Addon Data / Settings / MM Data Erased Often by ESO / Servers

Lady_Dovahkiin

PC / Steam / NA / Windows11

Hello, *love* the game! But there is this little bug that is turning into a BIG problem that makes it hard for me to continue to want to play (I put in about 90+ hrs every 2 weeks / well over 1,000 hrs since I started playing in September lol so not even wanting to play after this bug happens is a big deal- …I mean, what else am I supposed to do with my time lol)

This deals with add-ons, and I know ESO doesn’t touch that when I report in-game but I’m beginning to suspect it may actually be a server issue / game issue- if you’ll just hear me out (and hopefully someone can give some help, insight, or tell me HOW in the world I can prevent this), I’d be forever grateful!

2/8 post-NA servers being down, I played the game for a few hours no problem. I started the game that night (NO changes to a THING on my computer nor game). I closed my gaming laptop around 3pm when I stopped playing, opened it up and started the game around 9pm. When I logged in, I noticed every addon setting had been TOTALLY wiped and erased. My mini map was in the unfamiliar default position, beam me up was giving me a welcome message, etc for all addons (the same 7-10 I’ve been playing with most of my time in the game all had wipes like this). The WORST and most CRY-worthy was that all of my Master Merchant data that I have been meticulously collecting for months had been totally erased. I fixed all my settings again (so, so many settings, and so many hours getting 10day scans in LibHistoir / MM), played no problem up until 2/16. Was out of town for a couple of days, did nothing to my computer, didn’t touch any addons nor settings, opened my gaming laptop last night (2/19) for the 1st time since 2/16 and again EVERYTHING is wiped again. Lost all MM Data, all addons are acting as if they’ve never seen me before (lol) and back again in default positions. I’m just at a loss. Dreading opening the game up again tonight to go down the rabbit hole of recouping and rebuilding and do it all over again just to have this mysteriously happen again. Biiiig Yikes.

I know Master Merchant (MM) is just an addon, but as a SOLO, overland, PVE player- the only real way to make any gold is through trading guilds and MasterMerchant (and similar) are all pretty close to necessary for making gold in game and reading market trends. Post this bug, I then spend 2 days and countless hours researching where it went (never to be found), why did it happen (still haven’t found an answer), doing 10 Day scans again through MM for all of my guilds (hours and hours), trying to find my lost data (unsuccessfully), backing up data to put in a separate desktop folder (and then can’t actually import it), and then googling, forum browsing, etc trying to find out why this happens and what I can do to prevent it.

I do know it isn’t Minion (I thought that was the culprit a bit ago so uninstalled it, only to have this bug still appear); my name only has a ‘dash’ in it and doesn’t seem to have changed (and I haven’t been changing it); it doesn’t seem to be caused by the game going to that strange Program Data hidden folder I’ve read about on here, it’s not from ANYthing I’ve done (I wish as that would have been easy to pinpoint); it isn’t from updating or installing new addons nor windows updates nor doing anything to my computer folders / files as when this happens none of those things were touched). It seems it has to be coming from Game or Server changes? Pretty please help me!

Necrotech_Master

all addon data is stored locally on your machine, unless you have something windows onedrive

so the game servers cannot do anything to your addon data

windows onedrive can definitely cause issues with the addons because when the game is running the addons are trying to write back to the saved variables files, and onedrive keeps trying to backup the file everytime a change is made

this can cause issues such as "corrupting" the saved variable file resulting in it appearing that you lost your addon data

minion wont do anything unless you tell it to (you have to manually right click on an addon and hit remove saved variables to get rid of the addon data)

Lady_Dovahkiin

Thank you so much!! This is so incredibly informative and truly appreciate the insight! I’m going to see if I can turn off onedrive (since I’ve never used it) as that definitely makes the most sense, at this point! Thanks again!

perfiction

Just a note - sometimes if your game crashes during loading screen (or reloadui) it can break your addon and game settings. I learned that the hard way - two times after hard crash to desktop all my saved variables and userconfig were for some reason replaced with whitespaces so I lost all of its contents.

The only thing I can suggest - make regular backups of your Documents/Elder Scrolls Online/live directory.

Lady_Dovahkiin

Oh wow! This may have just been the cause and in all my hours of scouring for an answer- this is the very first I’ve heard of this (and seems probable). Thank you so much for sharing this! Definitely going to start keeping backups in a desktop folder of addons, saved variables, user settings and addon settings weekly.

Question- if I *do* need to import my backups, do I just paste these backup versions into their respective, original locations (replacing the new / corrupted data)?

Necrotech_Master

Lady_Dovahkiin wrote: »

Oh wow! This may have just been the cause and in all my hours of scouring for an answer- this is the very first I’ve heard of this (and seems probable). Thank you so much for sharing this! Definitely going to start keeping backups in a desktop folder of addons, saved variables, user settings and addon settings weekly.

Question- if I *do* need to import my backups, do I just paste these backup versions into their respective, original locations (replacing the new / corrupted data)?

correct, though it might be safer to delete the items in the destination before copying

this is also how you would say synchronize your settings across multiple computers too (i have at least 3 computers that can run ESO so i periodically copy those files around lol)