Traveling to player houses causes infinite loading...

EntropicLynx

When I try to travel to a player house, rather than loading the character into the house, it causes the game client to enter an infinite, never-ending loading screen and never loads the character, not even after up to 15 minutes of patiently waiting.

I have tried this with multiple characters, both with addons loaded and without any addons loaded. I have tried multiple of my own houses, as well as other players' houses.

It is not 100% of the time, but more like 75%-90% of the time.

Since this has not been reported by others (as far as I could find), it apparently isn't a widespread issue and suggests it is a problem with my client.

Does anyone have any suggestions about how I can fix this? I could uninstall the PTS and reinstall it, which might work, but I'd rather not have to do that if I can avoid it.

Thanks.

HachikoChan

I got the same problem as well...
if my char is inside the house I cannot log in to it, if I get it outside of the house I cannot go back to my house anymore, and I have to recreate every single time a new char coz only the new char can go into the house again...

So I just think its a bug from the PTS =_=

EntropicLynx

OK, thanks for the info

fiender66

I too have this problem. I've reinstalled PTS today. When I've verified if this helps, I'll tell in this thread

LiquidPony

Similar issue here.

Any of my characters that are currently in houses, I can't log in. Or more specifically, it takes me a half-dozen attempts to log in (I just get an infinite "Requesting character load ..." screen). I have to kill the ESO client, then try again. Eventually, maybe, I'll get in.

My characters that are not parked in houses, I can log in without issue. It's been this way since Saturday at least, maybe longer.

@ZOS_GinaBruno something is funky on the PTS.

fiender66

No good news. Uninstall/reinstall has not been of any help. On the contrary, now I cannot enter delves/dungeons

tatooinedovah

i've been having the same issue for a couple days now! to add my own experience:
the first few days i still managed to get past one single loading screen and into a player house after closing the game and running a repair on the test server (still getting stuck on the next loading screen into another player house) but that doesn't work anymore either as far as i can tell... physically going up to the actual entrance of a player house and trying to enter that way (instead of fast traveling directly) doesn't work either unfortunately. both owned and unowned player houses cause this problem when trying to load in. traveling to any normal wayshrines still works fine~

ZOS_JessicaFolsom

Are you all seeing this issue on the PTS strictly when interacting with player housing, or are you noticing it when attempting to zone into any instanced space?

tatooinedovah

@ZOS_JessicaFolsom instanced like dungeons right?

just went and tried with fungal grotto, no problem getting in at all! as far as i've experienced this problem only shows up trying to get into player houses [edit, also tried one of the dlc dungeons (galatar) and a trial (sunspire), no problem there either~]

screenshots:

fiender66

ZOS_JessicaFolsom wrote: »

Are you all seeing this issue on the PTS strictly when interacting with player housing, or are you noticing it when attempting to zone into any instanced space?

@ZOS_JessicaFolsom

I notice it in numerous instanced spaces, especially delves and dungeons. And it's becoming worse, that is more frequent. By now PTS is actually unusable by me

EntropicLynx

I haven't so far tried any other instanced spaces. But I am experiencing this with housing.

I'll check other instances and report back later tonight.

Sluggy

Same problems here. Didn't notice it until this week though. It only happens with houses and it can be any player's house, not just my own. Other instanced areas are not affected.

Sluggy

lol Scratch that, now it's affecting other instances areas as well. As fiender66 suggested I feel like this has been getting worse over time. I didn't have issues getting into houses for the first couple weeks of the PTS and until now I was able to enter dungeons and vMA.

EntropicLynx

As near as I can tell, anytime an attempt is made to load into an instanced zone (with the exception of normal delves) with a character that has previously been inside of an instanced zone and left it or attempted to leave it (particularly by map travel, collections menu, etc. rather than direct access from the overland area), or at a minimum has visited player housing through the collections menu or guild menu, even if that previous access occurred on the live server before the character was ported, will result in an infinite loading screen (or at least has a very high probability to do so). It *might* be, however, that this problem is first triggered only through a specific action, such as entering a player home instance from the collections menu or a guild menu. My limited testing didn't rule out that possibility.

I attempted the same tests (as follows) with a new level 1 character, a new level 50 CP 810 template character, and a ported-from-live character (level 50 CP 600-something). The results were nearly the same (more on that in a second). However, I should also note that I was not able to test The Wailing Prison or the Harborage as first instanced area points, because with a new level 1 character the Main Quest Line appears to be broken (the "Hooded Figure" you are meant to talk to seems to not spawn anywhere at all, and using "Find On Map" from the quest journal points to what appears to be a dungeon or delve map, but with no information).

