Cyrodiil is the main PvP area in the Elder Scrolls Online, and has been around since the game launched back in 2014. ESO was originally marketed primarily on its PvP, with Zenimax promising huge battles between the three alliances, involving dozens or even hundreds of players fighting it out in sieges.
And for a time it seemed that vision was realized, in the beginning you would see huge battles like this and they worked quite well, but as players began to get better at the game and start casting more skills and using more item sets, things began to go wrong.
Cyrodiil has as a result been plagued by server problems and lag resulting in considerable skill delays for years now, which was a massive shame for players who mostly play games for PvP. I have heard it said quite a few times that ESO's Alliance War would be an almost perfect PvP experience, if it worked reliably. A very recent development on the PC NA server has given new hope to those hoping for substantial improvements to the Alliance War, and that's what we're going to talk about in this article.
ESO PvP features large scale battles between playersNew hardware upgrades on the ESO Megaservers
This week there was a lengthy maintenance period on the PC NA megaserver, during which the ESO team was replacing the old hardware in their datacenters. This server hardware was about ten years old, so the official purpose of this upgrade was to increase the reliability of the hardware and minimize the risk of failures causing lengthy downtimes.
In the
statement on the ESO forums by Matt Firor announcing this maintenance, it was actually stated that this would not improve performance for players. However perhaps this was merely said to temper people's expectations, because it seems that the reality of the situation is different…
Cyrodiil Performance Improvements reported on PC NA
After the maintenance, players began jumping back into the game as normal. Soon afterwards, we began to see reports surfacing on the ESO Forums and various social media that server performance in the Alliance War had actually improved quite a lot.
Players have been reporting that they were having no issues at all with the usual input delay, even on campaigns that were at the population cap with multiple “ball groups” fighting each other in the same location.
So if you are one of the players on PC NA who decided to leave ESO PvP until the lag was fixed, then this might be a good time to give the game another shot.
Lag-free battles seem to be much more common after the upgradesWhat about the EU and console megaservers?
Currently, only the PC NA megaserver has recieved this hardware update. Unfortunately, there isn't a set timescale for when the other megaservers will be upgraded. In the statement mentioned above from Matt Firor, he also said that the timeline for sourcing server hardware is still long, in part due to the impact of the pandemic. However he also said that we will be informed as soon as they have a more specific time scale available.
So for those of us playing on other megaservers, all we can really do is hope that it won't be too long until we get the same upgrades, and that they are as effective for us as they seem to have been on PC NA.
In any case, this definitely seems to be a step in the right direction and finally gives PvP players in ESO some good news.
We hope you enjoyed this article about PvP in ESO (Elder Scrolls Online). ESO is a massively multiplayer online game (MMO) developed by Zenimax Online Studios.
