I think ESO has grown too big for a single mega server anymore.

Aptonoth

I hate to say it but these huge wait ques and long load times are a sign even the American server is no longer enough. I think ESO needs another NA server and another EA server as well. If ESO wants to keep growing I think this is the only viable way now as annoying as it will be for them its for the best of their games and player base future it can't grow if there's no space left on any of the servers.

Also congrats ESO and Zenimax for making a great game. So great it needs more servers lol.

karekiz

Well its been a bit of an unusual couple of moths too

Deathweeps

It has gain a lot for sure, I always talk to people about it and they "I'm sorry, that game is crap, when it first came....blah" but I tell them how awesome it is now, and how they have done a lot with it and they suddenly become interested. But this kind of bs is just hard to look passed, especially when you have been dishing out coin for nearly 6 years.

Aptonoth

Deathweeps wrote: »

It has gain a lot for sure, I always talk to people about it and they "I'm sorry, that game is crap, when it first came....blah" but I tell them how awesome it is now, and how they have done a lot with it and they suddenly become interested. But this kind of bs is just hard to look passed, especially when you have been dishing out coin for nearly 6 years.

I can't say I disagree the servers have been its biggest issue for a long time now. I think and hope they learn their lesson going forward like this its simply impossible they will be capped at their current player base incapable of growing which means profits will eventually level off never a good thing for corporate or the player base. They want new players spending money and players want a good game.

EmEm_Oh

I think ZOS is way too spread out with their game offerings. I remember watching one of their live events and everything they had planned, and half the stuff was really unnecessary. Go with what works and go with what your main attentions are...not some off-shoot wannabe game that was created just to be cool and to give a department something to do.

ESO could be a game-changing MMO. They have a gem, and the shareholders apparently don't understand that.

Dedicate more people to ESO.

walterhwilliamsb14_ESO

I am an ESO plus and paying good money and I can not get on. That is stealing my money.

Radiance

I'm surprised I was able to get on at all earlier today. I was disconnected and now in a 40 min Q. I haven't seen Q for login since maybe Beta or one year for a PVP Event, I think!? I can't remember!

I guess this is a usual with occurrence with every major update there are unforeseen complications. For the last big rework patch, It took me all day to update and then a number of people were unable to login for days and weeks and continue to have issues today.

Berek_Bloodfang

I’m betting the real reason they haven’t upgraded to two servers per region is because the game hasn’t been encoded to incorporate data bases for cross-play purposes and would end up costing them a fortune to recode it.

shaielzafine

Maybe a server for eso+ members or something with option to play with friends? Either way more servers and priority for subscribers.

Ysbriel

5 years and community numbers growing (by their claims) they should have at least two NA and EU servers by now. why this isn’t a reality? who knows?!...

Anotherone773

Its not that its to big for a single server, its that they dont have the hardware for it. They are operating their hardware at near max capacity during normal times because hardware is expensive. When you get event spikes like this it crashes the EU server because all the players on that server play in the same few hours roughly. In the US its spread between 4 times zones and the two heavily populated zones are 3 hours apart which makes a huge difference.

They could fix the problem with infrastructure investment, but that is unlikely until they feel like its starting to cost them money. Sadly by time they realize that the trough in their player base isnt a trough but a new normal all but the die hards have grown tired of the nonsense and moved on to other games and you wont be able to lure most of them back. Thus by time they realize they need to fix the problem or lose paying customers, the game will already be far gone.

I see game companies do it a lot. Despite all the complaining from players, they dont fix things and one day the complaining stops and the last new post in the forums was 5 days ago from a newbie asking if this game is still active.

HowlKimchi

walterhwilliamsb14_ESO wrote: »

I am an ESO plus and paying good money and I can not get on. That is stealing my money.

have you been to a theme park and had to wait in line before?

volkeswagon

just a more powerful server

dhboy123

walterhwilliamsb14_ESO wrote: »

I am an ESO plus and paying good money and I can not get on. That is stealing my money.

No it isn't.

Streega

I think an Asian server is what the game needs, not additional NA/EU servers. In Singapore maybe? That would attract asian and oceanic players and ease the load on EU a lot and on NA a bit, just enough to allow smooth play.

EDIT: Maybe introduction of russian and japanese language versions is a sign that ZOS is considering such a move?

TropicsDelight

shaielzafine wrote: »

Maybe a server for eso+ members or something with option to play with friends? Either way more servers and priority for subscribers.

I don't think the "play with friends" option would work for an eso+ server player and a non-eso+ player. But a pure eso+ only server that people who have ESO+ can option to shift to? Yeah... that could work. Everquest did that a long time ago in a way with a higher cost subscription server that got exclusive content even.

