Only if you want to permanently end the 3 banners war and kill Cyrodil PVP.

Vengeance is the best thing to have happened to Imp City. Every time I peak in there or go in there to play, there are a lot more players playing in the Sewers, and it is all due to Vengeance. Nobody wants to play it. So moving these changes into Greyhost will literally kill PVP for a large part of the population that plays PVP as their endgame.

What would be the testing done for Grey Host? Vengeance is supposed to be the testing done to figure out why theres so many problems in pvp no? Youd rather them strip Grey Host to next to nothing like Vengeance and let you only use your skills or whatever rule set they give you? At least with Vengeance being around (this stress test not withstanding) Grey Host has still been open.

moderatelyfatman wrote: »

Vengeance was originally touted by the ZOS team as testing but somewhere along the way became it's own thing.

But will it ever get finalised as its own version of Cyrodiil? The most recent version of Vengeance brought in proc-sets which moved it away from the original intent of a PvP mode for casual and new players that didn't need to grind gear for hours to play. But the anti-Vengeance group also were not happy because of the lack of all the diversity found in regular Cyrodiil.

So is it time for ZOS to pick a version of Vengeance and make it permanent and move onto Grey Host or Blackreach testing? The goal need not be lag free gameplay but merely a significant improvement in performance. By now the devs should have a pretty good idea what's skills and items are causing the most lag in regular Cyrodiil.

And it's about time ZOS turned its focus back to doing something about the heal stacking.

I voted yes, but the actual answer is no. Not because ZOS shouldn't be focused on GH today, they absolutely should be, but because they should have done what they said they were doing starting in 2018-2019 and really put some effort into GH back then, when they told us doing so was their focus.

Now here we are 8 years later and we've seen essentially nothing. No improvements to GH of any note and it's clear ZOS has never put any noteworthy effort into improving GH. And now we know vengeance is just a backhanded attempt to replace GH with something that needs less server resources and zero dev time.

This is so disappointing and tragic for ESO. But they have nobody to blame but themselves.

SilverIce58 wrote: »

What would be the testing done for Grey Host? Vengeance is supposed to be the testing done to figure out why theres so many problems in pvp no? Youd rather them strip Grey Host to next to nothing like Vengeance and let you only use your skills or whatever rule set they give you? At least with Vengeance being around (this stress test not withstanding) Grey Host has still been open.

Oh, I don't know, they could always try limiting heal and shield stacking just as the PvP community has been begging for going on 8 years now.

When the PvE players try to enter this discussion it's always obvious.

Gabriel_H wrote: »

NovelliESO wrote: »

Gabriel_H wrote: »

"Vengeance was originally touted by the ZOS team as testing but somewhere along the way became it's own thing"

Flawed premise. Players have deemed it its own thing. ZOS never have. It was, and remains, a test environment. The only reason they moved it to Live was to get more data. The only reason they shut down the other campaigns was to get the player numbers to test. Sections of the PvP community boycotting Vengeance are just dragging out the process and making it take longer.

"which moved it away from the original intent of a PvP mode for casual and new players that didn't need to grind gear for hours to play"

That was never the intent. The intent was to strip back the Cyrodiil ruleset then add things back in to get as close to GH as possible without tanking performance. The progress is slow because a chunk of players refused to engage.

Edit: Typos

[snip]

Edit: Or you could simply go into Vengeance and see the myriad of mismatches with the underlying Cyrodiil and the imposed ruleset and come to the common sense conclusion it is a test environment.

To anyone who can read critically the statement actually says "we know there aren't enough players who want to play vengeance so we have to try to force people into playing a game mode we know hey hate in order to get the participation numbers we want to see." In other words, this is ZOS admitting they know vengeance is a failure.

Gabriel_H wrote: »

Lucasl402 wrote: »

SilverIce58 wrote: »

What would be the testing done for Grey Host? Vengeance is supposed to be the testing done to figure out why theres so many problems in pvp no? Youd rather them strip Grey Host to next to nothing like Vengeance and let you only use your skills or whatever rule set they give you? At least with Vengeance being around (this stress test not withstanding) Grey Host has still been open.

Oh, I don't know, they could always try limiting heal and shield stacking just as the PvP community has been begging for going on 8 years now.

When the PvE players try to enter this discussion it's always obvious.

You mean how heal and shield stacking are limited in Vengeance? Almost like they stripped back the ruleset to give a base performance without desync and lag, and then slowly add things back in?

This keeps coming back to the same point: You want Cyrodiil fixed with a magic wand. It's not possible. They need to test, they need to change the ruleset. That is what Vengeance is. It's not a finished product, it's an ongoing and evolving mode that is trying to get as close to GH as possible without tanking performance.

You again, as always Gabriel, are missing the entire point. The larger PvP playerbase wants the tests done in GH not in vengeance. Why do you always ignore this?

It's time to cut our losses and take the risk that Vengeance will repair the damage the GH community has brought upon all of us. And still is. They would rather see people quit PvP or leave the game than not have their way. The longer it goes on, the more new players turn away. The more Vets become jaded and quit. The returning players take one look at it and say no.

The game will move on without them. It's the only thing Zos hasn't tried yet. And probably the only thing that will work which is why GH is so against fair PvP. Ive said it before, Zos needs to take control of combat, establish, maintain and enforce the rules. It wont work any other way and its not fair to everyone if that is not what is going on. Especially when the same people know they can get any character or build nerfed just by threatening to harm the PvP population by boycotting an attempt to correct it like they are doing with Vengeance. Or attempting to silence people who speak out for fair PvP. Or trying to dissuade people who are sick of their characters and builds being ruined to cater to the smallest minority.

