Spontaneous system "crash" issue, WITH VIDEO

doesurmindglow · April 2021

Interesting fix. I'm down to try anything at this point. ZOS tech support has been thoroughly unhelpful.

Thanks for the tip, I'll post an update if it seems to work for me too!

el25pelas · April 2021

Thanks for this great contribution. Seriously, it's great that the gaming community managed to discover these kinds of workarounds.
Just like banishing pets and minions before traveling, which I discovered through trial and error.

But this is not the job that people who have bought the game and / or paid a subscription should be doing.
As a veteran software developer, I am aware that a bug or crash of this type is the development team's best friend because of a very simple matter: they are easy to debug.

Much worse is a memory leak or a bug that occurs very rarely.
This crash just happens 100% of the time under certain circumstances, which many users have already described in this forum.

Therefore, what is the reason for such neglect? Technical service is simply not helpful. Sometimes even the reply messages are traced. They look like something out of a template.

What is happening here is that the consumer is not being covered with any type of protection against a flagrant case of violation of rights.

Perhaps this can clarify the matter:
https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/shopping/shopping-consumer-rights/index_en.htm#faulty-first-6-months-5

Why when we buy a device and it is defective, do we complain, and not with this type of thing?

I would not want to promote a "riot", but the support for this product is clearly not adequate.

doesurmindglow · April 2021

Yeah I agree the "banishment" workaround seems to be effective too -- when I banish minions and pets, it is far less likely to result in a crash when changing instances.

It's been a huge help just trying that, but there are still lingering crashes on port, so i hope maybe a combination of the methods (ie. banishing and then shrinking the window) might get us close to passable stability at least as far as instance changes are concerned.

I've been trying to replicate the issue on PTS and so far without much luck. This gives me some hope it may be resolved by the chapter release; but I'm not entirely optimistic. I will be holding off on a chapter purchase until I can see some indication that the developers are at least looking into this issue. I've tried submitting a ticket and followed the advice of tech support, but none of their recommendations have created the kind of noticeable improvement I've experienced from just implementing the advice of other Mac users posted to the forums.

eMKa8 · April 2021

The problem seems to be for a lot of mac players (if not all)

I have a very performing MAC computer and i also have occassional crashes. Especially when using mounts or pets at wayshrines

doesurmindglow · April 2021

After trying the "exit fullscreen fix" for a couple days, I can say that it does seem to offer improvement. It's not a total fix -- for instance, it doesn't solve crashes that don't involve an instance change, such as within a dungeon or PVP area, and there are still occasional crashes on port as well.

But used in combination with banishing pets/assistants, it does seem to sharply reduce the frequency. Some of the most notorious cases, such as entering a dungeon from the group finder queue, it has largely eliminated, so long as I make sure to resize the window and let the game refresh the resolution before initiating the port.

No idea why this works. I suspect it has something to do with the resolution change, either it takes less memory to render at smaller resolution, which might for some reason be less likely to trigger the race condition. But I'm glad it seems to be viable as another potential workaround for now.

I haven't yet been able to experience this bug on the PTS, so I guess I'm holding out some hope that the problem will be solved in the upcoming major patch. There is language in the PTS patch notes to suggest some work in ongoing:

From 7.0.0 PTS patch notes:

Optimized planar reflection graphics, reducing their impact to FPS.

From 7.0.1 patch notes:

The game now prevents memory-related crashing when attempting to load in a very large number of players, companions, and pets at the same time. There may still be undesired visual effects in these cases, which will be addressed in a later update.

This could be wishful thinking on my part as I still have yet to have anyone at the company fully acknowledge that they're aware of and working on modeling system-related crashes impacting users of the Mac client. I also think the PTS has way less traffic and thus fewer character and character "minion" assets to model and potentially trigger these crashes; so it's possible that the problem will remain when the patch is released and stressed by the live server graphical load.

BlueRaven · April 2021

doesurmindglow wrote: »

After trying the "exit fullscreen fix" for a couple days, I can say that it does seem to offer improvement. It's not a total fix -- for instance, it doesn't solve crashes that don't involve an instance change, such as within a dungeon or PVP area, and there are still occasional crashes on port as well.

But used in combination with banishing pets/assistants, it does seem to sharply reduce the frequency. Some of the most notorious cases, such as entering a dungeon from the group finder queue, it has largely eliminated, so long as I make sure to resize the window and let the game refresh the resolution before initiating the port.

No idea why this works. I suspect it has something to do with the resolution change, either it takes less memory to render at smaller resolution, which might for some reason be less likely to trigger the race condition. But I'm glad it seems to be viable as another potential workaround for now.

