Big problems during Whitestrake's Mayhem event - chat, skills, booted, lag

malistorr

I received a party invite from someone in 1 of my guilds. I accepted and it put me in a group of about 6-people who are all in this 1 guild. They told me that to speak with them I had to join all members guild chat 1. I went to the social menu and selected voice chat and go down to see the 3 channels for each guild. The menu says to press "A" to join that channel voice chat. I press "A" on any of them and nothing happens. Is this a bug? Why does there seem to be no way to speak with any group I'm joining in Cyrodiil Blackreach PVP on Xbox NA. I literally have no way to speak with my groups and play together at the moment. I also requently see an error saying the voice chat is having a problem went I go into the menus and go to voice chat. Any help or feedback is appreciated thanks. Or if there's some known bug or issue please point me in the right direction as search comes up with nothing useful as usual on these forums.

ZOS_Hadeostry

Greetings,

After further review we have decided to move this thread to a category we think is more appropriate for this topic.

Thank you for your understanding

ZOS_Bill

@malistorr

If your voice chat is currently not working, please try the steps in the help article below.

Why do I keep getting a "Voice chat is unavailable" message on Xbox One?

Please let us know if these steps help with the voice channels not working.

malistorr

The problem is not on my end. My router and internet connection are fine. About the only thing I haven't done from your list is delete the save data. I didn't have much time to play in group this week so hopefully I can test it again this weekend. Just so you know, others in my guild/group at the time reported the same or similar problems. So I believe it was 100% an issue on the ZOS/Microsoft side. I am on half-gig wired fiber internet with my Xbox Series X hardwired into the internet.

Thanks for replying and I'll report back once I'm able to test this again. I'm a full-time IT Admin so I can only game a bit at night Pacific US time.

Karivaa

Voice chat hasn’t worked on Xbox for many years. It is very inconsistent.

malistorr

My guild doesn't use party chat any longer so I can't really test this. It was party chat that wasn't working. But when I go to voice chat and try to join the channel that the guild is using I was able to this weekend. It definitely helps if I power on my wireless headset 1st, make sure I can hear audio out of it, then start the game. If I turn on the headset after the game is open I'll be able to hear audio but half the time it will give me a message saying that I can't join the guild chat channel. It's like it doesn't detect the headset if it's turned on after the fact.

LurgidBean

These are the things people in my guilds do to trick Xbox ESO into working.
"Devs hate it! One-SIMPLE-trick-for-ESO Clickbait-Style" (That's a joke, mods)

Sometimes if you press "A" to enter the chat, exit the menu screen for 5-10 seconds, and return you'll be able to actually enter chat. Additionally, you can try entering into other guild channels, waiting a few seconds, then back to the one you want.

Usually Works Eventually Method Starting an Xbox party with yourself, then manually swapping to "Game Chat" with the view button also sometimes works to force ESO to recognize voice channels exist. If it does work, you can leave the party. Sometimes it takes multiple tries switching between game and party chat (give ESO a few seconds to catch up) but it eventually will work. I know you mentioned limited time, so this solution probably isn't great when you have people waiting on you.

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You mention IT so maybe you'll have some insight- how are there so many problems in Xbox like this where you can eventually get it to work just by brute repetition? Like, if it is broken, shouldn't it never work? And if it's working, why do we have to develop ways to trick the code into playing nice?

Also thinking about the login issues people with older XBoxes are plagued with, that have yet to be acknowledged by an dev or customer service rep. Thread here with links to 10+ examples that have not been solved. https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/606535/xbox-login-issues-ignored-for-months-needs-dev-attention-pc-ps-comrades-plz-read

malistorr

Unfortunately I can't speak to their (Microsoft/ZOS) specific issues since I've only done IT for regular business (small office up to Fortune 500). But I've never worked with online games. The closest I ever got to that was working for a hard drive company who was testing the original Xbox because our drives were being used in that console. It is frustrating though trying to play with a group and the methods you have for speaking to them only work sporadically.

malistorr

ZOS_Bill

This is getting worse day by day during this event. Yesterday I couldn't join any "all members" chat for any of my 5 guilds. I played most of the day and it felt like I was playing alone. Every member of my guild reported the same. Eventually at night things started working again (I assume as players were logging off). This is clearly a case of servers that aren't keeping up with the load and too many people allowed in each instance of Cyrodiil. Either that or you have major bugs that need fixing. I hope the server hardware replacement proceeds soon for console as it is years overdue. Hopefully there are people there actively looking into why voice chat works only sporadically. It defeats the purpose of having an "online" game when half the time I can't speak with my guild while we trying to run a group around Blackreach Cyrodiil.

Other issues during this event:

1. Heard from about 50-players that people can barely fire skills. I use a bow and when I cast Poison Arrow my bow points up in the air for 3-5 seconds and eventually the skill fires (I think). Bow skills are firing so slowly and animation is just horribly slow or barely playing so I can't even tell what's happening in combat. My kills have gone down by about 75% because I can't fire skills quickly enough to kill anyone, especially since Nightblades using a bow have been nerfed into the ground over the past 2-years as it is. I have an Xbox Series X and half-gig wired fiber internet and the issue is not on my side. It's so bad that the only attack I can do with a bow reliably is light attack and even that is slow. Imagine chasing around tanky fast players trying to kill them with weak light attacks from a bow! That is what you've reduced gameplay to for this event because of horrible performance. I've been playing for years and this is the same every event.

2. I have been completely kicked from server and crashed to desktop at least 4-times per day since the event started. Again, too many people playing and your systems aren't keeping up. This never happened even once per day until the event. (Heard this also for 10s of players on Xbox NA all weekend.)

3. Queue yesterday was 100+. People have to wait an hour just to play. Is this the best ZOS can offer your paying customers? Really?!

malistorr

Yesterday queue was about 65ppl so about a 40-minute wait

Voice chat didn't work at all. When going to that screen to see all 5-guilds and the 3 "all members" channels for each the selector/cursor was bouncing around the screen between channels by itself. "Group" would appear and disappear at random and I was stuck in a channel for a long time. I could not remove from it or select another one. So no talking to group at all yesterday for my whole few-hours play time. Even after leaving the game and coming back it didn't work. I rebooted my Xbox and cleared game cache and nothing helps. This is clearly a ZOS issue.

I was booted to desktop in the game twice in-a-row last night. I had to force-close the game and restart it and get back in.

Skills were once again horribly slow to cast. Any time I tried to use my bow for Poison Arrow it would stick up in the air again and maybe fire, maybe not after a few seconds. PVP doesn't wait for your skills to finish so this would usually mean an uneccessary death. What's the purpose of playing when the poor performance is killing you by itself? I couldn't really see the animation at all as it wasn't rendering on screen. I'm surprised I got any kills at all as everything was happening at about 1/3 speed with animations not working and me guessing if skills actually "happened" or didn't. Again I have half-gig wired fiber internet and I'm in CA. If I'm having this many problems I bet things are much worse for most of the player base with slower internet or people who are farther away from the servers.

Was stuck in combat several times which prevented me from mounting and getting to several keep/resource captures. I'll bet I've missed out on a half-mil AP from all the bugs.

What a horrible experience all around. Why have events when you can't make the game work during them?