When I said the results were nearly the same, I did notice that with the level 1 character, I had no trouble loading into areas that I initially tried. Namely Wayrest Sewers I and II. I got to Stormhaven by previewing and then purchasing Gardner House, so I was surprised when the character successfully loaded into both dungeon instances. As soon as I tried to load a player home from my collections, however, even this character was back to no longer loading into instanced areas. I even re-tried Wayrest Sewers after restarting the game client and once again had infinite loading screen (this test was possible because the character was considered as logged out in Stormhaven rather than the player home).

I tried the following tests only once each with each character type, so I cannot verify if the problem is intermittent or always occurs once the bug-triggering circumstances occur, but other than my first entrances into WS I and II with a new level 1 character, there were no exceptions to the results.

* Initially loading into a player home with a newly created character seems to work fine regardless of level.

* Loading from a player home to another player home with the same character after initially loading in results in an infinite loading screen.

* Leaving a player home by the normal exit door and then attempting to re-enter it, even if right away, results in an infinite loading screen. Attempting to load into any other player home with the same character also results in an infinite loading screen. I did not test re-entering a player home that was accessed through the entrance door on the overland area and exited through that same door.

* If a new character has loaded into a player home and has not made any attempts to leave it in any way, then loading that character back into the player home from the character selection screen appears to work. For example, a new character that has been loaded into a player home, and then logged out while in the player home without ever having tried to leave it will be able to log back in and load into that home. In addition to trying this with newly created characters, I tried it 3 times with a character I had created on the PTS before these problems started and I was able to load her every time, but that home was the only instanced area she has ever been to and she has never left it.

NOTE: When testing with player homes, I tested both my own homes and guildmate homes with the same results.

* Attempting to load into a group dungeon after hitting an infinite load screen at least once results in an infinite loading screen.

* Attempting to load into a public dungeon after hitting an infinite load screen at least once results in an infinite loading screen.

* Attempting to load into a normal delve with any character appears to work fine, at least for me. But loading into a group delve after hitting an infinite load screen at least once results in an infinite loading screen. This difference may be because the code treats normal delves like an interior of a building rather than an instanced area, but that's just a guess. This difference may be noteworthy for debugging, though.


I hope that information helps with resolving these problems.

Thanks.

fiender66

@ZOS_JessicaFolsom

Maybe it's of some help this list of the attempts I've gone through to overcome the problem (without success, ofc):

1. Repair PTS from Launcher
2. Delete all add ons, and the .lua files from Saved Variables folder
3. Uninstall and reinstall PTS
4. Delete all chars and keep only a new one

EntropicLynx

tatooinedovah wrote: »

@ZOS_JessicaFolsom instanced like dungeons right?

just went and tried with fungal grotto, no problem getting in at all! as far as i've experienced this problem only shows up trying to get into player houses [edit, also tried one of the dlc dungeons (galatar) and a trial (sunspire), no problem there either~]

@taooinedovah When you did those tests, was that a newly created character? Had that character ever visited any player housing?

Sluggy

I can confirm that new characters can no longer enter instanced areas either.

tatooinedovah

@EntropicLynx

no it was a character i made after the problem started so i couldn't get them into a house in the first place ^^ however after seeing these other comments now i did test it with an older character that did get into player housing before this problem and it does affect other instances like dungeons for that character too

definitely seems like something with housing messes up everything else, i wonder what it could be?

EntropicLynx

My knowledge and experience of programming are limited, but based on everything posted so far, including my own tests, it seems as though it is a problem specifically with the code that triggers when entering or when leaving player housing, possibly only when doing so from a specific method, such as map travel, the collections menu, the guild menu, possibly the party menu, etc.

It might be that a certain character flag is not being handled properly, possibly preventing loading into other instances by not clearing an instance flag. But that assumes that the transportation coding uses some sort of character flags like that anyway, which it may not. Without actually looking at the code (which ZOS would understandably never allow me to do), I can't make any better guess than that.

At this point, I'd say it's just going to be a matter of waiting for the devs to look into the problem. I doubt we'll be able to provide very much more useful information to them, and they're going to have to examine the code in order to fix it in any case.

Thank you all for the information that you've provided on this issue.

@ZOS_JessicaFolsom please let us know if the devs would like me or any of the rest of us to do any additional testing to provide more specific case tests if they think it would help them narrow it down.

Thanks,
EL

tatooinedovah

it does seem possible that there's some sort of "currently in a housing instance" flag for characters that doesn't get properly cleared when leaving and since i assume it should be impossible to be in two instances at once the server might get hung up with the loading screen?

then again i also have limited game programming experience so who knows ^^ would love to know what hiccup could cause such a weird and specific problem haha

darthgummibear_ESO

If they manage to break housing, I'm out.