Preparing for the masses, the crashes, and the Anti-cheat system.
Hello everyone.
My main experience with MMOs is ESO. If you’ve followed the story of its main PvP content, Cyrodiil, you’ll know it’s a tragic story of a lost vision.
I really like the vision of AoC. As many say it’s probably the most inspiring MMO coming out. Its melodic open world PvP is a dream many have wished for. I believe in it’s ambitions. Where there’s a will there’s a way. But ESOs problems arise from so many dark corners it’s hard for me to start this post.
Let me explain what Cyrodiil is. It’s ESO massive tri alliance pvp arena. The estimates of the initial size of it’s server cap were 600v600v600 players per server. This was a gamemode that had keeps (little mini castles) and sieges that could be initiated at any moment.
Sounds fun? Well the whole thing now is in a sorry state of disrepair. Some say it can’t be fixed. Some say it's better abandoned. As a result of bad decision making it was abandoned, leaving it’s player base in disarray. Then carma struck and now the whole game is starting to act like Cyrodiil. It was made apparent with a near failed launch of their newest DLC, things over there aren’t right.
However plenty of lessons for AoC to learn for free can come out of that game.
One excuse that is always made is that ESO runs on an old outdated engine from 2007. There is they say that the licensing doesn't allow them to update the engine, but that sounds heavily like a management issue. Because how hard is it to get a new license?
One thing AoC can learn from that, is to maybe export textures and resources to Universal file formats that then can be added to future versions of the engine as plug-ins. Or at least starting meshes and templates so you're not left rebuilding the whole game if you want to upgrade the engine in say 2027. I’m no animator or graphic artist, but where my field of reference comes from, I know you can download 3D models from off the internet to be used in various programs. Is there a similar template approach that could be created and stored for the company’s artwork? A redundant back-up.
I said all that, but that’s not the big issue with ESO. One big issue with ESO, is that no one knows what the big issue with ESO is. Theories are all over the place. A problem is it doesn't have only one problem.
A big management mistake they made was not tackling problems with Cyrodiil. They ignored them. They let them stack up, releasing patch after patch of mistakes and extra glitches. One thing AoC can do is make a nominated team of skilled individuals from different departments that makes a list, looks for problems, and fixes them. It’s important this team is diverse so they can pinpoint where and which department the problem arries, maybe it is a cross department issue. They don’t need to have one specialist of the team do the job, but have the ability to send the problem back to the right department.
At ESO I really don’t know what they have going on but it doesn’t work. Unlike Intrepid, their company is ran by business types, who I think hear the intake of problems and look for the cheapest solution. Like for all its current server issues they’re trying to have the combat team fix it. Like they’re trying to have the people who just play with and change damage values fix server load… It’s a mess.
Now getting to the title of this thread.
If you ask a lot of veteran ESO players they’ll tell you performance has been on the decline in ESO.
A big problem is when they moved certain client combat values and interactions server side so they couldn’t be modified by modders and hackers to give themselves the edge in combat. Like people were flying, had unlimited ultimates(a super move that usually has like a minute +cooldown,) it was a circus. The bigger circus came after that as ESOs solution to it was a curse. Player positioning became a problem. They’d reduced the server population. Abilities wouldn’t fire correctly or be timed right. Performance took a big hit. And things got worse as the game progressed for reasons I don’t fully know, and I doubt anyone fully knows. But there are plenty of ideas why.
The big one is they kept adding input checks server side, so that nothing the client said was trusted. Something they obsess over despite all the negative consequences and alternatives. Intrepid probably has smart innovative people that can come up with their own solutions. Word of advice don’t copy ESO on this one.
One possible solution to this is to partner with or develop a cloud based gaming service and host the game on your partnered or owned gaming service. This gives you control over what can and can’t be installed on the cloud systems so you don’t have to worry about mods. I threw this idea out to ESO too and pointed them towards a company called Shadow. I’m not sure if they took interest, but might as well make it industry practice as it solves a lot of problems as I will continue to point out.
The way the concept works is you hardwire the server and hosting cloud PCs to a LAN. This eliminates pretty much all the latency in the games calculations. Network latency won’t cause problems where players get hit with abilities all at once, instead they may get small screen hiccups they can adjust for in gameplay.
Another problem hosting on high end cloud PCs will fix is client discrepancies and rendering issues. A problem ESO had, even though they have the minimum hardware specs, is that clients couldn’t handle the combat. ESO Devs still ignore certain quality of life problems with this issue like consecutive loadscreens, but the game used to crash constantly. It’s to the point Xbox and PS4 in all their gaming dedicated resources and splendor were considered toasters because they could hardly handle the game. On a regular PC the amount of system resources the game takes up is ridiculous. The sad part is even with a top of the line PC you still lag like the “toasters” did back in the day because it’s gotten that bad. ESO Devs choose to ignore this hardware issue, because players can try to improve it. Some credit they did eventually lower crashing, by lowering Fx and some stuff with the server. However, some including myself, point to their Anti-crash solutions as another source of ESO’s compounding server lag.
Lastly there’s the masses problem, tragedy of commons and so forth. Some say AoC is ready for it with an open beta. But what about the excessive client character and ability rendering that made ESO crash at every launch it’s ever had. Can the servers handle consecutive ability spams from so many players in a cluster. I hear the dungeon raid sizes are going to be huge. Will all the graphic aesthetics be too much for the average client?
Cloud based solutions again can be tapped to control this problem as you’ll know exactly what are on systems and what they can handle. A lot of problems some gamers have with games is even though their PC’s to spec, their Anti-virus taking up the whole CPU. If the game doesn't run doesn’t matter what, developers still get blamed for it.
I think I’m going to wrap this one up. Thank you all for reading my concerns.