I haven't yet been able to experience this bug on the PTS, so I guess I'm holding out some hope that the problem will be solved in the upcoming major patch. There is language in the PTS patch notes to suggest some work in ongoing:

From 7.0.0 PTS patch notes:

Optimized planar reflection graphics, reducing their impact to FPS.

From 7.0.1 patch notes:

The game now prevents memory-related crashing when attempting to load in a very large number of players, companions, and pets at the same time. There may still be undesired visual effects in these cases, which will be addressed in a later update.

This could be wishful thinking on my part as I still have yet to have anyone at the company fully acknowledge that they're aware of and working on modeling system-related crashes impacting users of the Mac client. I also think the PTS has way less traffic and thus fewer character and character "minion" assets to model and potentially trigger these crashes; so it's possible that the problem will remain when the patch is released and stressed by the live server graphical load.

I am glad it is helping!

I saw that note from the patch notes as well. Since the new patch has dropped, I have not yet experienced the crash yet on the PTS, there have been times when I was sure it was going to happen because of the long load screen and the "wheel" intermittent turning.

I am hoping it's a fix, but I think it is still too early to tell.

doesurmindglow · April 2021

Ugh I may have spoke to soon; Apple pushed an update to MacOS last night that seems to have destabilized it again. This workaround does seem to work for reducing crashes on port, but now I'm getting fairly regular crashes outside of that.

I'm going to see if I can't roll back the OS update and return to the previous stability; I would advise against Big Sur users doing the latest update, it seems to destablizes the ESO client. But if you have another MacOS version, I don't know.

doesurmindglow · April 2021

This is definitely an optimization problem with ESO's port to Mac, but whatever Apple did last night seems to have made it worse.

BlueRaven · April 2021

doesurmindglow wrote: »

This is definitely an optimization problem with ESO's port to Mac, but whatever Apple did last night seems to have made it worse.

Oh boy.

I just updated my system last night as well. I have not opened eso yet though.

doesurmindglow · April 2021

Yeah I went ahead and actually rolled all the way back to Catalina just to see how it might perform (I rarely use Big Sur's features anyway).

This eliminated the random in-game modeling crashes that started after the last MacOS update, but I still do get crashing on port. I do think that leaving fullscreen and banishing pets both seem to reduce the frequency.

AngryLorekeeper · April 2021

Thanks, I'll have to test this later today. I'm really hoping that ZOS gets their act together and fixes this problem soon, because the workarounds are kind of ridiculous.

eMKa8 · May 2021

I COMPLETELY agree

This game is too awesome to change from game.
I dont want to look for another “great” game becasue lets face it .... Mac almost doesnt have any available !

This one is by far the best game there is.
Close second is civilisation 5 and 6 🤗.

But i really want this to work on a Mac

Please Zos , make it happen ;-)

doesurmindglow · May 2021

Just an update: I went ahead and rolled my system back completely to Catalina to see if I could find a more stable compatibility between the client and my OS.

Thankfully, this did seem to eliminate the crashes occurring within instances about every 10 minutes of gameplay that were introduced by the April 27 Big Sur update, so the game is vaguely playable on Catalina. Unfortunately, it has not resolved the crashes on port, so I'm stuck still using the various workarounds to reduce their frequency.

I would HIGHLY recommend against Mac users running the Big Sur version of MacOS going forward with the April 27 system update if they plan to play ESO based on my experience, as for whatever reason it completely destabilizes the client to the point a Time Machine rollback is the only option to regain basic playability. If others have been able to apply that update with success, it'd be great to hear about it, though. It's totally possible the update was an issue only on my system, who knows.

BlueRaven · May 2021

doesurmindglow wrote: »

Just an update: I went ahead and rolled my system back completely to Catalina to see if I could find a more stable compatibility between the client and my OS.

Thankfully, this did seem to eliminate the crashes occurring within instances about every 10 minutes of gameplay that were introduced by the April 27 Big Sur update, so the game is vaguely playable on Catalina. Unfortunately, it has not resolved the crashes on port, so I'm stuck still using the various workarounds to reduce their frequency.

I would HIGHLY recommend against Mac users running the Big Sur version of MacOS going forward with the April 27 system update if they plan to play ESO based on my experience, as for whatever reason it completely destabilizes the client to the point a Time Machine rollback is the only option to regain basic playability. If others have been able to apply that update with success, it'd be great to hear about it, though. It's totally possible the update was an issue only on my system, who knows.

Just to add my experience I have had two of my “crashes” since the system update. But overall I am still crashing much less with my 1/4 window technique.

