PC-EU Server Update - April 11

tinythinker

SwampDrainerGoat wrote: »

you are going to upgrade NA server before the influx happens. Nice to see who your priority customers are.

PC-NA royalty, here. You may kiss the ring

But seriously, I can see the exact same scenario in reverse if NA had reached overload first. They seemed to think they could make a smaller fix, then realized the problem was suddenly going into overdrive.

When I've been on EU people always seemed very helpful. Hope you guys see a huge boost to stability and performance ASAP and that aid arrives more swiftly in the future.

xMovingTarget

Nifty2g wrote: »

log in to do a raid on eso and be put on a queue, hopefully that doesn't become a problem for the raid groups.

I have raid in 3 hours. You think I should start getting in the queue now?

tonne.backlinderb16_ESO

Maybe stop selling copies of the game until the issue is solved?

Sanguinor2

ManwithBeard9 wrote: »

Because they were hoping it wouldnt get to a critical point. So now that its at critical on one server, they might as well add for both instead of repeating the process later.

Oh I fully understand why they are doing NA aswell as EU Right now but what has me in disbelief is that when, as noted in the OP by Firor, Problems already escalated in late march so before the anniversary Event started, either no one was able to predict that the already very much straining Server might get even more Problems once the anniversary Event starts so more People logging in (dont Need a deegree in Analytics, mathematics or whatever the heck you want to make that prediction since that is what the Event is also designed for) which would most assuredly lead to even more Problems or that no one felt the Need to give a damn until it all came crashing down, I dont know which one of the two I find more concerning but both dont speak for atleast somewhat close to equal treatmeant of PC EU and PC NA.

Hoping it does not come to a critical Point seems like the laziest move possible to me, surely they have People that are payed to do more than hoping and are supposed to act or atleast bring it to Attention that the Servers, which are already close to a critical Point, will get more strain once the Event which is supposed to bring more Players to said Servers starts.

Ode2Order

I appreciate that you are communicating with us and I understand the situation. I only ask you remain communicative about this kind of thing before customers come to wild conclusions on their own and irreparable damage is done in the relationship between ZOS and their playerbase. We just want to see you keeping us in the loop about what's happening. We can't know or understand what you don't tell us. Thank you again for the information! May the Eight smile upon you.

Fluke.Slywalker

I fear for the Xbox EU. It's free to play often and part of the Xbox game pass.... We are doomed.

Things are pretty OK at the moment tbh, but reading this..... GULP.

Verbal_Earthworm

ZOS_MattFiror wrote: »

And yes, we are adding more capacity to PC NA as well as EU because we are rapidly approaching the same problem in NA and want to get ahead of it.

So why on earth didn't you "get ahead of it" for PC-EU?

You are doing nothing to dissuade us from thinking that PC-EU comes second, always.

We have been asking for something to be done for months and this is far too little and far too late.

Pathetic excuses wont get you anywhere.

Navras

ZOS_MattFiror wrote: »

Everyone,

@ZOS_MattFiror

Matt, thanks for the heads-up.

Few problems that we reported are related to bug reports submitted in the last 7 or 8 months: group finder for both dungeon and battlegrounds had issues for a quite long time now and, of course, the growing active player base made it unusable.

Let's say you have a structural problem on your software as well, Matt. It's not only related to the last wave of players that joined the crew. Acknowledge those issues and give us some feedback, please.

Also, don't let all the new players leave: ESO is such a great game, but with a so poor infrastructure no one will stay here for a long time.

Thanks for reading, take care man

DJfriede

Bottom line: "We wanted to test how much poop we could load on the boat until it goes belly up. Or in other terms: We have found the limit where most customers get really angry and we finally have to do something. We will now use this as a benchmark for further issues."

WAMB0

Mhhh starting January...
Its also not denying that hardware has been downgraded....

EC_Rob

Hello @ZOS_MattFiror ,

I have been playing ESO since the release, with its ups and downs. I am really relieved to see you guys are working on the problem. On some days, the lagg in EU was so bad I was better of playing on the pts or na server, even though I am currently living in The Netherlands. Our non Euro friends like Aussies, Kiwi's, Asians and Africans had it much worse, though.

I for one am happy to see communication to the playerbase, and hope the extra hardware will fix or at least greatly reduce our lag, us poor eu players. I am looking forward with good hopes.

I do also agree with SantieClaws earlier post, and would find it fitting if you would add the event with one week. Another 5th week in terms of loot. (everything). Because I am one of the players who couldnt even log in last night, each time I finished the queue, I got kicked on loading.

with the kindest regards,

Rob.

Dragneel1207

nice
and thanks for communicating

MikaHR

You need some EPYC servers...literally and metaphorically.

Veles

ZOS_MattFiror wrote: »

Everyone,

You should only see the queue at peak times, when demand is higher than the hardware supports.

What is the problem for ZOS and BETHESDA increase the power of your server hardware?
And someone says after it "It is the best MMO..."

FierceSam

Everyone makes mistakes. It’s how you deal with them that defines you.

A) plan for success more effectively - I for one am overjoyed that the game I love is proving so popular

don’t wait until things fall over to implement improvements

C) don’t ignore and belittle your customers when they tell you your service is deteriorating

D) consider hiring a head of technology to ensure this doesn’t happen again (‘group finder’ cough cough)

E) finally, communicate MORE EFFECTIVELY AND HONESTLY with your customers. We want you to succeed after all

Sanctuary_Reaper

So PC-NA gets the upgrades so they dont have to suffer this, but EU had to wait till it happened? Not Cool one little bit, to me it just shows how little you think of your EU customers.

