Character Selection screen crash

Alidel

Since Greymoor launched I've encountered game stopping to respond sometimes after arriving at character selection screen. It was very bad at first, but I thought it just one of the hiccups of Greymoor launch (which it had a lot of). For those curious - I did try to disable all addons, it did not change anything. Besides after one of the maintenances (the one where servers were rebooted) issue disappeared completely. I sighed with a relief and could swap between my 18 chars without any fear of getting crash and having to restart the game. Nevertheless after last maintenance issue returned and is furious now. If at the start I could log in successfully 1 out of 3 times, now I can be lucky to get 1 log in in 10 crashes. I haven't seen any forum posts about topic, so maybe I'm just the one? My pc isn't best, granted, so it might be just mine personal issues (friends with better machines never had described difficulties) but it's very strange correlation with maintenances. Besides I never had this issue before Greymoor with an old character selection screen. Have anyone experienced this? Is this just me?

solasub

My friend has a similar issue : he can not go to the char selection (to swap char for example) without a game crash ; that is very, very annoying ; for him, the crash rate is 100%.
He does not have a forum account, this is why I try to find a solution for him.

FierceSam

Yup ... this is now the most common failure point of the game for me atm. At least once per game session guaranteed.

Returning to the character screen will stall the game indefinitely, forcing a total reboot. I’d imagine it has everything to do with the ugly af advert panel they’ve *** into the screen in the Greymoor update, which presumably has to ping back to some separate marketing server or programme in order to decide which bit of filth to display.

And obviously because it just stalls the game, forcing you to reboot, there’s no easy crash log to send to ZOS so no point wasting time reporting it.

Love the way that “reducing character load screen time” got transformed into “doing away with different backgrounds and pumping more marketing at you”...

Foxhearted

Happens to me too. After logging out, the screen just freezes and I have to quit and restart.

Alidel

I hope after scheduled maintenance it will get easier, cause right now I'm lucky if I get only 10-20 minutes per relog.

nemvar

Supposedly they changed quite a bit on the character loading backend... although I'm not sure *how* exactly that causes the client to hang.
They mentioned that character loading is now multithreaded and I assumed they meant the server. If they also did that for the client, it could possibly be hardware or OS incompatibility or a faulty implementation.

It's unlikely that something like a UI panel causes this, even if it requires an internet connection.

Major_Lag

For the last couple of weeks, I've had a different problem: crash to desktop when trying to login with a character.
When I select a character to login with, everything works normally at first, then it suddenly crashes a couple of seconds after showing the "requesting character load" message.

However it's been very intermittent for me - it's rare for this specific crash to occur more than about once per day.

Mauin

I've encountered this as well. It's happened a total of two or three times, and all crashes were confined to the duration of Midyear Mayhem (when the obnoxious banner and advert were up). I have had no issues outside of the event. Yet.

twev

My most frequent crash is right after starting the game and going from character select to selecting ANY character right after start.

Nepenthe

Same here - XBOX-NA.

When I arrive at character select, the first character that it loads is okay. It's when I move to different ones using dpad-up or down that causes crashing. And it's not always the first character. Sometimes it's the third or fifth or eighth. There doesn't seem to be a pattern to it. Scrolling through characters quickly, or slowly, doesn't matter.

Using right or left trigger to move to the top or bottom of the list seems to be fine, though.

Lady_Sleepless

I get this all the time. I found clicking through my characters and giving it time to load helps... but it will crash very often! It is so annoying!

rumple9

Had this problem for 2 years makes logging out to do hirelings a nightmare

Tandor

Alidel wrote: »

Since Greymoor launched I've encountered game stopping to respond sometimes after arriving at character selection screen. It was very bad at first, but I thought it just one of the hiccups of Greymoor launch (which it had a lot of). For those curious - I did try to disable all addons, it did not change anything. Besides after one of the maintenances (the one where servers were rebooted) issue disappeared completely. I sighed with a relief and could swap between my 18 chars without any fear of getting crash and having to restart the game. Nevertheless after last maintenance issue returned and is furious now. If at the start I could log in successfully 1 out of 3 times, now I can be lucky to get 1 log in in 10 crashes. I haven't seen any forum posts about topic, so maybe I'm just the one? My pc isn't best, granted, so it might be just mine personal issues (friends with better machines never had described difficulties) but it's very strange correlation with maintenances. Besides I never had this issue before Greymoor with an old character selection screen. Have anyone experienced this? Is this just me?

It would be helpful to know what your machine specs are, and where your characters are loading into, although with 18 characters I imagine that's probably a variety of zones. It's not unusual in MMOs for major updates to test borderline specced machines.

I would certainly put in a support ticket (only one, and respond to any automated replies), and provide all information they request as it will help ZOS resolve it, assuming the machine meets the currently required specs.

madrab73

Tandor wrote: »

Alidel wrote: »

Since Greymoor launched I've encountered game stopping to respond sometimes after arriving at character selection screen. It was very bad at first, but I thought it just one of the hiccups of Greymoor launch (which it had a lot of). For those curious - I did try to disable all addons, it did not change anything. Besides after one of the maintenances (the one where servers were rebooted) issue disappeared completely. I sighed with a relief and could swap between my 18 chars without any fear of getting crash and having to restart the game. Nevertheless after last maintenance issue returned and is furious now. If at the start I could log in successfully 1 out of 3 times, now I can be lucky to get 1 log in in 10 crashes. I haven't seen any forum posts about topic, so maybe I'm just the one? My pc isn't best, granted, so it might be just mine personal issues (friends with better machines never had described difficulties) but it's very strange correlation with maintenances. Besides I never had this issue before Greymoor with an old character selection screen. Have anyone experienced this? Is this just me?

