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As part of Elder Scrolls Online's ongoing plan to increase performance in Cyrodiil, Zenimax Online Services Creative Director Rich Lambert has addressed some changes that they will be testing in hopes to optimize your PvP experience. The post gets quite in depth about how the system currently handles ability usage, and how AOE abilities factor into that.
Comments
There Is Always Hope!
This is just a trial "fix" to one particular case of bad performance in Cyrodiil only. They are essentially blaming poor performance there on players' AOE spamming and I'm almost 100% sure that's not the full story.
They all but admitted that some of the cosmetics fluff is causing problems too in another one of their blurbs about limiting what gets rendered (no pets nor personalities, etc.) in congested areas.
Also interestingly in the recent Ashes of Creation reddit AMA they talked about how they will be doing some cosmetics armor culling (presumably defaulting to a base character model) in congested areas as part of their performance strategy even at this early stage in development.
It's foolish to think that ESO's ability to customize each piece of gear independently to one of hundreds of possible textures and colors - which is a great thing if customization is your thing - does not introduce performance issues.
This AOE spamming problem may in fact be a real problem (I'll have to take their word for it) and limiting it may improve things, but this is not THE only performance problem so this won't be THE fix.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
From what was originally posted the AOE problem more stims from certain builds being able to instantly and endless spam AOE and if what was said is indeed true then that is more of a combat design problem and maybe they need to rework there combat to eliminate such options and builds. If the speed of abilities is the problem then why not slow the speed of combat down overall. We also need to seperate client side lag (aka graphics lag) from server side lag (aka the server tick rate slowing down).
Besides I'm not saying this is THE problem but just a contributing factor in ESO. They were the ones who said they are clamping down on rendering personalities, pets and other things in congested areas for performance reasons so in ESO and its engine it's obviously something they have identified as an issue.
I've also spent hundreds of hours in Cyrodiil and the AOE spamming they're referring to is situational. It only ever happens during the rush stages of keep battles when one side is going through a breach or in bomb group vs. bomb group fights. In smaller scale fights there, which are more frequent, you actually want to use more single target abilities and CC than AOE spam.
I have been in many of those AOE situations and honestly never saw it having any kind of immediate effect on the performance where it was happening. Bad performance in Cyrodiil PvP is much more random and inexplicable often happening during mostly idle times.
I seriously doubt this AOE spamming thing is the only or even main problem.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
FFXIV graphics are not as good as ESO.. Have you played FFXIV lately? Character to Character FFXIV characters have way more customization both in the base model itself and in the sheer amount of clothing options and dyeing options. Environment wise I would say they are on par with each other both being older games.
I still tend to think it has to be something with how they are crunching numbers on the back end. Or some silly hidden bug that just randomly pops up when certain things are done together.
I honestly wonder if it is them just being cheap and wanting to skimp on having enough servers? I do not know anything about that tech and it would be wrong to wildly speculate on my part. It just seems like these problems should be solvable for them, maybe it does meen combat needs to be reworked. I do not mind the animation canceling I agree with @iselin that damage should be moved to the end or spread out.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
And yes animation canceling is another huge problem with the game that will have to be addressed someday. Gives those that use it a huge advantage which is just unacceptable.