We Need To Have A Talk: Gray Host Queue

Orbital78 · June 20

BXR_Lonestar wrote: »

Udrath wrote: »

Why don’t people go to imperial city?

Two issues with IC right now.

1) The lag in there is something else. It's unplayable. I don't know what the issue is but every time I've been in there, the frames will freeze every 5 seconds on the spot, stall out, and then rubberband.

2) You can't accept the que once you get over 100 telvar due to the rules they put in place to prevent people from porting out of IC to save their telvar. So the moment you get 100 telvar on you, you are at a high risk of missing your que, and then you go back to the beginning of the que for GH.

It just wasn't an option. Period.

I don't think I've ever had terrible lag in IC, even during MYM/Whitestrakes. GH on the other hand can be quite terrible depending on what ballgroups/scripts etc are being run. This isn't much of an issue since I don't GH anymore.

For the queue use an addon that auto-accepts. I haven't tested it, but it is my understanding that once you're queued, you're not subject to the limit?

LadyGP · June 20

moderatelyfatman wrote: »

LadyGP wrote: »

BardokRedSnow wrote: »

Lag in IC? Brother I don’t know your pc specs but it may be time for a new one or a driver update. You shouldn’t have lag or performance issues in IC

Brother I'm rocking a $4k pc with fiber and I get lag in IC.

Maybe a $5k PC will fix it?

Being blunt - this game should be like doom and run on pretty much everything at this point. I'll try a potato before I throw more money at it.

peacenote · June 20

Mostly came here to say that I took a break from PvP after the Vengeance tests, except for to participate in one or two of them, because I have limited time and didn't want to get invested in a method of play that was going to be sunset.

Popped back in recently because a) they seem to have decided to keep GH and b) to check out the Veteran PVP rewards thingie. I immediately become extremely frustrated by the queue. All the issues described by everyone are true and I don't need to repeat them. I appreciate that ZOS sees the issue and is trying to take action. Whether it's the right solution or not, I don't know. I do know that the IC telvar porting rule has made things so much worse for me, because what do you do when you want to PvP but are waiting to PvP? Well, I like to PvP from a different place. Because usually I set up before I go in. It doesn't make sense to jump into a dungeon while waiting for Gh to pop. Except, now it doesn't make sense for me to do that if GH is my primary goal and IC is just secondary, but IC keeps me from getting into GH. I logically understand where the change was coming from, but it's a great example about how some people really ruin a good thing for everyone. I always used to PvP in IC waiting for Cyro. But no more.

However, I saw this beautiful post and I now also want say that I can't agree more on the assessment of how we got here. I agree.

LadyGP wrote: »

SneaK wrote: »

Like @Izanagi.Xiiib16_ESO said, the actual issue is how they’ve lowered the population caps randomly throughout the years.

While BR will help the queue, it still doesn’t really address the underlying issue that people want to play in the most dense faction locked Cyro server with a GH ruleset. It’s always been this way. Haderus used to have 100+ queues, so did Scourge. The 7days and the niche camps have never really seen that.

All the new updates are exciting, people are coming back, ZOS should have planned better. Vengeance was never the answer and a year of tests proved that, it’s absurd to think how this has all went down tbh. I would imagine there’s some tuff conversations to be had in the mgmt world at ZOS.

At the end of the day, they need to spend some money on hardware and increase our pop caps to the normal ruleset camps.

Eh, I can see how it went down this way to be honest.

The first test injected an insane amount of hype and "we are so back chat" into the conversation. Those 900 person fights... we hadn't had those type of tights in soooo many years.. it's very easy to get glossy eyed.

The surveys, intentionally or not, seem designed in a way that skews the results and grouping the answers into "fun" categories compounds that original bias even further to reach a desired outcome. Basically: ask "Did you have fun?" with five answer options, then lump three of them into an "88% had fun" stat. When three out of five choices are some version of fun a ton of fun, a lot of fun, fun, somewhat fun, no fun at all you're obviously going to land on "everyone's having a great time" once you chart it. I can't remember the exact survey questions but I do remember having a moment during the stream where I said, "duh you're going to get that result almost answer to that question was a positive answer" - and this kind of skewed through the surveys down stream.

I never saw a question with answer options that let people who weren't having fun actually voice that.. strong dislike of Vengeance, dislike of the ruleset, dislike of zerg vs zerg, etc. The survey seemed built just to gauge a simple "having fun or not," but there's a ton of nuance in that, right.

Then you keep going down this lane and you're getting data, performance charts that show the change you made is making the graph go in the right direction, it's very easy for anyone to keep going down this road. Yes, the forums had a lot of negative talk about it.. there was alot a lot of positive talk about it.