I know this is a negative post, but im not going to praise a company for doing something late, when it should of been in place anyway, considering the vast amounts of money spent on this game.

Jamdarius

gepe87 wrote: »

Wow. If Matt replied to this then this problem is really serious!
I hope both devs and players will overcome this

#ESOfam

problem was always serious, we finally get a word on it though. Not some check your updates sh*te or turn off addons, about time we get better servers quality.
Good job for letting us know and hopefully we will get better pings, less lags and no more random disconnects!
I believe in you guys so pls do not disappoint me.

Tavore1138

Not wanting to be a *** about a problem situation and with all appropriate sympathy to ALL players impacted - is the queue designed to favour those who pay a monthly sub as with other games that have both subbing and free players?

Personally I'd be disappointed to be in a queue behind players who don't pay.

[edited for profanity]

weedgenius

Does EU have as many bot accounts as NA? I see huge bot farms on the daily and they never seem to go away no matter how often they are reported. Can't help but wonder whether cracking down on bot farming would help with crowded servers?

AlienSlof

Thank you very much for this info - this is EXACTLY what we needed to know. Communication is a wonderful thing.

What this also tells me, is this game is thriving, which is excellent.

Lord_Eomer

Requesting Character Load from last 10 minutes, PC EU

Katahdin

SwampDrainerGoat wrote: »

So kinda like closing the gate after the horse has bolted. You let it get this bad and enable queueing for EU, yet you are going to upgrade NA server before the influx happens. Nice to see who your priority customers are.

From what Matt stated, I think they were aware that there might be an issue starting in January (they started seeing an influx of players), but it didn't reach a drastic level until late March. They won't just knee jerk reaction to a little blip in population that could be ephemeral and throw up new servers right away. They probably decided to see if it persisted first.

Im assuming they arent going out to the local Best Buy for new server equipment. It might take them some time to get approval for new servers, get the new equipment ordered, delivered, installed, tested, the game installed and tested before adding it to the live servers.

He also stated why its a bigger problem on EU and why it happened faster on EU.
Since they are also starting to see it on NA, they are adding capacity there as well.
It's probably the same equipment from the same vendor(s). So its easier if they can get one approval for both at once instead of taking more time seperately, which corporate might question a duplicate request since they probably don't understand the problem.

SgtPepperUK

SaltySudd wrote: »

Unless there really hasn't been an influx in players and this is a tactic to convince people that ESO has a growing community in order to convince them to buy the game...

On a more serious note: It's nice seeing a post from Matt huzzah for communication!

Well, I'm only one person but I came back with the recent free weekend on Steam.

Played the game at launch for about five months and moved on.

A couple of weeks ago I'd just been reading about some BTS stuff about TES3 when I went on Steam and saw ESO was having a free weekend so I thought "Why not?"

Ended up rebuying the Steam version of the game along with Summerset and subbing to ESO+ for six months.

As I said, I'm just one person but I don't imagine I'm the only new or returning player after the free weekend.

Vapirko

Really nice to see this kind of transparency, thank you.

VaranisArano

This post is what good communication looks like. In the future, keep this up.

Even better, communicate this before the situation gets bad enough that you spring a queue on players with an incomplete explanation. I mean, sure, players will always have questions, but this post has so much information that really deserved to be in the original announcement.

alceleniel

Sounds promising

Katahdin

VaranisArano wrote: »

This post is what good communication looks like. In the future, keep this up.

Even better, communicate this before the situation gets bad enough that you spring a queue on players with an incomplete explanation. I mean, sure, players will always have questions, but this post has so much information that really deserved to be in the original announcement.

While I agree with your sentiment. Just playing devils advocate, the issue may have been something the community managers were not comfortable or familiar enough with to convey. Matt may have been busy with other things and not have been able to post this yesterday.

Iluvrien

Katahdin wrote: »

VaranisArano wrote: »

This post is what good communication looks like. In the future, keep this up.

Even better, communicate this before the situation gets bad enough that you spring a queue on players with an incomplete explanation. I mean, sure, players will always have questions, but this post has so much information that really deserved to be in the original announcement.

While I agree with your sentiment. Just playing devils advocate, the issue may have been something the community managers were not comfortable or familiar enough with to convey. Matt may have been busy with other things and not have been able to post this yesterday.

Playing devils advocate to your devils advocate... if, as in your earlier post, the new equipment takes time to get agreement for, ordered, installed and tested, then Matt (or marketing) had plenty of time to have penned this post ready for him (or, well, anyone else) to hit "Post". They said the big problems started a week ago. Assuming they started at that latest possible point it should have been pretty easy to get this written up.

Gr00v3nburg3

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/465228/constant-login-failed-connection-to-server-timed-out-please-try-again-later-error-on-xbox-eu#latest maybe look into this?

Korah_Eaglecry

Turelus wrote: »

Thanks for the update Matt, good to know what's been happening and what the plan is going forward.

I hate to add a negative comment to my post but if the cause of some of the EU performance issues have been known since January why couldn't we get a statement as to why earlier?
There have been A LOT of threads from angry PC EU players over the last few months which were met with silence, and only now when the situation has become critical do we know what the cause was.

I think a lot of people might have been appeased if they had known the reasons sooner.

Any way I don't want to focus too much on the negative but I wanted to add a bit of critic, especially with ZOS talking about wanting to improve communication this year.

Onwards to upgraded servers and many new friends to play the game with!

Short answer: It wasnt impacting their bottom line.

Long answer: They would rather wait until things get ugly and have to go with extreme measures rather than spend money up front to get ahead of an issue.