What would happen if everyone started playing on PC NA?

Lebkuchen

I live in a small village in the middle of Europe, somewhere in the mountains of the Alps. When ESO was released on console some of my childhood friends asked me to come play with them. We know each other for over 30 years. We played games like Super Mario on Nintendo and Zelda: Ocarina of Time on Nintendo 64 together in our homes when we were children. So i bought a Playstation for ESO. I was playing too much WoW anyway and my wrist still hurts when i touch a mouse. So i said goodbye to PC gaming and started playing ESO with my friends. It was a lot of fun until we reached endgame. (Back then endgame was trials and PvP.) One by one all 4 of them left the game because they could not handle the bugs and performance issues. They came back a couple of times to see if the lags and bugs had been fixed, and always ragequit a few days later. I was kind of used to bad performance because i played WoW on a Laptop for years, so i kept playing ESO with the friends i made online. Now almost all of them are gone too, my guilds are dead and Cyrodiil is empty. I am tired of making new friends, just to see them ragequit because of performance issues.

I focused on Cyrodiil because it was more unique and interesting than questing, dungeons and trials. I quested so much in other games, i really do not care about "go there, do that, come back..." anymore. And dungeons and trials got old for me before i even started playing ESO (because i spent hundreds of hours raiding in WoW). Of course i still enjoy these parts of the game sometimes, but the main reason i kept playing ESO was Cyrodiil and the hope/anticipation/expectation/trust that it would be fixed soon. So now i am not sure what to do. Should i give up and play other games with my friends? Or should i switch to PC NA because PC EU, Xbox NA, Xbox EU, Playstation NA and Playstation EU are all unplayable?

Like most of my friends i want to keep playing the game, but gave up hope that things will ever change for consoles and EU servers. So after all the useless explanation why i am thinking about switching to PC NA here is my question: What would happen if we all just started playing on PC NA? How many new players could the new servers handle? I am just asking this stupid question because i know that a lot of console players and EU players think about starting over on PC NA. And i imagine that too many new players could have a negative impact on the performance. I do not want to buy a new gaming PC and invest a lot of time to get new chars ready just to see it was all for nothing.

phaneub17_ESO

Your ping will suffer. There are 3 instances per zone and there's quite a lot of places to go so you still won't see everyone, but you can expect long queues.

fred4

I don't think much would happen, because you're in a different time zone than NA players. Prime time on NA is past midnight in Europe. The more pertinent question is whether you'd get much action at the time you play. That said, Kristofer ESO has talked about playing very early on PC NA, e.g. something like 7am his time (in Canada), because the server would become laggy during the day already. This was before the upgrade.

I have a character on PC NA. You will have a ping in the 200 to 250 range, due to crossing the Atlantic. That can work. It can feel better than server lag at 140 ping on PC EU. On the other hand 200+ ping is borderline and you also get unpredictable lag spikes (ping 999) that you don't often get on PC EU, if you're living in Europe. This varies. There can be good days and bad days.

I don't think this is the solution. I haven't done much of anything on NA for a long time. I think I checked out the new servers briefly, but had bad transatlantic lag that day, which cancelled out any advantage those servers might have offered.

fred4

And in case you're wondering, server lag raises your in game ping slightly. A ping raised by as a little as 30ms can feel atrocious, if it's server lag. That's why I mentioned the 140 figure. My ping (from Ireland) is normally around 100 to the EU server. It varies a bit. 110 is still quite normal for me, but once it consistently hovers around 140, or higher, that's server lag in my experience, and you get major issues with skills not firing. Consistent issues, happening all the time.

Transatlantic ping issues feel different. You have a base ping in the 200 to 250 range. Let's say 220. Everything is just slightly slow. It is noticeable and not nice, especially if you play a squishy high mobility build where the skills have to work or you die. It's still playable, though. It's not nearly as bad as laggy PC EU Cyrodiil at prime time. However you do get dropouts. Ping spikes to 500, to 999, to really high values. Depending on the day, these may happen frequently, or they may not. So it's a different problem.