I think that is a good option tbh. All ESO+ members would be given tokens to give them the option to port characters from the PC-NA server to the PCNA-ESO+ server (EU getting their own). It would create four servers from two and split the population improving performance for everyone, ESO+ and F2P alike.

It would also give ZOS marketable additional perks they could offer to the ESO+ server such as additional exclusive events and access to in-game dropped items like rare drop mounts, motifs, and dyes, and pets that only drop on the ESO+ server.

Getting more people inclined to sub ESO+ has massive revenue generation potential for ZOS, this is a very good way to do it.

Eifleber

Wasn't there rumours that there will be a Russian/cyrillic server?

Raudgrani

Could easily be fixed with some professionals and some $'s. It's not like there ain't servers dealing with far bigger and more demanding tasks, and they do it without any flaws at least 99% of the time (which is usually literally how they put it).

It's a shame people actually working at ZOS doesn't demand that they get better stuff to work with. It's not a huge thing to say "We need to improve our servers, we have grown too big, the game is bigger and more demanding than it used to be, and we have reached a limit to how much we can tune and tweak to make it work better. The future of the game depends on this. Upgrade, or this is where we 'peak', it's only downhill ahead if we don't". It would not be hard to back up those claims with server logs etc., these days they can proved pretty exact data to server strain and failures etc.

Nemesis7884

I dont understand enough o the technical site but would assume that this megaserver architecture is in fact the culprit

redgreensunset

Streega wrote: »

I think an Asian server is what the game needs, not additional NA/EU servers. In Singapore maybe? That would attract asian and oceanic players and ease the load on EU a lot and on NA a bit, just enough to allow smooth play.

EDIT: Maybe introduction of russian and japanese language versions is a sign that ZOS is considering such a move?

Can't speak for NA but it would ease the stress on the EU server in any meaningful way, because that strees comes almost solely from EU players themselves. When our prime time begins, when the overwhelming part of our issues are, most of east and south east Asia will already have gone to bed or be heading there shortly.
Not saying there shouldn't be an Asian server for other reason but using the troubles of EU to promote one is disingenuous at best.

redgreensunset

Raudgrani wrote: »

Could easily be fixed with some professionals and some $'s. It's not like there ain't servers dealing with far bigger and more demanding tasks, and they do it without any flaws at least 99% of the time (which is usually literally how they put it).

It's a shame people actually working at ZOS doesn't demand that they get better stuff to work with. It's not a huge thing to say "We need to improve our servers, we have grown too big, the game is bigger and more demanding than it used to be, and we have reached a limit to how much we can tune and tweak to make it work better. The future of the game depends on this. Upgrade, or this is where we 'peak', it's only downhill ahead if we don't". It would not be hard to back up those claims with server logs etc., these days they can proved pretty exact data to server strain and failures etc.

For all we know the people on the floor is trying to tell the suits this. We won't ever know because they'll never say it in public. But trying to get A Suit to understand technical issues is like trying to explain cooking to a gerbil.

fred4

As far as I understand their setup, it is NOT a single server. What they call a megaserver is in reality a server farm. Whenever you change zone the client makes a new connection to a different IP-address - a different server. In order to spread the load there are, as we all know, multiple instances of highly populated zones, such as the ones containing the big trading hubs. Each is handled by a different server or, at the very least, different threads of high core-count CPUs.

Where it breaks down is Cyrodiil, because you can't segment that in the same way and allow people to move around freely. This is why we have campaigns. When you move around between other zones, you are automatically put into some unnamed instance, aka server, to balance the load. For Cyrodiil the instances are explicitly named and you have to choose.

I believe ZOS have and/or are playing around with the population limit in Cyrodiil, but it has been necessary to make it so low already (maybe 200 / 200 / 200, but don't really know) that they can't reduce it any further. Cyrodiil would obviously play much better with a lower population cap, but there might not be any big battles for a simple lack of people.

Yes, your FPS will go down when you are close to a big battle. This is where, I believe, client performance comes into play. As far as skills not firing reliably, though, I can already feel that at base when Cyrodiil is full. All you need is be a nighblade and try to cast skills inbetween cloaking. It's particularly obvious on that class.

The reason we have NA and EU servers is to prevent transatlantic Internet lag. It is in my estimation not done to spread the load.

MartiniDaniels

I have an impression that ZOS management is simply misinformed about what's going on. Maybe they receive wrong reports. It is obvious to anybody with business education, that if your service has insufficient capacity, your customers will go away to your competitors. This is pure loss of income, especially in digital business. Majority of companies in the world spend ton of money just to lure more customers and to keep long-term customers to use their product... ZOS makes everything possible to make customers go away. Inexplicable behavior.

Tammany

Due to russian localisation there will be million new players.