It would be helpful to know what your machine specs are, and where your characters are loading into, although with 18 characters I imagine that's probably a variety of zones. It's not unusual in MMOs for major updates to test borderline specced machines.

I would certainly put in a support ticket (only one, and respond to any automated replies), and provide all information they request as it will help ZOS resolve it, assuming the machine meets the currently required specs.

It's impacting on PS4 too so probably all platforms after some truly awesome coding

Sarannah

Rarely having this issue as well. It seems to happen when you switch characters too quickly. Making the game too slow to switch the character highlighted in the selection screen to the new one. So basically when you select three characters at once. The one currently selected, the one highlighted with the mouse, and the one highlighted when you move the mouse to it too quickly(so the old one stays highlighted). Meaning it crashes, since we should only be able to have a maximum of two characters selected at the same time.

When using the character selection a bit slower, it seems to avoid the crash.

Alidel

Tandor wrote: »

Alidel wrote: »

Since Greymoor launched I've encountered game stopping to respond sometimes after arriving at character selection screen. It was very bad at first, but I thought it just one of the hiccups of Greymoor launch (which it had a lot of). For those curious - I did try to disable all addons, it did not change anything. Besides after one of the maintenances (the one where servers were rebooted) issue disappeared completely. I sighed with a relief and could swap between my 18 chars without any fear of getting crash and having to restart the game. Nevertheless after last maintenance issue returned and is furious now. If at the start I could log in successfully 1 out of 3 times, now I can be lucky to get 1 log in in 10 crashes. I haven't seen any forum posts about topic, so maybe I'm just the one? My pc isn't best, granted, so it might be just mine personal issues (friends with better machines never had described difficulties) but it's very strange correlation with maintenances. Besides I never had this issue before Greymoor with an old character selection screen. Have anyone experienced this? Is this just me?

It would be helpful to know what your machine specs are, and where your characters are loading into, although with 18 characters I imagine that's probably a variety of zones. It's not unusual in MMOs for major updates to test borderline specced machines.

I would certainly put in a support ticket (only one, and respond to any automated replies), and provide all information they request as it will help ZOS resolve it, assuming the machine meets the currently required specs.

Crash happens before I even decide to choose character and press the play button, so don't think it's about zone. As about specs - game ran just fine (if you can call PC EU nightmare like that) before Greymoor. Have they increased minimum requirements with new character selection screen?

Augusten15

Not sure if this has been stated or not but I had this problem when I first started playing in May.

The permanent fix was using a VPN. I have no idea why nor do I care.

Find one with a free trial so you don't waste any money if it doesn't resolve the problem.

Foxhearted

Didn't happen to me for a while, now that there's an event screen again, it froze once more..

amm7sb14_ESO

Hmm. I haven't seen this happen yet. And I changed chars a lot last night.

That said, this is not a "it hasn't happened to me, so it doesn't exist" post, because quite frequently, after I say I've never experienced xyz bug, it ends up hitting me soon after. So I'll probably get it tonight

Scorpionwind

Alidel wrote: »

Since Greymoor launched I've encountered game stopping to respond sometimes after arriving at character selection screen. It was very bad at first, but I thought it just one of the hiccups of Greymoor launch (which it had a lot of). For those curious - I did try to disable all addons, it did not change anything. Besides after one of the maintenances (the one where servers were rebooted) issue disappeared completely. I sighed with a relief and could swap between my 18 chars without any fear of getting crash and having to restart the game. Nevertheless after last maintenance issue returned and is furious now. If at the start I could log in successfully 1 out of 3 times, now I can be lucky to get 1 log in in 10 crashes. I haven't seen any forum posts about topic, so maybe I'm just the one? My pc isn't best, granted, so it might be just mine personal issues (friends with better machines never had described difficulties) but it's very strange correlation with maintenances. Besides I never had this issue before Greymoor with an old character selection screen. Have anyone experienced this? Is this just me?

Easiest way around : PAY for Exitlag or WTFast.

Same problem - since mid 2019.

@ZOS_BillE will just tell you that it is add-ons. FALSE. It is a ZOS problem. Do not re-download. Just get one of those VPN's.

I do have a lengthy post somewhere.

Alidel

Funnily enough, once event started - my crashes disappeared completely. And now I remember, that during free of crashes time I mentioned in the first post - there was a pvp event. It's just a guess, but I think that in my specific case crashes come from absence of character selection screen popups about events? Maybe something about placeholder code interfering with my client?

Alidel

So, I've found a solution for my exact issue. Going to share it here, in case someone else having exactly the same crashes.
Solution: go to Documents\Elder Scrolls Online\live and open up UserSettings.txt
find line "SET CharacterSelectForceAllCharacterPreloads" and change it up to "1"
Hope it works just as fine for you.

finehair

Happens to me as well, I don't have the best pc but this is only happening when I'm in character screen in ESO, says screen stopped working and forces me to close the game through ctrl+shift+esc.

Langdon64

Same here. Stadia. I hear a strange clicking sound, then the screen freezes at character select screen. This was before I used add-ons so I don't think that is an issue.

Wyrd88

Have had same problem as OP since Greymoor and it was a nightmire.

But here comes thr saviour @Alidel

Alidel wrote: »

So, I've found a solution for my exact issue. Going to share it here, in case someone else having exactly the same crashes.
Solution: go to Documents\Elder Scrolls Online\live and open up UserSettings.txt
find line "SET CharacterSelectForceAllCharacterPreloads" and change it up to "1"
Hope it works just as fine for you.

Did try it out and after a quick test looks like it works!

Thank you very much, my friend.