I personally didn't have trouble completing content before update 46, but update 46 definitely stripped my motivation to even enter content. The amount of damage that's currently possible makes things much more boring in my opinion. The power creep is making even Veteran content feel like overland. It's not very rewarding.

I've said it many times before, accessibility is great, but trying to achieve it through power creep isn't a great way to go about it. Accessibility has actually worsened in environments like PvP due to the fact that so much knowledge and experience is required to even make a high performing build. In PvP right now, properly built veterans have never been more powerful compared to more casual or new players. The people who are stacking 3 damage skill lines that work well with each other will absolutely melt the people that are just mixing and matching skill lines for fun.

Skill lines on their own are poorly balanced with each other due to how the game was designed. When you allow something like subclassing in environments where a player's performance matters compared to others, you're just creating more ways for people to fall behind. If choices were more balanced with each other, players could be free to build how they want. Since that's not the case, curiosity and creativity will be punished, because there's far more unviable skill line combinations than there are viable ones.

They changed the passive crux generation to a small ultimate generation if a crux already exists. I'm betting most arcanists would prefer the passive crux back.

The argonian houseboat is equipped with a ladder leading to the roof of the boat. But you cannot use the ladder to go up.

Is this intended or a bug ?

Tandor wrote: »

This has been raised before, and if I remember correctly the more quests you have, the more it can impact loading times.

Pretty much this. It's in an effort to keep things performant. Everything has a cost and we have to manage the overhead of that.

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.