Is it time for ZOS to upgrade their servers ?

Knowledge

No one here has any idea what type of servers ZeniMax uses, how they are implemented, or what quality they are. Yet we assume that because there are "problems" with them right now that they must be upgraded.

It doesn't matter how good or powerful a server is. It can still have problems. Technology is not infallible.

Bhaal5

Yes - they are broke

Knowledge wrote: »

No one here has any idea what type of servers ZeniMax uses, how they are implemented, or what quality they are. Yet we assume that because there are "problems" with them right now that they must be upgraded.

It doesn't matter how good or powerful a server is. It can still have problems. Technology is not infallible.

I dont think zos knows either
BUT
In saying this, a dev (cant remember which one) posted up server changes coming with summerset. So currently voting yes as its for the here an now... But waiting to see what these changes bring to the overall performance of the game

Klixen

You know, I think the real problem here is the amount of people on the servers.

This Mega Server idea is terrible. During off-peak times the servers are just fine. But as soon as the servers start to fill up, the problems start.

So what I'd really love to see is a couple more servers opened up to ease some of the congestion. I wouldn't even care if I had to start all over again from scratch. Just so I could get away from some of the people. There's such a thing as being too popular you know

Enslaved

Yes - they are broke

It is time to improve the service. idk how they can do, but I agree they should do it. If not, all the goodies that would bring new players to ESO, all the nice things - all will be in vain.

Pixel_Zealot

Yes - they are broke

Playing with a constant 250ms even though I'm running 20mb fiber down is ridiculous.

It makes bar swapping impossible in quick-reacting necessary situations.

Ilithyania

Varidian wrote: »

Chilly-McFreeze wrote: »

I'm used to being kicked out of Cyro in the evening, which is bad enough. But now this horrible stability through the events.... I'm really starting to think about spending my money elsewhere again.

I played the Star wars The old republic, about a year after launch and they were ruthless with the progression... i never DC a single time, never failed a log in.... nothing... but this?

I have never in all my years of gaming paid Hundreds into a game - and been so flat line disappointed with my investment as this. been back on ESO just over a month, wasn't too bothered at first... issues happen with games and then they fix them. but in this case the issues are persisting repetitively

and look at SWTOR now, barly any new content, due to Anthem. Boring Command crate grind on each Toon, Conquest got messed up. its a Cartell market EA greed feast. no thanks.

Jade1986

Yes - they are broke

Ilithyania wrote: »

Varidian wrote: »

Chilly-McFreeze wrote: »

I'm used to being kicked out of Cyro in the evening, which is bad enough. But now this horrible stability through the events.... I'm really starting to think about spending my money elsewhere again.

I played the Star wars The old republic, about a year after launch and they were ruthless with the progression... i never DC a single time, never failed a log in.... nothing... but this?

I have never in all my years of gaming paid Hundreds into a game - and been so flat line disappointed with my investment as this. been back on ESO just over a month, wasn't too bothered at first... issues happen with games and then they fix them. but in this case the issues are persisting repetitively

and look at SWTOR now, barly any new content, due to Anthem. Boring Command crate grind on each Toon, Conquest got messed up. its a Cartell market EA greed feast. no thanks.

LOL! Did you just equate their flawless server service with the failure of the game? The game failed because of the blunder decision to focus on story only for 2 years, their awful milking of the customers ( we have the sales person from that era in ESO now, amazing ) and the extremely alt unfriendly system the jacksmurfs designed during KotFE and KotET. Server stability is one of the few things that game has going for it.

Neoealth

Yes - they are broke

I don't understand the few people who say "Nah it's fine don't bother upgrading because I feel I get my value for money"

Upgraded servers is going to benefit everyone. I have been getting random boots to login screen and some lag in dungeons since this event started. I blame two things for this lag, 1) Antiquated servers and 2) Obsessive farming behavior by the more experienced players.

Gota collect all those motifs right? *rolls eyes*

Titansteele

This poll shows nothing except a lack of knowledge in so many.

You could upgrade the servers to match the scale and power of googles worldwide infrastructure and it could achieve the square root of *beep* all.

I do not have any answers but that is because I know enough about the subject to confidently state that I could not provide suggestions without analysis on the setup of infrastructure and the application design that runs the server code.

People are asking for the tyres to be replaced on their car without even knowing if it has a chassis let alone if it is in good condition or not.