I want to test the pts some more, I saw this in the 7.0.1 patch notes:

“ The game now prevents memory-related crashing when attempting to load in a very large number of players, companions, and pets at the same time. There may still be undesired visual effects in these cases, which will be addressed in a later update.”

And I am hoping this solves the issue.

But the problem is that there is not “a very large number of players, companions, and pets at the same time” to test it very well.

doesurmindglow · May 2021

Yeah, agreed. I saw that note in the patch notes also, and hope that it applies to our situation.

It would be nice to have SOME communication from ZOS to connect the two things; that is, an indication that "memory-relating crashing when attempting to load in a very large number of players etc" is in fact what we're experiencing with these crashes on port and further that "the game now prevents" means that there is something resembling a fix for it. Because tech support on this issue has basically gone no further than "did you disable your addons? XD" it's kind of anyone's guess, but it does certainly sound promising at least from that language.

Further my own testing on PTS has yet to actually replicate one of the instance change crashes I get very regularly on live, which is also promising, though it comes with the significant caveat that the traffic, latency, number of assets in question, and potential for coding errors are all so much more abundant on the live server it'll be hard to really know until the actual release.

upquark · May 2021

I have had this issue with multiple Macs (quad core and 16+GB or higher) in multiple zones in multiple situations (traveling in zone, traveling between zones, walking into a tavern).

This has occurred with and without add-ons and after multiple settings adjustments.

Tickets have been submitted over the past 1.5 years on this issue.

This last crash on my 2019 8-core i9 8GB Vega Pro 48 while in game ended in kernel panic resulting in MLB and power supply dead in the water. It’s in the shop getting both replaced.

Hauteecole_Rider16 · June 2021

In my case, the crashes occur on porting into the main cities - Solitude, Senchal and now Leyawiin.

Yesterday I played in Leyawiin for several hours before I got this crash. Granted, I spent most of my time outside of Leyawiin, but it looks like I will have to use the same work around for Leyawiin that I use for Solitude and Senchal - no porting directly into these cities but port to the wayshrine outside of the city then walking into it. I still get the occasional crash with the gates at Solitude , but at least it's better than it was. Today I tried going into the city through the south gates off the docks, and I simply can not get back into the game on this toon.

Sigh.

Deter1UK · June 2021

Well whatever it is it certainly is not equipment related

My iMac is dual boot with windows (which I specifically and only use for ESO)

(If the family are needing the computer it's left in Big Sur, if no-one needs it for the day I reboot to windows to play)

In Windows the Blackwood update plays like 60+fps and no crashes, smooth as silk.

In Big Sur (17-25 fps as usual) I have Crashed To User Login three times today, once while entering the game, once while leaving the building I was in and the last time when leaving Leyawin

My daughter plays on our old 2011 iMac via Stadia with remarkably few issues, just a little jerkiness now and then but nothing that spoils her enjoyment.

I deleted shadercache.cooked as I do every update and that worked ok until today.

I resented the hassle involved in getting bootcamp up and running, not because Apple have not made it really easy to do, they have, but because it should have been so unnecessary!

BlueRaven · June 2021

Yeah, I thought by reducing the window size I may have solved it, but at best it only does it less often. I crashed a bunch of times yesterday.

So I put in a new ticket, although I doubt it will get me very far.

Hauteecole_Rider16 · June 2021

Here’s what I’ve figured out so far:

Crashes when I use wayshrines or house in Senchal and Solitude; Crashes when I go through the Leyawiin Gates (not WS) - hvent’ really tested the houses in the city yet.

So it seems mighty specific to those updates (oddly enough Markarth is fine)

BlueRaven · June 2021

Hauteecole_Rider16 wrote: »

Here’s what I’ve figured out so far:

Crashes when I use wayshrines or house in Senchal and Solitude; Crashes when I go through the Leyawiin Gates (not WS) - hvent’ really tested the houses in the city yet.

So it seems mighty specific to those updates (oddly enough Markarth is fine)

That is interesting, mine are similar but a bit different.

I recently opened yet another ticket about this issue, in one of my responses I broke down my problem areas:

-Summerset, specifically Alinor. The system crashes rarely (and I can live with rarely) when I directly port into the city. Riding into the city is perfectly fine.

-Northern Elsweyr, specifically Rimmen. Similar to Alinor it rarely happens, and again I can ride into the city without issue.

-Southern Elsweyr, Senchal. This place is deadly, and I don’t even like going near the city. Also Dragonguard, not as bad as Senchal, but much worse than Alinor or Rimmen.

-Western Skyrim, specifically Solitude. Either directly porting, or going through one of the entrances, both are equally bad. This one particularly hurts as I purchased the house there (furnished) and I basically cannot use if for fear of getting my character affectively stuck.