My view on it... vengence as a concept is the right mindset. We need to reduce calculations on the servers and we need to reduce/rework how said calculations happen. We also need to be able to do this without ripping 99% of the things out of GH that made it fun.

Just keep providing feedback, suggestions, etc, and let the devs iterate on it. The studio will have to look at the pop data and make a decision. Looking at the leader boards alone... it's very clear the numbers aren't where they had hoepend. I'd love to see the average player time in vengence or better yet.. how many people spent more than 10 minutes in vengence - period.

It's time to stop saying vengence failed and start providing suggestions/feedback on how they can improve it. They have put so much time, effort, money, etc into this and again.. the mindset is there.. the first test proved it CAN be fun and enjoyable.. we just have to help them understand what makes GH fun and let the devs cook.

To that end, for me personally what was not fun about Vengeance was how it dumbed everything down and restricted the use of so many things. I take time to make my PvP builds, and I'll use them, possibly tweaking them slightly, in IC, Cyro, BG, and duels. Performance in GH was never so bad for me that I could accept such a strict ruleset as "fun" as a tradeoff. It isn't fun to me. You can't even subclass, which is a major feature! Ironically, the simplification of Vengeance builds made it more complicated for my brain as I had to have a whole different build for my same character while in there. Which I can't even set up outside of Vengeance, if it's the same as it was during the tests. Just... no thanks. People talk a lot about immersion and the complete un-seamlessness of having this weird PvP pocket broke my brain and my immersion such that I'd rather just ignore it. If the queue in GH is too long, I too will just not PvP that day... it doesn't at all entice me to try it. I thought about it for half a second when the queue was long and when I remembered I couldn't just bring my current build and layout in there, I immediately dismissed it.

katanagirl1 · June 21

LadyGP wrote: »

BardokRedSnow wrote: »

Lag in IC? Brother I don’t know your pc specs but it may be time for a new one or a driver update. You shouldn’t have lag or performance issues in IC

Brother I'm rocking a $4k pc with fiber and I get lag in IC.

I noticed quite a few months ago that the frame rate for me in IC has been so low and stuttering that just roaming the sewers solo is unplayable. I wanted to just do some easy tel var farming but the visuals gave me a headache. Performance in GH for me is actually good unless I run into a ball group.

Zama666 · July 14

stuck in queue at position 49 for an hour.....

LadyGP · July 14

Zama666 wrote: »

stuck in queue at position 49 for an hour.....

The queue bug is very real and has mostly never been acknowledged by anyone at the studio.

I haven't been able to reproduce it 1:1 BUT what I think is happening is that if you queue for GH and port around from zone to zone... if while you're at loading screen and your queue drops at all... when you're done loading into that next zone the client doesn't register that your queue position has dropped.

It's like the link is now broken and never refreshes so you end up perma stuck.

I've ported a bunch and never had it happen.. but the only time my queue gets stuck is if I had ported at some point..

If that makes any sense.

TheAwesomeChimpanzee · July 14

LadyGP wrote: »

We're one week into U50, and with that comes Vengeance and the removal of all PvP campaigns except Gray Host.
Quick note before I get into it: this thread isn't about whether Vengeance is good or bad. Some people love it, some don't, that's fine. Please take that debate somewhere else.
Quick note pt2: I clearly don't have ZoS analytics so alot of my "data" is coming from my own personal experiences, friends experiences, or conversation in zone chat - my numbers are close but not exact.

The queue problem is genuinely bad right now.

On a random Thursday around 5pm EST the queue starts forming. By 5:30 it's around 30, by 6:30 it's around 80. This past weekend people in zone chat were talking about queuing at 6pm and not getting in until 9:30pm. Three hours to play a video game on your day off and by the time you get in it's basically bedtime. That's a fundamental problem, especially when ZoS is actively trying to retain and bring back players.

The queue getting stuck bug makes this even worse. Waiting 90 minutes with your friends, watching them all get in, then sitting at position 21 for 20+ minutes before getting kicked back to spot 95... at that point most people are just logging off. That's not a dramatic reaction, that's a hard truth.

I get that more players, new sets, and new skills online means performance takes a hit and the cap decisions aren't simple. And yes, Vengeance exists as an alternative but the in-game experience between GH and Vengeance is night and day, so "just play Vengeance" isn't really a good-faith answer and I challange people to not default to that.

The crash problem compounds everything.

