? what is it about this game that makes it so it cant handle it?

I dont know. But to say we cannot have large scale pvp, without abysmal lag and latency issues, is kind of a big deal. At least without telling us what the root of the issue is.

Like an acceptable answer would be, and im just totally making this up, ""our server hardware is outdated and the cost, time, and effort, that would go into replacing it, is so astronomically high that it is not a viable option. So we can only work on band aid fixes and will never really be able to fix the root of the issue, unless some new technology comes out to make it easier to fix."" that would be acceptable. Very disappointing, but acceptable.

What is not acceptable, to me, is to just say its not possible.

I already touched on it but either you missed it or misunderstood.
Simply put, it's not programmed in a way that can handle it. The two choices to 'fix' this are either re-write the core of the combat system from ground up or change the nature of combat itself to work within these limitations. According to ZoS they had tried the first in the past and it seems to have gone nowhere (likely it was deemed too Risky or Expensive or both) so now they are trying the alternative.

you might have but i wasnt responding to you, or reading comments from days ago. Who knows you might be right but im looking for an answer from zenimax. They are the people who have these answers, and the people making statements about performance. They are also the people that have let it get to such an abysmal, unplayable, point. Just a tiny bit of accountability goes a long way, and after 10 years of degrading performance we deserve some specifics about this issue.

Heres another question for zos, why is performance so much worse today than it was 5 years ago, and why have you just allowed this to go on for so many years? Again, something players cant answer.

Lagzee wrote: »

JustLovely wrote: »

Dalinar4 wrote: »

1000% agree with the person who mentioned turning add-ons off. As far as I can tell it is the one thing they haven't tested. At the very least: run a test. Three days with no add-ons in Cyro, or even across the game. Get some hard data points.

I don't think I can play without add ons. I rely very heavily on my custom UI, just for starters. And I wouldn't do writs without Dulgubons.

Pc players dont know how good they have it lol. I put 18k hours into this game before i ever came to pc back in 2020, and i loved every second of it, even without addons. Now im spoiled and when i go back to xbox i miss my addon setup. The xbox addons are just not the same to me.

But regardless, i think the main point here would be to just test it in cyrodiil. not to try to take away doulgubons in pve. I too love my UI and would hate to play without it, but never the less it would be a good thing to test. And something they 1000% should test. And if it did nothing then fine, but its worth checking. If it made latency better then great, then we go from there.

Yes we do. That's why we chose to play on PC. PC is a much stronger and infinitely more versatile platform. It doesn't make sense to expect a game box to have all the same abilities of a PC, it's not a PC.

Lagzee wrote: »

Sluggy wrote: »

JustLovely wrote: »

You've completely missed the point of the question. Why is improving latency not possible, and what is the root of the issue? Is it the game engine? The server hardware? Changes they made years ago that cannot be reversed, for whatever reason? why cant the game handle item sets, CP, and skill line passives, in large scale combat, without abysmal latency issues? When other games can? what is it about this game that makes it so it cant handle it?

I dont know. But to say we cannot have large scale pvp, without abysmal lag and latency issues, is kind of a big deal. At least without telling us what the root of the issue is.

Like an acceptable answer would be, and im just totally making this up, ""our server hardware is outdated and the cost, time, and effort, that would go into replacing it, is so astronomically high that it is not a viable option. So we can only work on band aid fixes and will never really be able to fix the root of the issue, unless some new technology comes out to make it easier to fix."" that would be acceptable. Very disappointing, but acceptable.

What is not acceptable, to me, is to just say its not possible.

I already touched on it but either you missed it or misunderstood.
Simply put, it's not programmed in a way that can handle it. The two choices to 'fix' this are either re-write the core of the combat system from ground up or change the nature of combat itself to work within these limitations. According to ZoS they had tried the first in the past and it seems to have gone nowhere (likely it was deemed too Risky or Expensive or both) so now they are trying the alternative.

you might have but i wasnt responding to you, or reading comments from days ago. Who knows you might be right but im looking for an answer from zenimax. They are the people who have these answers, and the people making statements about performance. They are also the people that have let it get to such an abysmal, unplayable, point. Just a tiny bit of accountability goes a long way, and after 10 years of degrading performance we deserve some specifics about this issue.

