Did your ability to play and/or complete certain types of game content improve after the launch of Update 46?
No. I have been completing dungeon and trial trifectas for multiple years at this point across various roles. Subclassing has made accessibility to this content worse for me. My experience on PC/NA is that generally people don’t care about over-optimizing for dungeons but the majority of trial groups do care. With subclassing, the buff/debuff distribution has become shaken up in an unpleasant manner (builds that make no sense thematically, sacrificing comfort for maximum buffs/debuffs on the supports, can no longer play the builds I enjoy because I functionally cannot give the same buffs/debuffs as a support or the same amount of damage as a DPS), thus also meaning that as time goes on, most HM+ groups will gravitate towards only being able to have subclassed supports. This means I can no longer play how I want in the content I enjoy and must choose the content or drastically altering my builds into a shell of themselves (which my builds have been working perfectly well for the past several metas…). It is no longer “this class works the best for this content” and no longer “this person’s an x class main, they’re really good at that class so it doesn’t matter if it’s a little off meta” it’s “run these 3 lines or else I’ll get someone who will because you’re not being a team player”. I don’t want to be shamed and so I no longer desire to engage with the content. I was working towards becoming a better and better player, optimizing little bits here and there, striving to grow. Subclassing crushed this dream because I do not want to completely shift my mentality on how builds should be looked at (I liked working within the confines of a class, I like thematics, I liked figuring out what class is best for what content, etc. and now I can’t do that anymore and still be a good player). Subclassing feels very “sink or swim” and unfortunately I know other wonderful players who are kind and helpful who have also or are possibly going to cut down their playtime due to subclassing and its effects.

I can tell by how the questions are structured that this is biased towards “subclassing helped with accessibility” but I hope you all will consider collecting data on those who are now not completing content they were before.

Desiato wrote: »

LadyGP wrote: »

So yeah... performance has been pretty bad the last few years - BUT they keep adding new things and it's improving. Is it like a modern game that launched in 2025 - not even close. Is it still pretty good for an engine thats 18 years old - I'd say so.

If you're talking pure client performance, I can't fathom this. My gaming PC is a few years old (5800x) and even an alik'r dolmen is 120 fps. My client is a solid 180 fps most of the time with a 1% low of 120ish. I don't play with ultra settings though. My secondary gaming system with a Ryzen 3600x plays ESO great. I reference cpu because it's a cpu bound game.

When you consider console specs, there's no reason for a modern pc to have performance issues.

The only times I have consistently bad performance issues are when I'm in Cyrodiil and its issues are well-documented.

Outside of Cyrodiil, the biggest issue comes from asset management which is unavoidable because of the outfit system and the vast number of styles, other cosmetics, mounts, pets, etc... it's really impressive that it handles it as well as it does on the fly.

The age of gaming engines isn't as relevant as it used to be and I would guess much of the ESO client has basically been re-written over the years. In fact, we know this. The main relevance of ESO's age is gpu feature support, not performance.

I would encourage anyone who is having client performance issues unrelated to the EU server issues to try playing with a fresh live folder to see what that's like. Don't delete your existing live folder though!

I wonder if some players are playing ESO on a full SSD. SSDs can develop serious performance issues It varies ssd to ssd, but some need as much as 20% free space to avoid performance issues. Because of the vast number of art assets that eso is constantly loading, this could definitely affect client performance -- well, I would guess, I have never filled up an ssd. It is a well-known issue with ssds though, especially cheaper ones. I've also read that once an ssd develops a performance issue from approaching max capacity, merely freeing space may not immediately solve the issue -- depending on the drive.

Before anyone accuses me of being a ZOS shill, I did not hold back criticism in the past:

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/367598/video-30-50-fps-drop-bug-almost-2-years-old-cryodiil-pov/p1
https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/379166/source-of-cyrodiil-lag-discovered/p1

I have a 4090 new AMD cpu not a hardware issue.

And the engine is 100% an issue. Crap, just look at 343i and Halo. Do a quick google search about how their NEW engine they used cost them so much technical debt that it was impossible for the devs to do anything. It took MONTHS just to add in post match XP because of how bad it was.

I'm not talking about client performance - I'm talking strictly from a ZoS wants to fix X.... they have Y amount of solutions to do.

They are 100% limited by techniques they can use to solve modern day challenges because of how difficult their engine is to use and how outdated it is. Yes, they are adding new tech to it and it's making it easier - sure. But at the end of the day you can not say with a straight face an 18 year old engine doesn't cause issues.

There is a reason why "this only happens when I play ESO and not a single other game I play" comments are rampant on the forums, reddit, social media, etc.

It comes down to the engine and the limited amount of tricks they have to solve things - like when a users internet has a blip for example. They have to do the whole rubberbanding tolerance trick. There was a year where my internet was just so bad and I couldn't play ESO without disconnecting every 5 to 10 minutes. Did I have that issue in any other online game - nope. Zero disconnects, zero buffering, zero rubberbanding, etc.. and I'm talking games with literally thousands of people on the same server as me at the same time.