If you disconnect after 6:30pm, your night in GH is probably over. You're not getting back in. "Just go quest or do something else" some of us only play ESO for Cyrodiil PvP. That's it. If I crash and the queue is at 100, I'm closing the game and doing something else entirely. That's a loss for the player and a loss for ZoS and something that should be avoided at ALL costs.

What's the fix?

I don't have a clean answer. What I do know is that a lot of players who used to run the smaller campaigns are now funneled into GH because they have no other locked option. That's concentrated a ton of demand into one place.

ZoS has always kept pop caps close to the chest, but the general assumption is somewhere around 100-150 per faction. Demand clearly exists.. GH has a queue and Vengeance appears to be running around one bar. That suggests there's room and appetite for an overflow campaign, and it needs to be a locked one IMO.

The queue being long is actually a good sign.. people want to play.

But the experience around the queue is bad enough that people are giving up and leaving. That's the part that needs to be fixed.. and fixed fast.

Last Saturday, my friends and I wanted to PvP at around 9 PM EST. Since we are fully aware that queues are a serious problem, just as you pointed out, we decided to queue at 7 PM. Two people in our group had their queues break. We also know this is a recurring issue, so we disabled all of our addons and stayed inside our in game houses to minimize anything that could potentially interfere with the queue. We simply tabbed back into the game every ten minutes or so to prevent ourselves from being logged out.

Despite all of that, two queues eventually broke at positions 3 and 29. They completely stopped moving while everyone else’s queues continued to progress. This is what people mean when they talk about “queues breaking,” and it is a problem that has existed in this game for as long as I can remember.

It was not nearly as unbearable when more than one campaign was active, but now we are expected to sit through a two-hour queue and not only sit through it, but actively plan our evening around it only for the queue to break anyway. That is completely unacceptable. When I enter a queue, the most basic expectation is that the system will respect my position. Instead, I may now have to spend four hours queueing just to play for thirty minutes before going to bed. It is completely ridiculous.

I do not believe adding another alliance locked campaign is the solution. First, queues need to stop breaking. That is the absolute bare minimum we should expect from this pathetic joke of a company.

Second, I believe they should increase the population cap for each faction by roughly 50 players, from around 120 to 170. Yes, the game might lag more, but who cares? It already lags, and the massive queues clearly show that people are still willing to play through it.

CatalinaWineMixer2 · July 14

Remove GH. Problem solved. There are more of us who will not wait in a que to play with a small pond of people who call to have our characters nerfed and our gear ruined on a daily basis than there are in GH. I used to play it. Ruining my Warden most recently was the last straw. I am a Warden Main.

GH is broken now more than it ever has been. The toxicity of it is absolutely beyond the pale. There is entirely too much damage, it happens entirely too quickly. It has never and will never be balanced. When cross platform comes, every problem with it will exponentially multiply. It is not PvP, it is Build vs. Build. It is not in any way fair and does not require skill of any kind whatsoever.

Zos has already mentioned that it cannot be fixed. Accept that it is so. I have been playing this game for going on 11 years. There are many more of us who will no longer participate in this broken game mode than people realize.

Major_Mangle · July 14

CatalinaWineMixer2 wrote: »

Remove GH. Problem solved. There are more of us who will not wait in a que to play with a small pond of people who call to have our characters nerfed and our gear ruined on a daily basis than there are in GH. I used to play it. Ruining my Warden most recently was the last straw. I am a Warden Main.

GH is broken now more than it ever has been. The toxicity of it is absolutely beyond the pale. There is entirely too much damage, it happens entirely too quickly. It has never and will never be balanced. When cross platform comes, every problem with it will exponentially multiply. It is not PvP, it is Build vs. Build. It is not in any way fair and does not require skill of any kind whatsoever.

Zos has already mentioned that it cannot be fixed. Accept that it is so. I have been playing this game for going on 11 years. There are many more of us who will no longer participate in this broken game mode than people realize.

Either massive cope or a poor attempt at bait, I honestly can´t tell

ceruulean · July 14

Subclassing and the P2W to become competitive in GH has ruined it more than the broken queue. I used to play before U45 and GH was still somewhat entertaining even with the queue getting stuck (although the campaign was dying and dwindling from low population cap). I know players who quit because they didn't have Summerset to transmute their jewelry and even when they used ESO+ free trials to grind DLC dungeons for monster sets, there was always a disadvantage without mythics from Greymoor scrying.

Subclassing reduced build diversity even more and made the OP magsorcs of U45 look like carebears.

ZOS is planning to make antiquities part of base game which might help a little, but the zone to dig up mythics like Monomyth are still behind a purchase, so the P2W part of PvP is not entirely solved.