Improvement Suggestion: Character Login and Logout Times

Onigar

I realise this is a topic being addressed as part of the ZOS performance improvements and I am happy with that.

My suggestion is for times when you just want to login, perform a simple daily task and logout of a character.

When you have a lot of characters to scroll though daily then this login/logout time becomes significant.

For example, 8 characters login/logout just to pick up helper mails takes 14 minutes.
With the passive maxed for 2x a day then this is 28 minutes of gameplay lost. To me the value of the items in all these mails does not equal 28 minutes of gameplay.

These simple daily tasks can be,

• Riding Training
• Item research
• picking up helper mails,
• picking up one or more daily quests,
• etc.

At the moment when a character logs in they have the full UI and game interface presented based on the account settings as well as ZOS game hard coded settings.

My suggestion is to add a tick box against each listed character on the character login screen.

This tick would enable a "light" UI and game interface as well as a reduction of any other background settings to speed up login and effectively the logout too.

I cannot say how much time would be saved through the use of this as it needs testing by ZOS but it does make sense that if there is less software processing and memory usage then the character login/logout times would be reduced.

If you wanted to remain on a character where a "light" UI was selected then /reloadui could be used as a method to reset to the full UI.

stefan.gustavsonb16_ESO

They tried to reduce the character load times by making the related code multi-threaded on the server side. Since that update, my character load times have been consistently longer across the board, at all times of day. I literally do not trust them to be able to make a "light" mode that would be any faster to load.

I often log through up to a dozen characters myself, so I do feel your pain, but I'm not hoping for any improvement.

Thinking more about your suggestion, what would you propose could be skipped? Shouldn't a character in "light UI" mode be able to do crafting? Riding lessons? Banking? Shopping? Talking in chat? Leveling up slotted skills from daily crafting XP? That would require pretty much the full shebang. Plus, the UI is handled client-side. There's not a lot of data that could be kept from the client while still enabling most of the things you would potentially want to do even on a brief login.

I suppose you could create a game mode where everyone else is a "generic male mannequin" black silhouette, because that seems to be what happens when the server decides that it can't be bothered right now with serving you the data you need about other players to get a proper visual game experience, but I'm not sure how much that would shave off the loading times. The bulk of the data that is required already resides on your hard drive. The server just provides the client with information about what models and textures to load from disk. If loading the game world on the client side is the problem, they would not (should not) have tried making server side changes to speed it up. And in a game as visually rich and teeming with diverse player characters as ESO, I doubt they would want to deliberately cripple the presentation like that.

Lollapalosaa

I've been thinking quite the same. My idea was that when a player is logged on to any character and wants to "log out" to next char, instead of log out there would be an option to "log out to character 2/3/4/5/etc". That would result in halving the amount of loading screens.

Onigar

Lollapalosaa wrote: »

I've been thinking quite the same. My idea was that when a player is logged on to any character and wants to "log out" to next char, instead of log out there would be an option to "log out to character 2/3/4/5/etc". That would result in halving the amount of loading screens.

This is an interesting option, I like it.

Had not thought of that but it would potentially save considerable time

Onigar

stefan.gustavsonb16_ESO wrote: »

They tried to reduce the character load times by making the related code multi-threaded on the server side. Since that update, my character load times have been consistently longer across the board, at all times of day. I literally do not trust them to be able to make a "light" mode that would be any faster to load.

I often log through up to a dozen characters myself, so I do feel your pain, but I'm not hoping for any improvement.

Thinking more about your suggestion, what would you propose could be skipped? Shouldn't a character in "light UI" mode be able to do crafting? Riding lessons? Banking? Shopping? Talking in chat? Leveling up slotted skills from daily crafting XP? That would require pretty much the full shebang. Plus, the UI is handled client-side. There's not a lot of data that could be kept from the client while still enabling most of the things you would potentially want to do even on a brief login.

I suppose you could create a game mode where everyone else is a "generic male mannequin" black silhouette, because that seems to be what happens when the server decides that it can't be bothered right now with serving you the data you need about other players to get a proper visual game experience, but I'm not sure how much that would shave off the loading times. The bulk of the data that is required already resides on your hard drive. The server just provides the client with information about what models and textures to load from disk. If loading the game world on the client side is the problem, they would not (should not) have tried making server side changes to speed it up. And in a game as visually rich and teeming with diverse player characters as ESO, I doubt they would want to deliberately cripple the presentation like that.

My thoughts on the UI were to reduce Video settings and any other player settings that could be reduced to shorten the login time to start, also yes no need to see other players so black mannequin's (or pets both types) is also fine but more than that there could be underlying code that is not really needed when just logging on for a minute or so.

stefan.gustavsonb16_ESO

Onigar wrote: »

there could be underlying code that is not really needed when just logging on for a minute or so.

Possibly. And I really agree that the load times are a problem. However, would you trust them to decide what is required for the quick daily routines and what can be ignored? I would bet that we would see important settings being messed up and precious items going missing because the "limited UI" was implemented wrong, and lots of other similar bugs. I would advise strongly against adding yet another layer of complexity to an already very complicated and still somewhat bug-ridden game. Also, I just don't see them taking on this ambitious task for a very limited benefit, if any.

The "switch character" option would be a nice thing in itself, though. Being able to log on to a different character without going back and forth through the character select screen would be more convenient, even if it saved no time at all.

Michae

I would like the "relog" option. When you're logged in on a character there should be a relog option with a list of your other characters, so instead of going to log in screen and choosing another character you would just log in straight into an alt, bypassing one loading screen.

bmnoble

Not sure how feasible it is but if there were a way to skip having to go back to the log in screen altogether each time and just being able to pick the next character you want to load while on your current character instead it might save some time.

So instead of logging out and logging into the next character, its done in one loading screen, doing it that way the only time you have to use the login screen is when logging into your first character for the day and when you log out for the day.

I know nothing about programming or how difficult it would be to do though.