I'm in no way complaining or trying to throw shade at ZoS - quite the opposite actually. What they are able to do, the tricks they are able to use, with such an old engine is something they absolutely do NOT get enough credit for. The engineers, devs, etc... they are making this old dodge neon purr like a corvette. Unfortunately, shes just one pothole away from disaster.

9 times out of 10 when someone has issues running ESO on pc, it's on the user's side, not the server. Often the problem is anything from a bad internet connection, overloading the pc's hardware, or even addons, which ZoS is not responsible for.

If it is a server-side issue, it is usually announced here on the forums or even the official ESO discord or other places, and seeing as how not everyone on your server is noticing issues, it's safe to say it's on your end this time.

Have you ever heard of Checkov's Gun? It is a concept in writing that you don't introduce a gun to the narrative unless the gun is needed at some later point.

That said, why do you keep mentioning LGBTQ++? It has nothing to do with an error or hack that was made with your guild. People could make an incorrect correlation and infer that you are implying that the error was somehow related to your membership charter, which does not seem to be the case.

So I will just assume you have never heard of Checkov's Gun and included the designation out of habit and not realizing that it has nothing to do with the story you are telling.

In the future, please remember Checkov's Gun and when introducing a new concept into your writing, ask if it is necessary to tell the story you are trying to tell.

I really think this "generic" Companion should be sourced from the Infinite Archive, and can possibly be an ink creature like mentioned in the original post.

The IA is designed to be run either solo, duo with two players, or duo with one Companion. There are achievements for running IA with a Companion specifically.

Adding a "mercenary" like this should be accessible in the base game and be automatically unlocked for all characters on your account without needing to do some sort of introduction quest as you do for regular Companions.


As for the abilities, maybe this "mercenary" doesn't have Class abilities, but can use Weapon, Armor, and Guild abilities. While it would make sense for them to use Arcanist abilities since the Infinite Archive is in Apocrypha, an alternative would be to let this character use Mirrormoor-inspired Class abilities, or maybe this character could be Subclassing skill lines from multiple Classes (such as Radiating Heart + Lightning Caller + Winter's Bite for the "Elementalist" archetype).

This week, Filer Ool will offer the following at the Infinite Archive:

The Tel Var Merchants will be offering the following at the Alliance Bases in the Imperial City Sewers:

Dominion Fisher Yellow, the most "yellow" dye in the selection, isn't even yellow on most materials. It ends up being this disgusting fluorescent green on most cloth.

Divine Gold, Patrons Gold etc just look orange on certain materials. It is good for metals, but nothing else does it keep the yellow flavor on.

Dominion Yellow doesnt even look yellow on most cloth. Its even more bronzy on metals.

Sulfur Yellow is more greenish, just like Dominion Fisher yellow.

And then we have stuff that looks like pale tans such as 10 year anniversary ivory or the other one that is similar but slightly more bronze tan.

So my point is, most of the selection of yellows are terrible. They go from Bronze to green to green to bronze to tan. There are no actual yellows that stay yellow, like for House Mornard in Galen that is the yellow i want on cloth portions, not this nasty green yellow.



I want a nice yellow that is consistently like this all the time.

CAN WE PLEASE have that? You have 40 reds, 10 black and whites, 40 purples, and plenty of greens. A good selection of blues, but a terrible selection of Yellow. What makes this worse is the selection of ORANGES are great, so what happened there exactly?

PS: My favorite color is yellow, and you are doing me a dirty.

Hi all! This should be fixed later today. Thanks for letting us know! We just really wanted to welcome you back. Repeatedly. Even though you never actually left.

I can see, Syldras, that you're struggling to follow. Perhaps if you were not so selective in your quotations, you would have.

You've failed to consider what you have invested in advancing your patronising advice; the position you are adopting, transactionally, in so doing; what it means, politically, to suggest that the entirely calm and rational account I gave in my original post is a function of my own unexamined trauma or in any way a failure in my ability to engage in calm, rational, logical reasoning; and the now consistent attitude of framing concerns about anti-LGTQ+ sentiment motivating abuse of the reporting system as "emotional".

Yes, merely belonging to a particular group does not prevent you from expressing attitudes and opinions that are hostile towards that group. Your opinions are not invalid -- they are wrong. There is a difference. That I also find them trite and superficial philosophically, breathtakingly naïve, if not outright reactionary, politically, and infantile psychologically, is besides the point.

I understood that you were not saying that LGBTQ+-hostile behaviour doesn't exist. I criticised you for suggesting that our response to it was (1) the result of unexamined trauma on my part, (2) a boy-who-cried-wolf response, and (3) "focussing [sic] on being vicitmized", and (4) harmful to the community.

Who, exactly, do you imagine you are rescuing from the persecution of our "accusations"?

So, yes, I believe the the most appropriate response to your argument, offered in the most calm and dispassionate mode you care to imagine, is to stfu.