Why does it still take so long to log in?

Tinolyn

PC/NA. Takes 5 minutes to get past "requesting character load."

This is my oldest character, if that has anything to do with it. Even PC/EU loads faster.

LostHorizon1933

My deep suspicion is that somewhere, somehow, there's a DOS program chugging along ...

Basaz

I've noticed that when I alt tab, it takes way longer.

scorpius2k1

Tinolyn wrote: »

PC/NA. Takes 5 minutes to get past "requesting character load."

This is my oldest character, if that has anything to do with it. Even PC/EU loads faster.

5 minutes is definitely a long load time. Not to say ESO servers, etc aren't a factor, but what hardware are you running? I find ESO to be extremely reliant on hard drive performance. SSD should be used at a minimum, but an NVMe really speeds things up.

For me it's better than it used to be on most logins since I built a new PC, but I agree, it's still pretty slow in any scenario. As a comparison, I am running ESO on a PC with a Ryzen 3700x and a Samsung 970 EVO NVMe M.2 drive.

This my login time just now:

Login Screen => Character Select : 21s
Character Select => In Game : 45s

Total Loading Time : 1m 6s

My load times are roughly around that most days, even during peak hours. Load times to get from login to actually playing the game could be better, especially on a decent modern fast PC. 20-30s would be great. Wayshrine and zone transfer loading seem to be vastly improved however to what they used to be. In zone wayshrines maybe a few seconds, zone transfer/dungeons/delves/trials load usually around 10-20s. I remember those always taking minutes at a time not too long ago. Hopefully as ZOS continues with their performance plan to work on their backends (and database optimizations), things will continue to improve.

.

Tinolyn

Ryzen 2700x; 16GB RAM
Win10
2 TB HDD
256GB SDD

I've defragged; repaired game; updated addons, etc. This was especially bad, I assumed, because of the event, the Cyro test, etc.

It is becoming absolutely ridiculous. I recall several years ago ZOS had an issue where "older" characters (those who've done a lot of quests or whatever) had trouble logging in/swapping characters etc. I was wondering if that was the reason this time, since there's no event or PVP tests to blame for overloaded servers.

amm7sb14_ESO

scorpius2k1 wrote: »

Tinolyn wrote: »

PC/NA. Takes 5 minutes to get past "requesting character load."

This is my oldest character, if that has anything to do with it. Even PC/EU loads faster.

5 minutes is definitely a long load time. Not to say ESO servers, etc aren't a factor, but what hardware are you running? I find ESO to be extremely reliant on hard drive performance. SSD should be used at a minimum, but an NVMe really speeds things up.

For me it's better than it used to be on most logins since I built a new PC, but I agree, it's still pretty slow in any scenario. As a comparison, I am running ESO on a PC with a Ryzen 3700x and a Samsung 970 EVO NVMe M.2 drive.

This my login time just now:

Login Screen => Character Select : 21s
Character Select => In Game : 45s

Total Loading Time : 1m 6s

My load times are roughly around that most days, even during peak hours. Load times to get from login to actually playing the game could be better, especially on a decent modern fast PC. 20-30s would be great. Wayshrine and zone transfer loading seem to be vastly improved however to what they used to be. In zone wayshrines maybe a few seconds, zone transfer/dungeons/delves/trials load usually around 10-20s. I remember those always taking minutes at a time not too long ago. Hopefully as ZOS continues with their performance plan to work on their backends (and database optimizations), things will continue to improve.

.

Its not a system thing because its happening to me too, on an SSD

Ackwalan

It takes longer for my character with a high achievement score to load then the ones with a low score. I guess packing and unpacking a file the size of the Library of Congress tends to slow things down.

etchedpixels

Tinolyn wrote: »

PC/NA. Takes 5 minutes to get past "requesting character load."

This is my oldest character, if that has anything to do with it. Even PC/EU loads faster.

Read the older patch notes. The logins are somewhat serialized. They were working on this way back but like 2 person mounts and many other things mention of it and progress has vanished into the aether. Maybe post Covid it'll come back - can but hope because it's now really awful, and all the newer rival games coming online have fast logins.

scorpius2k1

amm7sb14_ESO wrote: »

Its not a system thing because its happening to me too, on an SSD

Sorry to hear. I personally don't have any of these problems anymore since I upgraded my system and am grateful. ESO has some of the most horrendous load times of any game I've played. Who knows why some of us have these problems still and some of us don't. I don't disagree it's still there as I've experienced it myself plenty of times. Not debating here, just giving advice to what has helped me as far as what a player can do on their end.

Tinolyn wrote: »

Ryzen 2700x; 16GB RAM
Win10
2 TB HDD
256GB SDD

I've defragged; repaired game; updated addons, etc. This was especially bad, I assumed, because of the event, the Cyro test, etc.

It is becoming absolutely ridiculous. I recall several years ago ZOS had an issue where "older" characters (those who've done a lot of quests or whatever) had trouble logging in/swapping characters etc. I was wondering if that was the reason this time, since there's no event or PVP tests to blame for overloaded servers.

I'm assuming you have ESO installed on the 256 GB SSD and not the mechanical 2TB right? Otherwise that is going to really slow you down. ESO on a mechanical drive is horrendous, no matter how fast it or the rest of your system is.

Regardless of character age, they still load from a database...with that said you bring up a solid point that might bring some context to the issue. I am curious if "older" characters/accounts are on different databases/servers than recent ones or something which might be why "Requesting Character Load" is taking longer for some and not others. Kind of a weird theory, but when you consider what ZOS was talking about in their performance plans and several were database related, especially the part "Database Account Cold Storage" where they would migrate unused accounts into a storage database while active players were on a different one. Basically, my thought is there are probably a lot more unused accounts than used accounts, by separating the two you get much faster lookups and a faster load times to the player. Just a guess but you might be onto something with the "older" data, especially considering what @etchedpixels said above with older patch notes mentioning account serialization is in use. It makes even more sense but we can only assume and speculate unless ZOS would be so kind to confirm exactly what causes it for one user and not another with similar hardware setups.

Good luck!

ZOS_Bill

As an update, there were some login issues for a short period on the PC-NA servers earlier that should be resolved now. If you are still having any errors when logging in please let us know. With multiple threads open on this issue we are going to close this one. You can continue discussion here.