-The Reach, specifically Markarth. Not as bad as Solitude, but I specifically did not buy the home there because of the character stuck fears.

-Blackwood, specifically Leyawiin. The new worst of the list.

The areas AROUND the cities are fine. The problem is with the areas listed above and ONLY those areas.

Just as a reminder, ALL of the “vanilla zones” work perfectly fine. Hews Bane, Gold Coast, Black Marsh, Craglorn, perfectly fine as well. All of Morrowind, not a hint of a problem. The above list are the ONLY places in the game where this problem exists.

doesurmindglow · June 2021

I have many of the same problem areas, although I will say that Northern Elsweyr and The Reach are generally better toward fine for me. I do have issues with base game zones but I think they're less of a problem also. I haven't yet purchased the chapter so cannot test Blackwood/Leyawiin but on PTS I didn't have any crashes there, so I can't really say yet.

One area that I have noticed is particularly crash-prone is Imperial City. Player housing, battlegrounds, and dungeon instances are also notoriously problem zones. I'm an active PVPer and mostly quit playing battlegrounds entirely due to the instability.

Something that does seem likely is that more complex renderings (ie. the newer zones, large player counts) and specifically generated instances are contributing to what remains of this bug. I do think there has been improvement, but there is still a ways to go to get back to pre-Flames of Ambition stability on the Mac client.

lymantria · June 2021

I think I have a similar problem.

My Mac (27-inch 2017) crashes from time to time completely but only when I'm playing ESO. However, opposing to many people who already wrote about it, I do not see any particular pattern to my crashes. It may happen in a world zone. Most of the times it happens in the middle of a trial, and it's not something I am happy about. I don't have any pets, companions, etc. Didn't happen in a big city. Mostly happens in trials. For example - today I entered the first boss room in vMoL, and suddenly I couldn't use my mouse but the game was not frozen, and then the system completely crashed. The other day the game froze completely in vCR, and then the system crashed.

Hoping that this issue would soon be fixed.

BlueRaven · June 2021

lymantria wrote: »

I think I have a similar problem.

My Mac (27-inch 2017) crashes from time to time completely but only when I'm playing ESO. However, opposing to many people who already wrote about it, I do not see any particular pattern to my crashes. It may happen in a world zone. Most of the times it happens in the middle of a trial, and it's not something I am happy about. I don't have any pets, companions, etc. Didn't happen in a big city. Mostly happens in trials. For example - today I entered the first boss room in vMoL, and suddenly I couldn't use my mouse but the game was not frozen, and then the system completely crashed. The other day the game froze completely in vCR, and then the system crashed.

Hoping that this issue would soon be fixed.

Please submit a ticket about it. I recently sent in a new one about this issue but received little help in resolving it. I really don't think they (ZOS) view this as an issue that needs to be looked into, so with more tickets sent in about it the better.

lymantria · June 2021

BlueRaven wrote: »

lymantria wrote: »

I think I have a similar problem.

My Mac (27-inch 2017) crashes from time to time completely but only when I'm playing ESO. However, opposing to many people who already wrote about it, I do not see any particular pattern to my crashes. It may happen in a world zone. Most of the times it happens in the middle of a trial, and it's not something I am happy about. I don't have any pets, companions, etc. Didn't happen in a big city. Mostly happens in trials. For example - today I entered the first boss room in vMoL, and suddenly I couldn't use my mouse but the game was not frozen, and then the system completely crashed. The other day the game froze completely in vCR, and then the system crashed.

Hoping that this issue would soon be fixed.

Please submit a ticket about it. I recently sent in a new one about this issue but received little help in resolving it. I really don't think they (ZOS) view this as an issue that needs to be looked into, so with more tickets sent in about it the better.

Sure, will do!

BlueRaven · July 2021

Just wanted to update this as this issue is STILL happening.

I have been reluctant to update this thread because of the final message I got from customer support over this matter made me very depressed.

However, @ZOS_BillE recently closed a thread similar to this one and I wanted to add at least one last thing before this one may got closed as well.

I will post it here along with my ticket number, I will remove any names;

[Incident: 210602-007570]

"Greetings,

XXXXXXX here again with The Elder Scrolls Online Support.

Thank you for the follow up reply and for providing the additional details about your OS. After reviewing your extensive troubleshooting history we have unfortunately exhausted all known troubleshooting which we can provide. In this situation the only thing I can recommend is to contact Apple Support or consult the online support communities for any additional ideas they could provide.

Thank you for your understanding.

Warm regards,
The Elder Scrolls Online Support"

••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

And my reply to which the support team did not answer;

"Hello,

Thank you again for your time with this matter.