Gabriel_H wrote: »

Lucasl402 wrote: »

SilverIce58 wrote: »

What would be the testing done for Grey Host? Vengeance is supposed to be the testing done to figure out why theres so many problems in pvp no? Youd rather them strip Grey Host to next to nothing like Vengeance and let you only use your skills or whatever rule set they give you? At least with Vengeance being around (this stress test not withstanding) Grey Host has still been open.

Oh, I don't know, they could always try limiting heal and shield stacking just as the PvP community has been begging for going on 8 years now.

When the PvE players try to enter this discussion it's always obvious.

You mean how heal and shield stacking are limited in Vengeance? Almost like they stripped back the ruleset to give a base performance without desync and lag, and then slowly add things back in?

This keeps coming back to the same point: You want Cyrodiil fixed with a magic wand. It's not possible. They need to test, they need to change the ruleset. That is what Vengeance is. It's not a finished product, it's an ongoing and evolving mode that is trying to get as close to GH as possible without tanking performance.

And as for the elitism ... Less than 10% of players are PvP only. Around 35% are PvE only. The other 55% do both.

Look.. it's truly this simple.

The reason people keep coming back after trying MMO after MMO is that the overall combat (speed, movement, TTK, builds, ruleset, etc) is special - pretty much no other MMO i've tried can match it.

Yes, the ball groups, balance issues, etc suck and are a massive friction point but overall Combat in Cyrodiil is unique and some of the best out there.

If you take almost everything away that make it unique/special, for the sake of performance, you're left with a shell that no one wants to play.

That is where we are at. I don't understand why everyone gets in these super deep back and forth rguments about all these tiny details.

Look at it from a high level - GH PvP vs Vengence is night and day different and the vast majority of players don't want it.

CatalinaWineMixer2 wrote: »

It's time to cut our losses and take the risk that Vengeance will repair the damage the GH community has brought upon all of us. And still is. They would rather see people quit PvP or leave the game than not have their way. The longer it goes on, the more new players turn away. The more Vets become jaded and quit. The returning players take one look at it and say no.

The game will move on without them. It's the only thing Zos hasn't tried yet. And probably the only thing that will work which is why GH is so against fair PvP. Ive said it before, Zos needs to take control of combat, establish, maintain and enforce the rules. It wont work any other way and its not fair to everyone if that is not what is going on. Especially when the same people know they can get any character or build nerfed just by threatening to harm the PvP population by boycotting an attempt to correct it like they are doing with Vengeance. Or attempting to silence people who speak out for fair PvP. Or trying to dissuade people who are sick of their characters and builds being ruined to cater to the smallest minority.

Please show us on the doll where the evil PvP player touched you. Good grief.

YOU ARE NOT A VICTIM BECAUSE THE PvP PLAYERS HAVE PUT IN MORE TIME AND EFFORT TO BE PROFICIENT AT PvP.

When PvP is removed from ESO it means ESO is dead and turning out the lights for good.

Stamicka wrote: »

Gabriel_H wrote: »

Stamicka wrote: »

This makes me think that there’s something about how those tests were implemented that contributes to the lag, but I don’t know for sure.

Passives. Whenever you fire a skill the game has to calculate everything from base each time to calculate bonuses. There is then additional calculations depending on whether you crit or not all through the passives.

Wouldn’t this be true of almost any major buff though? Like if you have major sorcery/brutality up, that’s still a bonus that the game has to calculate for most of the skills you cast.

I don’t know how the game works behind the scenes. No one really does except the developers. So there could always be reasons that they do things that we don’t know about.

So I’d like to think that there’s a reason that testing has unfolded the way that it did.

The stuff about testing Grey Host just makes no sense to me. For one, they’ve tried different tests already and it didn’t work. There’s also the fact that people seem to be mad at testing in general, so I don’t think that this would go over well with the community. Lastly, if testing involved simplifying Grey Host, that would make Grey Host more like Vengeance. It seems like most of the PvP community is scared of Vengeance replacing Grey Host. So if they start stripping down Grey Host, how is that not making your fears come to fruition?

It’s wild to me that this is even being suggested by the same people who hate Vengeance so much. Like eventually you’re just creating a circle where you’ve ended up at Vengeance.

I’m not particularly a fan of either approach.

What I am a fan of is respecting the customer. ZOS is backed by a multi-billion-dollar company. Instead of repeatedly using paying customers as test subjects, they could hire dedicated QA testers—an actual profession—to conduct these kinds of experiments before pushing them onto the live playerbase.

Instead, they expect the people who paid for Gray Host to simply accept losing access to it while they rebuild Cyrodiil from the ground up. If that process takes another five or seven years before it reaches a state that the existing PvP community actually enjoys, that’s an unreasonable expectation to place on your customers.

If they insist on simplifying Cyrodiil to isolate variables, then stripping systems away from the top down is at least less disruptive than removing the product entirely. Players would retain most of the gameplay they paid for while still allowing the developers to gather data.

What I don’t accept is repeatedly taking away the live campaign people actually log in to play, replacing it with a mode much of that community has consistently rejected, and expecting everyone to treat that as normal development.

After everything that’s happened this week, the backlash and the low participation in Cyrodiil are consequences entirely of ZOS’s own decisions. They ignored months of feedback, forced these tests through anyway, and are now seeing exactly the response many players warned them they would

Personal opinion

- put back Vengeance back how it was last week
- put GH and BR back how they were
- stop working on all three campaigns
- cancel crossplay
- focus as much people as possible on the class reworks with an extreme focus of class balance
- do an additional balance pass on item sets
- resume working on crossplay