Heres another question for zos, why is performance so much worse today than it was 5 years ago, and why have you just allowed this to go on for so many years? Again, something players cant answer.

Well you are simply never going to get that answer unfortunately. One of the issues of being a large mega corp is that direct discussion of any internal technology, issues, challenges, or plans are pretty much forbidden.

But to assuage your concerns somewhat, while I'm mostly just taking a guess - it's not like it isn't based on experience. Performance issues like this crop up for pretty much the same reason in any software and while the very specific details will certainly alter from project to project, the basics never change. Computers are stupidly fast. But we often build a lot of tooling into our software to make development easier and that often impacts performance a lot. And what was considered best practice for nearly three decades was also something that is known to adverse affect performance significantly.

On a side note, I always find it funny that people blame the supposed 'mess of spaghetti code' on performance. That alone wouldn't say if performance suffers from it or not. Some of the hardest-to-read, hardest-to-maintain, bug infested nonsense I've ever had to work on or write has been some of the fastest code for precisely the same reasons. And some of the easiest and most pleasant to work with code has been the very worst performing.

MincMincMinc wrote: »

... I just dont think that moving the stat calcs entirely server side was THAT straining, simple algebra is not going to be that load intensive.

That's been my take on it. The calculations for this kind of thing are exceedingly simple. In theory it shouldn't be anything a consumer-grade home PC from two decades ago couldn't handle with ease. However, layers of abstraction be can one reason why it might be so bad. If I had to take a guess, I'd say they probably don't implement most of the combat logic natively and instead use some kind of scripting language. But at the end of the day, all real performance issues are going to come from one major source - memory access time. It's the part of computers that has seen least the least performance improvement since the 90s. Memory access patterns can also limit how much you can take advantage of multi-core processors. The trouble is, changing how you organize and access memory is one of the biggest changes you could make and trying to move the logic from scripting side to native side also is not only a huge task, but has knock-on effects for any future development.

I feel like deserting GH is a management decision. If it's a competency restriction, then that's a much bigger problem for everyone, customer and studio alike.

MincMincMinc wrote: »

Sluggy wrote: »

MincMincMinc wrote: »

... I just dont think that moving the stat calcs entirely server side was THAT straining, simple algebra is not going to be that load intensive.

That's been my take on it. The calculations for this kind of thing are exceedingly simple. In theory it shouldn't be anything a consumer-grade home PC from two decades ago couldn't handle with ease. However, layers of abstraction be can one reason why it might be so bad. If I had to take a guess, I'd say they probably don't implement most of the combat logic natively and instead use some kind of scripting language. But at the end of the day, all real performance issues are going to come from one major source - memory access time. It's the part of computers that has seen least the least performance improvement since the 90s. Memory access patterns can also limit how much you can take advantage of multi-core processors. The trouble is, changing how you organize and access memory is one of the biggest changes you could make and trying to move the logic from scripting side to native side also is not only a huge task, but has knock-on effects for any future development.

Really the datapoint I want to see is what happens if we go halfway between vengeance and GH. So we know GH lags at 300 pop and vengeance starts to lag around 1200(4x) that. If we added most of the core systems back to vengeance in performative ways, skipping out on proc and call events that can cascade out of control. How many players can we support?

Like imagine doing only stat sheet change sets like hundings. attributes, food, mundus, nonproc passives, nonproc enchants, no poisons, no weapon enchants, no status effect procs, etc.

Agreed. That's where I thought it was going after the first Vegeance test. But it petered out after that. It's why I showed so much concern for the lack of quick turnarounds on the tests. I knew they'd never get it all worked on at the rate they were going and would end up just dropping almost everything. The weapon, armor, and class passives are what makes certain choices shine in the right situation and I think most of the crafted sets are decent enough to warrant allowance in the mode while still allowing mostly for that 'pick up and play' feel.

Zos is redoing classes, they should revamp the skills to be LESS compute intensive. Dots should hit every 2s for shorter timers (6s, 10s, 12s duration). Channels every 1s, but only last 3s. Every skill, every passive, every set should be simplified in code, as much as possible. It's not a remove 1 thing fix. It's an overhaul of everything. They should eliminate weapon and spell damage all together. JUST damage. Same with penetration. Same with armor.

Besides going for efficient coding, get better servers.