PC-EU Server Update - April 11

BrightOblivion

Tavore1138 wrote: »

Not wanting to be a d**k 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.

Then you needn't worry, because everyone who plays this game outside of a free week has paid in some form or fashion. You don't get access to DLC/expansions without buying them, either with your money/crowns or by giving gold to others in exchange for the crown gift (thus sinking those crowns and necessitating that more be bought in order to fill other orders). If people have access to parts of the game, it's because they bought that access.

As someone who's bought every single DLC that's come out and several costumes, and who has given gold in exchange for various crown store items, I can assure you that the money which I have spent or caused to be spent on my behalf is no less green and no less valuable or useful in funding the game. This myth that non-ESO+ members are somehow freeloaders is just that, a myth, and, with all due respect, it needs to stop.

red_emu

Thank you for the update. Currently after 40 minutes in queue I have been staring at my char and a turning circle for further 10 minutes already.

GG ZOS, 2/10 would buy again

Aimora

SantieClaws wrote: »

Greetings traveller Matt

Is there any possibility of an extension to the Anniversary Festival, perhaps by a week?

So no one can say they have missed out event tickets and delicious shiny lootables.

Khajiit also worries what will happen to the login system at the weekend when longer guild events and things take place.

If the server is full and no one logs off then is it possible this one, or even someone else not this one, might not be able to log in at all?!

Yours with paws
Santie Claws

I think this would be a fair goodwill gesture as we have also had double maintenance this week too!

RDMyers65b14_ESO

For those who are just logging in to the game after 'months', keep in mind that after every update, it takes a few minutes longer to load the game. The more patches, the longer the longer the process. It does this every time.

Verbal_Earthworm

Korah_Eaglecry wrote: »

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.

Unless it's PC-NA apparently.

jbjondeaueb17_ESO

There's a lot of chances that the situation get worse from this weekend, first it's Easter weekend, and second, the biggest zone in France for school holidays have theirs starting for 2 weeks tomorrow evening.

crondira

ZOS - server environment Time for an update I think: P * LMAO *

Apox

Now what about the universally higher ping and server desync?

I charged someone with crit rush in a bg, travelled the full distance to them, dealt damage to them with melee, and then they hit me with a piercing javelin that knocked me entirely back t where I was before I used crit rush

This game is awesome, its fun, takes place in a universe we all love, but its biggest problem is performance and lag If you guys could work that kink out it'd easily be the best game by a mile.

Verbal_Earthworm

So it's 7pm precisely in the UK and I try to log in to the PC-EU server for the first time today:

"You Have Been Placed In A Queue: 10 mins etc."

I see the words "Leave Queue" and I think, yes, that is totally what I want to do as I have better things to do for ten minutes.

I press it and the pop up goes for a second then just pops-up again,

"You Have Been Placed In A Queue etc".

So I think, well this is a bit odd, so I click it again.

"You Have Been Placed In A Queue etc."

So I keep clicking "Leave Queue" and it keeps putting me back into the queue without letting me log out.

So i click it real fast and press Quit and the whole thing crashes to desktop.

Well played, ZOS, well played...

KoultouraS

This will be referenced as a case study on how not to treat devoted costumers
and how to diminish a player base long term , in future marketing essays

Cążki

@ZOS_MattFiror

glad hands on you finaly hahahhah you lazy at performance :P but glads you know do somethin to this issue after two months very fast very !! really !!!

Rex-Umbra

Only play in the off hours

Coolio_Wolfus

@ZOS_MattFiror
As Russia is planning to block international servers and we have RU players demanding that the RUESO addon is made official, why not spin up a local RU server for them as one way to ease the EU server?

You may also want to consider spinning up an Eastern server for CN, JP, KR etc.

And a server for our AU and NZ players to help reduce their latency.

These should further reduce pressure on the current pair of live PC servers as an added bonus.

SammiSakura

I would like to know if we will get any clarification on the guild history then. Though I imagine this will get lost in a see of comments. We really need at least 7 days for our history. Come on "/

DJfriede

So after I'm done with this one...



... I will get in line for Cyrodiil, probably queue of 45 as in the past days.

When I'm done with Cyro, I will queue for battlegrounds. After 30 times pressing F it will port me into a half empty BG. After 20 minutes of deserter fee, I can queue again.

#The Elderscrolls In Line.

Alucu

https://steamcharts.com/app/306130 data on player activity via steam

Cążki

DJfriede wrote: »

So after I'm done with this one...



... I will get in line for Cyrodiil, probably queue of 45 as in the past days.

When I'm done with Cyro, I will queue for battlegrounds. After 30 times pressing F it will port me into a half empty BG. After 20 minutes of deserter fee, I can queue again.

#The Elderscrolls In Line.

Not for last week, but for at least two months this is it what you write !

Ok / zos moderators pls this will be last today
I will promise its quite funny and enjoyable.

this song for #QueUExit

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7RYSQvrUrc

UrQuan

Katahdin wrote: »

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.

Further to this, take a look at Steamcharts:
https://steamcharts.com/app/306130
The all-time peak number of concurrent ESO players on Steam (yes, Steam players are only a fraction of PC players, but it's still indicative of when the population has been the highest) happened less than 2 weeks ago, on March 31st.

