What are ESO servers like?

Jorva

I was curious about the structure of ZOS server(s) for ESO. I tried searching on the forums for some topics that might explain this, but I guess I couldn't find anything. The only ones who really know about this firsthand are the ZOS personnel themselves so this is a question mainly aimed for them, but players are free to place their input and would make for a contemplative discussion. Some of these may be painfully ignorant questions but I am pretty new to this sort of subject. I am just yearning to know how ZOS conduct online interactions and solutions with the game. If you have questions beyond the ones I asked relevant to the servers themselves, it would be cool if you shared it with us.

• How does the ZOS handle all of the information and memory that passes through their server?
• Is it just one massive server or are there multiple servers in a single business building?
• Is the hardware/software responsible for the long loading screens and PvP lag spikes?
• Is there a ZOS owned server located in the EU regions or do you reach it all the way from the US?
• Could you be specific on how expensive it can be to maintain a 24/7 server for ESO and how it impacts your focus on other activities like content development?
• I've played other games where they had servers running individual "worlds" instead of one/two massive instance(s). Through this method, players were able to join these instances at will. Why not do this way, at least for the sake of flexibility, allowing players to continue their game experiences while the other half of the servers are down for maintenance and testing instead of downtime of all servers?

I think that is all of the questions I have for now. Hopefully a ZOS staff will respond and maybe we could get some solid answers! Thanks for your time.

bryanhaas

I am not with ESO but do have some experience with servers. More than likely it is quite a number of servers connected in a virtual environment kinda like vmware. Also due to the nature of constant writing of data to the disks hard drive failure is most likely a constant issue for them. However with servers and a hard drive failure isn't really a probably as they are hot swapped due to being in a massive raid but due to that the hard drives usually need operate faster ie 15,000 rpms to counteract the the redundancy in the raid. Basically if you have a 7800 rpm hard drive in a raid where the data is being written to both drives then you have cut your speed in half so the need to run a higher speed drive. Could be there is a new raid combo that is now available that improves speed and the update allows them to take advantage of. When you think about it this could be an extremely daunting task.

That is just about hard drives just think of the other components involved.

UltimaJoe777

Jorva wrote: »

I was curious about the structure of ZOS server(s) for ESO. I tried searching on the forums for some topics that might explain this, but I guess I couldn't find anything. The only ones who really know about this firsthand are the ZOS personnel themselves so this is a question mainly aimed for them, but players are free to place their input and would make for a contemplative discussion. Some of these may be painfully ignorant questions but I am pretty new to this sort of subject. I am just yearning to know how ZOS conduct online interactions and solutions with the game. If you have questions beyond the ones I asked relevant to the servers themselves, it would be cool if you shared it with us.

• How does the ZOS handle all of the information and memory that passes through their server?
• Is it just one massive server or are there multiple servers in a single business building?
• Is the hardware/software responsible for the long loading screens and PvP lag spikes?
• Is there a ZOS owned server located in the EU regions or do you reach it all the way from the US?
• Could you be specific on how expensive it can be to maintain a 24/7 server for ESO and how it impacts your focus on other activities like content development?
• I've played other games where they had servers running individual "worlds" instead of one/two massive instance(s). Through this method, players were able to join these instances at will. Why not do this way, at least for the sake of flexibility, allowing players to continue their game experiences while the other half of the servers are down for maintenance and testing instead of downtime of all servers?

I think that is all of the questions I have for now. Hopefully a ZOS staff will respond and maybe we could get some solid answers! Thanks for your time.

I am not Zenimax Staff but I shall attempt to answer your questions as best I can from my own experiences and the information provided already from various resources:

1. The game devs usually code in everything and have all the data there in their systems. The server and the data are basically connected, and they can easily modify the data, including character data, and then upload the edit to the server for the changes to take effect.
2. ESO uses megaservers which are basically a collection of many, many servers all in one. This is how we are able to use instances and the like. However, the actual servers are not located at Zenimax Studios but where their provider is, which if I recall correctly (for NA) is Austin, Tx. The EU server is located in the European Data Center in Germany.
3. No. The loading screen issue came about sometime after the Imperial City patch and Zenimax has been working long and hard on trying to figure out the root cause. They keep us posted on it every ESO Live stream and also ninja in some little tidbits to improve the situation when they can. As for the lag, it is commonly experienced but not by everyone, meaning the issue is not server side. Servers do have their limits though, and latency can likely occur when pixels fly lol
4. Refer to #2 lol
5. Every gaming company that runs an MMORPG or Wifi Service pays a regular fee to server providers for their service. If Zenimax is at liberty to state this cost they shall. Maybe lol
6. The individual servers would likely still be tied together. The megaservers we play on are just a means of sorting players if one server is too full, and again likely aid in instancing better than not using megaservers would. If you happen to experience issues playing with a friend though I find this helps: Group up with them, and then change zones. This should put you in the same instance as they are once you rejoin them, assuming you didn't do this before going to them to ensure you were in the same instance lol

Malmai

TheMachineKiller

Malmai wrote: »

quite the budget build you got there

Sledgemoto

Wily_Wizard

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