Guild members experienced significant disruption yesterday after the latest patch for Elder Scrolls Online. Players logged in to find they were in no guilds, had no friends and could not chat. Access to Cyrodiil was completely absent. Grouping required actually coordinating positions on discord to allow face to face teaming. A significant backlash from the player base was seen on the forums. The situation this morning appears to be better but Cyrodiil is still causing problems for some users. This is particularly embarrassing for Zenimax after Matt Firor at the Be3 event was proclaiming how they had recently increased server capacity.
Hot fixes were carried out over the last few hours in order to fix the situation, some forumites were speculating it was caused by either database deletion or corruption and the only way to get it back would be from backups. Needless to say there is a great deal of anger regarding the ongoing situation with the server capacity and performance with Elder Scrolls Online, especially with the EU servers, although we are hearing that the situation on the NA servers is not much better. It would seem prudent for the company to focus their efforts on ensuring and maintaining server performance as soon as possible, and an update from ZoS would be appreciated. The last update can be found below, this was posted a week ago and since then the situation has gotten worse.
Hundreds of posts have been made on the forums in the last 24hours, the only feedback received from ZoS was to state that hotfixes were in progress. Forum Thread
So, to any new members or players of ESO we apologise for the inconvenience, you were not being ignored in game yesterday, we were just unable to chat with anyone. Matt Johnson Guild Master Skyrim Red Shirts
Zenimax STATEMENT June 3rd 2019
Hello! I suspect we'll get questions about performance more than a few times today, so I prepared a description of what we have going on to address performance concerns - on a number of fronts.
Even though there is very little new information here, we definitely could be doing a better job of keeping everyone appraised of how things are going while we are in process. We will be better messengers in the future keeping everyone up to date on longer-term fixes and updates.
First, server capacity. As we all know, we had server capacity issues a few months back, especially on the PC EU servers. We were forced to temporarily cap the number of concurrent users on PC EU and put up a queuing system to enforce it. We got the new capacity online for PC EU in a week, and added that same capacity for PC NA (which was very close to experiencing the same problems). We took the queuing system down, and we can now support the concurrency demand we are seeing.
Second, the looking for group system. As we posted last week, we are working on a 100% revamp of this system, which is mostly used for Dungeon and Battleground queuing. We have a version done that we are testing in-house, although it will be a while before it goes live. We want to make sure that the solution we have scales correctly and will support the now massive numbers of players that are using the system. We are planning for revamped LFG system to be in Update 24, depending on how testing is going. Until then, we will continue with the only solution we have (which we posted about last week in the LFG update) - cap the number of players in the queue. We know it is extremely frustrating to not be able to queue for dungeons and BGs and get "cannot join queue" when you try, but at least now once you get into a queue successfully, you should be able to join the dungeon or BG.
Third: overall performance. Rich talked about this in his end of year message six months ago: we are currently implementing sweeping optimization and memory management client architecture changes that should improve client performance and especially client stability. These optimizations will be most noticeable on lower-spec PCs, base Xbox, and base PS4, but overall everyone should notice better stability and performance. This is scheduled for Update 24. Additionally, we have another set of optimizations scheduled for Q1 next year that will reduce the client "footprint" requirements and should speed up loading times.
Fourth: Longer term, we are in the beginning stages of combat system performance improvements that should improve overall game performance in Cyrodiil and Trials. Stay tuned for updates on this.
Obviously if anything else crops up, we'll investigate. I know that it can seem like it takes an inordinate amount of time to address performance problems, but we need to take our time and make sure that we don't introduce new issues while we do this. Thanks for your patience, and we will keep you updated.
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