The peak and average concurrent players have been rising every month since November, but when you look month to month on a larger time frame you see that there's often significant variance from one month to another in terms of the peak players.

Servers are expensive, and one of the worst mistakes an MMO company can make is investing too much money into servers that are going to be more than the population can support in a month or so (that mistake can financially cripple a studio if a significant portion of that player base disappears and revenues drop - it can lead to not having enough capital to keep producing new content, which leads to more players leaving, and eventually leads to the game being in maintenance mode before the servers finally get shut off).

Of course another bad mistake that an MMO company can make is not investing enough money into servers and ending up with servers that can't support the player population. It's a fine line, and it's pretty much impossible to always get it right. It's understandable that ZOS would want to have confidence that the population increase wasn't just temporary before investing serious capital into increasing server capacity, and that they would want to make smaller adjustments first. Of course it's also understandable that players having trouble logging in because the servers are full would be frustrated, but the truth is that there's no easy answer to it.

zvavi

I blame the WoW refugees
Just kidding, welcome new players!!!

Aarlur

2 weeks? Joke! My time in queue was 16 minutes, and when it went down to zero, its still didnt logged me in. After another ten minutes I just turned it off.
Honestly, you think I going to believe that you havent see this coming? If you dont, someone should be fired, but if you did, someone should be fired.
And, as always, its happening with eu server. Would be nice if once, just once an american company should not handle europians (and everyone else outside of america) as second class customers! I know its impossible to beleive for you, but you are not more important, or better than everyone else.
I am paying every month, I expect to be able to use the product and handled equally as other customers. I dont care ingame gifts and whatnot, or extended subsciption time, I would expect to get some of my many back.

Ozzard

As someone who architects computer systems for part of my living, a couple of quick points:

1) If ESO runs on dedicated hardware and it's a straight shard capacity problem, then three weeks to deployed fix from starting to address the problem is INCREDIBLY fast: it's often multiple weeks from ordering the new hardware (not just servers) to them arriving, then you need to lease datacentre rack space, run fibres to the new racks, commission the servers, install the software, make sure the front-end load-balancers know about it... ticklish stuff even if you have the hardware to hand, but out of your control in a major way if you have to order it. I've had kit take 3 months of the estimated 7 days before it arrives; this isn't stuff you shop for in PC World :-).

2) Reading between Matt's lines, I'm not convinced that it's just a job of increasing the number of shards and delve/raid instances that can be run. You need a centralised way to hold character data, too, and that database is usually by far the hardest thing to scale as there either has to be one of it or you run into either consistency or availability problems ("capacity, consistency, availability: pick two"). Fixing *that* within a couple of weeks, if it's the problem, tells me the devs have a really good handle on what they're doing.

Matt or greens - any chance, sometime, of a rough guide to the tin you use to run this stuff? It'd be fascinating - well, to me at least.

technohic

Its really cool that ESO is growing and that ZOS is adding hardware and I am hoping in time before this happens on NA; but getting to the point EU is at I can't help but feel momentum will be lost. It would be nice if even before this, if there was error on the side of more than needed that sounds like it would also have better performance rather than just cutting it so close that the game cannot take an influx of players.

Intextio

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!

WOW refugees are immigrating here in droves. Not to mention it is quite easy to see all the new players running around in my platform, PC/NA.

Mainman99

Ozzard wrote: »

Matt or greens - any chance, sometime, of a rough guide to the tin you use to run this stuff? It'd be fascinating - well, to me at least.

Don't think they dare to show it.. Its obvious that its inferior to what it should be

natsamson

As an IT Support engineer myself I know first hand the stress and load the servers will be getting especially from the recent sales, anniversary and hype of the upcoming expansion Elsweyr.

It is great to hear an estimated time of 2 weeks to get the ball rolling with new hardware, for the queue's themselves I myself have only dealt with 11 minute peaks during the week (It is Easter Holidays for some parts here in the UK)

I can feel for people on slower connections getting disconnects and issues, luckily my Ping and internet is stable enough to not run into these issues (period).

Even though in the short term it's not ideal to have long queue's its always nice to hear the game is expanding at such a fast rate, its just a test of time whether the "first impression" for new players works out ok with this issue cropping up.

Glory

I really hope the additional hardware will also result in increased server performance.

This game really needs to see an increase in performance (alongside capacity). It's extremely frustrating to get online and have ridiculously bad latency and unplayable levels of lag.

Acrolas

Korah_Eaglecry wrote: »

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.

The real answer is that budgets aren't approved overnight, particularly ones dependent on supporting evidence, and work orders aren't immediate because funding and labor just don't work like that. That the expected turnaround time is only two weeks is evidence that they're not making this *** up as they go along.

These inconveniences will be forgotten in a month. But it's the Internet and people will do what they normally do in the comments section.

kuutar

agegarton

Here’s how this shonky queue system has worked out for me:

You are placed in a queue.

The timer ticks.

Before the timer stops, the client crashes.

You reset.

Your are placed in a queue.

[please return to the top]


Awesome work. And by awesome I mean absolutely *** awful planning and execution. If you worked for ANY company I have worked with, you’d be out on your ear (assuming you made it this far).

GeneralEU

15 minutes of waiting! after which there was information "30 sec and not reduced, it came out that I waited 30 minutes to log into the game.

GG Zenimax.
In this way you will lose players.