Raudgrani

redgreensunset wrote: »

Raudgrani wrote: »

Could easily be fixed with some professionals and some $'s. It's not like there ain't servers dealing with far bigger and more demanding tasks, and they do it without any flaws at least 99% of the time (which is usually literally how they put it).

It's a shame people actually working at ZOS doesn't demand that they get better stuff to work with. It's not a huge thing to say "We need to improve our servers, we have grown too big, the game is bigger and more demanding than it used to be, and we have reached a limit to how much we can tune and tweak to make it work better. The future of the game depends on this. Upgrade, or this is where we 'peak', it's only downhill ahead if we don't". It would not be hard to back up those claims with server logs etc., these days they can proved pretty exact data to server strain and failures etc.

For all we know the people on the floor is trying to tell the suits this. We won't ever know because they'll never say it in public. But trying to get A Suit to understand technical issues is like trying to explain cooking to a gerbil.

I understand how you mean. I've often been a highly disliked co-worker among "suits", because I'm the one giving them this ***. And no, not in public. I'm like "Can I have a word with you?" and present the bad news. I can fathom WHY people get ****hurt by these warnings (etc.), I would value such an asset worth twice its weight in gold.

I really hope there are some people struggling to get this straight. Every piece of new content puts extra stress on the servers. It's just a matter of time before it becomes literally unplayable (i.e. not working at all), not just like "This is unplayable blah blah...".

NoNameNamer

Why would you think it's a single server? It's not.

Uryel

What do you mean "a single mega server" ?

You DO understand that those are actually a vast number of clustered servers posing as one, right ? And that each and every zone is instanciated so as to spread people on several physical servers, right ? Also, there are at least two different megaservers, US and EU...

Also, the amount of stress and the amount of content are only correlated IF, and only IF, you don't upgrade storage capacity, processing power, and so on. A properly dimensionned server has much room for new content before requiring upgrades. Properly coded content / database can reduce that load somewhat.

So basically, what we're seing isn't "it has grown too big", it's merely "they can't code and won't spend money properly".

NoNameNamer

There's only so many design & code optimizations and hardware upgrades you can do. At some point you reach the theoretical limit on how much load a server can bare. WoW went through a lot of changes to minimize server loads (remember when they pruned most of the combat logging?) but even then they had to implement sharding. Players in the same area are phased into multiple instances to balance the load. This means they would not always see each other despite being in the same location unless they form a party which pulls everyone in the same phase/instance. This allowed them to completely get rid of login queues. Obviously, they couldn't bring this tech to Classic WoW so they had to preserve the login queues for those servers.

Tapio75

The whole megaserver concept was flaved to begin with...

I mean with ORIGINAl concept where people were supposed to be able to choose with quiz to get in to instances with same type of players, that was great and that was like it should have been.. RP players to same instance for example.

Now that all are in same grey mass wit people randomöy seeing other players withpout real chance to see same player again, its a mess plus it takes too much performance to work that system out with contant instance changes and all that crap. Loading screens in middle of fight etc.

It has all the problems World of Warcraft got with xrealm stuff, but even worse because people cant even choose the default instance of server type to begin with. We are just randomly put on instances based on when we log in.

Id like it to be more like old school version, where we have few servers and as litle communication between them as possible. Real chance to make better communities inside servers that way.

mairwen85

Aptonoth wrote: »

I hate to say it but these huge wait ques and long load times are a sign even the American server is no longer enough. I think ESO needs another NA server and another EA server as well. If ESO wants to keep growing I think this is the only viable way now as annoying as it will be for them its for the best of their games and player base future it can't grow if there's no space left on any of the servers.

Also congrats ESO and Zenimax for making a great game. So great it needs more servers lol.

It is not one server, its a group of servers working together as if they were a single server. There are multiple 'worlds' which span across those servers, but the worlds are not in a fixed/static or stable state.

For example, imagine that an area can hold x players before hitting population cap or taking strain from crowding.
During peak times there may be any number of worlds spawned to hold as many players as possible in each to minimize load, so you could have several instances at max population and a few which are under populated (or intelligently spread the population across them).
Off-peak worlds can merge to maintain the impression of an active space. Essentially, the idea is to provide density and not empty cities and zones and you should be able to find/see others whatever time of day you play.

It was ambitious at the time, and several companies have similar implementations; whether it still works as designed, or requires architectural change is another matter.

It might not be that they need more servers; it could just be they need the 'intelligence' to work better at managing the load.

Uryel

NoNameNamer wrote: »

Players in the same area are phased into multiple instances to balance the load. This means they would not always see each other despite being in the same location unless they form a party which pulls everyone in the same phase/instance.

That's precisely what ESO does, mate.

And there isn't really a limit to server load, so long as you have more power, thus more physical machins to do the work. All the pruning and optimisations and whatnot are not there to prevent the game from breaking, they are here to reduce the cost of operating it.