I think it is perfectly reasonable as a customer to ask for a better experience, leave the "how" part to people armed with enough knowledge and context to make the suggestion educated.

xenowarrior92eb17_ESO

Yes - they are broke

Community says YES!
ZoS be like

Ilithyania

Jade1986 wrote: »

Ilithyania wrote: »

Varidian wrote: »

Chilly-McFreeze wrote: »

I'm used to being kicked out of Cyro in the evening, which is bad enough. But now this horrible stability through the events.... I'm really starting to think about spending my money elsewhere again.

I played the Star wars The old republic, about a year after launch and they were ruthless with the progression... i never DC a single time, never failed a log in.... nothing... but this?

I have never in all my years of gaming paid Hundreds into a game - and been so flat line disappointed with my investment as this. been back on ESO just over a month, wasn't too bothered at first... issues happen with games and then they fix them. but in this case the issues are persisting repetitively

and look at SWTOR now, barly any new content, due to Anthem. Boring Command crate grind on each Toon, Conquest got messed up. its a Cartell market EA greed feast. no thanks.

LOL! Did you just equate their flawless server service with the failure of the game? The game failed because of the blunder decision to focus on story only for 2 years, their awful milking of the customers ( we have the sales person from that era in ESO now, amazing ) and the extremely alt unfriendly system the jacksmurfs designed during KotFE and KotET. Server stability is one of the few things that game has going for it.

hardly flawless i DC amny times , so did my firends XD XD

srfrogg23

No they are fine as they are

If it’s time to upgrade, then it’s time to upgrade, but I don’t personally have any of the issues mentioned.

I’m not saying I’m opposed to them doing an upgrade, but, can everyone that voted “yes” be absolutely certain that it’s not their ISP? Sometimes internet providers don’t always play nice.

Neoealth

Yes - they are broke

Titansteele wrote: »

This poll shows nothing except a lack of knowledge in so many.

You could upgrade the servers to match the scale and power of googles worldwide infrastructure and it could achieve the square root of *beep* all.

I do not have any answers but that is because I know enough about the subject to confidently state that I could not provide suggestions without analysis on the setup of infrastructure and the application design that runs the server code.

People are asking for the tyres to be replaced on their car without even knowing if it has a chassis let alone if it is in good condition or not.

I think it is perfectly reasonable as a customer to ask for a better experience, leave the "how" part to people armed with enough knowledge and context to make the suggestion educated.

Why make things over complicated? Experience as told me that when you upgrade hardware you get better performance. What makes you think upgrading would not make any difference?

reiverx

I think poorly optimized code is a bigger problem than server power. Last update brought in a whole lot of issues. However, the new outfit system worked flawlessly, most likely because it involves real money and was properly tested at the expense of everything else.

Vahrokh

The only technically appropriate answer is not listed: "re-engineer code and infrastructure".

See, you cannot upgrade a city car with a Ferrari engine and hope it works. You have to have the appropriate frame, brakes, tires, clutch...

You cannot just throw bigger hardware, scaling up does not work like that.
Furthermore, "ESO" is not "one thing". The login servers (plural) probably are made with different technologies and sit on different computers than the game servers. Game servers are not unique either. Each region (sometimes, portions of regions) has its own dedicated servers. If ESO works like other MMOs, battlegrounds, Cyrodiil and PvE instances each have their own dedicated and separated servers clusters.

Any fragility in the whole, massive "chain" leads to smaller or bigger issues.

Looking at the issue with a magnifying glass, it seems ESO login servers and game database(s) are too tightly coupled. Events cause people to switch to many characters (for example, to grind dailies to grind as many boxes as possible), many more than usual. This causes strain and evidently the whole infrastructure is not engineered to handle it.

So, it's not just about changing some computers, they would have to put engineers to study how to rewrite delicate portions of the code (usually sealed when the MMO first ships, because then it becomes very hard to "fiddle" with stuff used by thousands without weeks of testing) and they cannot or don't want to do it.

Last but not least, the network infrastructure. EU is weaker and less redundant than the US and DDoS attacks / simple outages are way harder to keep under control. There are some EU countries that are only indirectly connected to Germany and only through 1-2 national ISPs. In case of failures, those points of failure become critical.

Violynne

No they are fine as they are

rumple9 wrote: »

Daily log in problems, lag, kick out of server every few hours, frequent maintenance downtime - are we getting value for money or are people happy with things the way they are?