I just want to stress, I am NOT the only person experiencing this issue. There have been many threads on the Elder Scrolls Online Mac Forums filled with people trying to figure this out, for years.

Here is the one I started;

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/541794/spontaneous-system-crash-issue-with-video/p1

I have also contacted Apple about this and have been on the Apple forums about this issue.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251610169

No one there knows how anything like this can happen from a mac hardware or mac os system stand point.

Lastly, ESO is the ONLY piece of software that does this.

Balder’s Gate 3, Total War (Warhammer series), Civilization, etc. DO NOT gave me any problems even remotely like this issue on this computer. ALSO I use the Adobe suite of products for work also on this computer, and also without issue.

Elder Scrolls Online, is THE ONLY software I have where anything like this happens.

I don’t think I will find the answers elsewhere, especially since the problems seem to happen in such specific areas of the newer locations added to the game. All I can think is that there could be a special shader or Server platform where these cities reside that is not cooperating with the Mac OS/hardware.

Anyway, I feel I have done what I could on my end. I don’t know why a crowded area such the main city in Grahtwood can play so cleanly, but the new cities introduced play so poorly. There obviously has been some sort of change in the ESO client, between then and now that is causing the issue.

Just something to think about.

Thank you for your time.

XXXXXXXX"

•••••

I just wanted to post this in case this thread gets closed as well.

I don't know where to go from here. Is putting out additional tickets even worth it anymore? It just seems like my future here on this os platform is pretty bleak.

EDIT: This incident number was from June of this year 2021.

Inoki · September 2021

BlueRaven wrote: »

No one did anything. No one even tried. Ah well.

That's the problem with this company. If you look back, dozens of reports, if not hundreds before you, and NOTHING was done.

[snip]

BlueRaven wrote: »

So I think I figured out a work around. It’s not great but this is what I am doing;

I was on the pts and I noticed I was having the same old “crash” issue in the new main city.

I was checking out the new homes. I had just left the inn room and was attempting to leave the inn itself. But it just started crashing and crashing over and over again. I could not even log onto the character. It would just do a short load screen then system crash like in my video above.

Now on the pts I have no addons or anything, so we can’t blame it on that.

So I tried a pure shot in the dark idea.

I play on an iMac with a 27” screen in windowed mode. Before prompting a load screen by going to an area that gives me problems, I manual “shrink” the window down to less the 1/2 it’s size. Then I do whatever action I need to do. Open a door, use a wayshrine, what ever prompts a load screen.
The game does its thing without issue, Oroborous never stops turning. When I am back to gameplay, I open the window back open to full size.

That’s it. It seems to work on live as well.

I hope this helps my fellow Mac users!

[snip]

What else does it look like till now?
[edited for bashing]

BlueRaven · September 2021

Inoki wrote: »

BlueRaven wrote: »

No one did anything. No one even tried. Ah well.

That's the problem with this company. If you look back, dozens of reports, if not hundreds before you, and NOTHING was done.

[snip]

BlueRaven wrote: »

So I think I figured out a work around. It’s not great but this is what I am doing;

I was on the pts and I noticed I was having the same old “crash” issue in the new main city.

I was checking out the new homes. I had just left the inn room and was attempting to leave the inn itself. But it just started crashing and crashing over and over again. I could not even log onto the character. It would just do a short load screen then system crash like in my video above.

Now on the pts I have no addons or anything, so we can’t blame it on that.

So I tried a pure shot in the dark idea.

I play on an iMac with a 27” screen in windowed mode. Before prompting a load screen by going to an area that gives me problems, I manual “shrink” the window down to less the 1/2 it’s size. Then I do whatever action I need to do. Open a door, use a wayshrine, what ever prompts a load screen.
The game does its thing without issue, Oroborous never stops turning. When I am back to gameplay, I open the window back open to full size.

That’s it. It seems to work on live as well.

I hope this helps my fellow Mac users!

[snip]

What else does it look like till now?
[edited for bashing]

The solution is very hit or miss. It sometimes works but often does not. This past Friday I had over eight system resets trying to get into leyawiin just once.

BlueRaven · September 2021

Not that they are going to do anything about it. Problem still happens in the dead lands.

Crashed again in the main city, not in the rest of the zone, just like every other dlc.

Same exact problem, same exact type of location, just in a new zone wrapper.

fiender66 · September 2021

I join the choir. Same issue as described by BlueRaven. Only in the new zones (Deadlands).

This was a issue that I experienced in the past occasionally, but cannot remember details.

No, I'm not going through the ordeal of starting a ticket, sorry