I have a PC eso account (physical copy of game, not via Steam) that I've been using since mid 2018 on the NA server, have never had sign in issues with the associated email, username or password; but have never used the PTS server. I decided to download the PTS about 4 days ago to get a look at the Markarth dlc, and have had multiple issues. First the download took 2 full days, but that was expected- this morning I took the opportunity of the ending of the Lost Treasures event, and went to login to the PTS for the first time, very excited to get a look at the new zone, and found the PTS was under maintenance, so I had to wait for another patch and another download- again, not a big problem- maintenance occurs regularly.
But when I finally got a chance to actually sign in and see what the PTS experience was like, I've had nothing but headaches. To begin with, I start the launcher and select PTS, and get a field that asks for a username and password, but doesn't give much indication to a noob whether you're supposed to use the username and password from the 'regular' server (NA or EU) or create a new account. I finally decided from studying the tooltips that I was supposed to use the same user account and password as my NA server account.
But when I try to login, I get a message that my pc is "not authorized" to access the account, even though I can quit, restart the launcher, change to the NA server and login using the exact same credentials and access the game without any problems. The same error message also indicated it would send me an access code to authorize my pc to the email associated with my account, but no access code was ever sent, I've been checking all folders in the email account all day long, and the error message said I would have to wait 24 hours! to request a new access code to be sent. WTF?
Is there some mysterious process to logging in to the PTS that I'm missing, since I assume multiple people are using it without issues? Do I need to create an entirely new ESO account just to access the PTS? If there is some problem with my login credentials, why am I able to access the game via the NA server on the exact same PC with the exact same credentials, and play for hours with no problems?
Any help appreciated,