I voted "No" because I'm not experiencing most of these issues.

The only reason I suffer lag is because so many people congregate in a specific area. This isn't the fault of the game. This is a limitation of the system.

Once I'm out of the main cities, the game runs perfectly fine.

Titansteele

Neoealth wrote: »

Why make things over complicated? Experience as told me that when you upgrade hardware you get better performance. What makes you think upgrading would not make any difference?

The simple answer is this is complicated, I am not making it so I am merely telling you as it is.

Performance Engineering and System Capacity is something I am responsible for as part of my career. I have no intention of getting involved in some sort of epeen waving competition with anyone so I will elaborate no further.

I already said I don't have answers @Neoealth - I do not know if an upgrade would improve the situation or not because despite my experience in this area without real details I could not recommend a course of action. What I can say is that adding more power, knowing what we know (which is very little) by no means guarantees a performance gain.

What harm would it do? Well it could cause harm but I wont go into that as if people are lacking the base understanding of the first statement there is no way they would understand the ramifications different scenario`s could have on our user experience.

If we look at it from a purely financial aspect, if they upgraded at a significant cost and it provided no benefit at all then it is a waste of money, money that if invested elsewhere would provide a better user experience.

I am not a plumber, I realise that I need to rely upon the expertise of tradesmen when it comes to this topic. Just because you built your own PC and it doesn't overheat and try to kill you does not make you an IT expert. Voice your discontent in the experience, that is reasonable but let people that know what they are doing come up with ways to address those concerns.

Ashtaris

Yes - they are broke

I voted yes, but honestly I don’t have enough information to say upgraded hardware will fix any of the issues. For example, the recent EU server issues was unfortunate, but does anyone besides ZOS really know if it was a hardware or software issue? Just throwing more hardware at the root core of a software problem is not the answer. Also, some of the issues are definitiely client side. That’s one of the reasons ZOS is supporting multi-core processors in the Summerset update, to improve client side performance.

Grimm13

With Summerset they are bringing hyper threading to the game. This will make improvements on all our machines that have had multi cores for years now.

Will this also improve on the servers? If so, is that not a server upgrade.

Juju_beans

All you folks calling for server upgrades...do you have any knowledge of what server types they are currently running ?
Upgrade from what to what ? Everyone just saying "yes, upgrade servers" with no knowledge beyond that ?

Herd mentality.

FireCowCommando

Yes - they are broke

And i have no faith ZoS will ever improve them, that ended years ago.

dennissomb16_ESO

need better options. It is not as simple as hardware being upgraded. It is combination of hardware, coding, internet. Coding being the main issue. Hardware is important but the overall coding design means even if they upgraded to the latest greatest hardware we would continue to see the issues such as lag that we see now.

Pixel_Zealot

Yes - they are broke

I think the problem is much bigger than just their forums.

Craziux

Yes - they are broke

@ZOS_GinaBruno Ask your Dev-Team about upgrading the servers and get some brand new hardware, please. The servers at prime-time and even at casual times struggle with slow input and really bad lag, at least in EU.

We in EU might just be extra cash to you, but with improving the servers, you could earn even more. It might set you back quite a bit, but you (Zenimax) should have enough cash to do this with all those ridiculous sales you do! We all know with the sales you make that you should have all the needed resources to do this already. If greed does not hold you back, then just do it!

Karmanorway

Yes - they are broke

eserras7b16_ESO wrote: »

DRAGON_KILLER_HUNTER wrote: »

I get more than enough value for the little money i paid for this game

I already payed more than 500€ since i'm premium since day one so yeah. I ATLEAST demand proper servers

Oh god, why did u have to type that. Makes me extra salty thinking about all the money ive payed over the years 😆

Tapio75

I dont think upgrade would help.

Maybe they shgould move to another location, or do a full reinstall of everything.. Trouble is, that many problems would persist in the datavase where all our stuff is saved.

I in the otherhand would be willing to lose all the characters and progression that can be achieved by playing if it meant that things would work well in the future. Problem would be crown stuff and other accountwide stuff like rewards and such. Maybe they can be restored, but its a long work.

ZOS_RikardD

Greetings,

We have decided to close this thread because it was originally created in April 2018 and there are other recent threads discussing this topic.

Thank you for your understanding.