ZOS, Massive Spike in Ping/LAG in Recent Days - What Gives?

Auberon1983

PS/NA

We (guild) ran nDSR twice the past two days. Surprisingly and very welcome, lag was almost non-existent.

However, digging up a treasure map on Betnikh proved to be too much. Took almost 2 minutes, yes really, to dig up Betnikh Treasure Map 2. I thought I was going to get DC'd

I keep reading all the new replies here, and there appears to be two contstants: lag/rubberbanding/ping/etc is still a major issue ever since the creation of the thread, and it appears to strike almost at random

How nDSR was smooth sailing, but treasure maps on Betnikh was rough, is beyond me

fizzylu

SkaiFaith wrote: »

There was the thread "Zos please fix/augment player count" and I feel like letting players access the game would be a good start... /s

And that's assuming the error is why Steam numbers are so low.... which personally, I don't think is the case.

Flameweaver1951

XBOX/EU
Major lag today, doing daily crafting writs and opening the boxes takes ages, to the point where I am logged out by the game.

Update. It’s get worse. Can’t open doors at Elden Root to turn in daily updates. Try to open, wait a few minutes then kicked offline.

aggerdo

Pc/eu

unplayable, kicked out multiple times just trying to get my daily tickets.

Aektann

Today, without any reason or changes in the system on my side, ping doubled (was about 80 now 150+) with spikes to 999+
Good job ZOS, what can I say

manukartofanu

moderatelyfatman wrote: »

@LadyGP Well, you're not alone!
Have you seen the latest Steam Charts? Average population for November is below 10k for the first time in nearly 7 years.

And it counts players like me, who don't bother to close the game after the error.

LadyGP

moderatelyfatman wrote: »

@LadyGP Well, you're not alone!
Have you seen the latest Steam Charts? Average population for November is below 10k for the first time in nearly 7 years.

silky_soft wrote: »

Good. I hate it for this game, I truly freaking do, but this is the ONLY way to get action on any of these things. This issue is coming up on... 7 months?... 7... freaking months... of this issue and we still

1) Don't know what is causing it
2) Have zero idea on a possible fix
3) Zero has been communicated about this issue outside of this thread
4) Maybe at best have 2 or 3 engineers who are looking at it...
5) Leadership is "aware"

Canceling subscriptions and flat out uninstalling this game is the only way to get change. Maybe I'll come back next year..

Who knows, I've been saying "this is the year Cyro finally gets a big update.. it has to be" for about 5 years now.

Guess I need to check my expectations.

LadyGP

manukartofanu wrote: »

moderatelyfatman wrote: »

@LadyGP Well, you're not alone!
Have you seen the latest Steam Charts? Average population for November is below 10k for the first time in nearly 7 years.

And it counts players like me, who don't bother to close the game after the error.

My game is still open from last night. Literally said "f this" and turned on Silo (amazing show if you haven't seen it by the way)

Destai

So question for the people here experiencing issues - do any of you have amazon prime open while attempting to play?

Reason I ask is because I was discussing this thread with some guildies last night and one of them was saying that any streaming service would interrupt his playing experience. I’m sure it’s unrelated but in the absence of official hypotheses, just wondering if there is some validity there.

LadyGP

Destai wrote: »

So question for the people here experiencing issues - do any of you have amazon prime open while attempting to play?

Reason I ask is because I was discussing this thread with some guildies last night and one of them was saying that any streaming service would interrupt his playing experience. I’m sure it’s unrelated but in the absence of official hypotheses, just wondering if there is some validity there.

For me personally I have gone as far as closing every application I possibly can, including antivirus, while playing eso and the issues are the same.

Dojohoda

Shut down the AI monitoring and see if that helps.

baltic1284

Dojohoda wrote: »

Shut down the AI monitoring and see if that helps.

How do you shut down AI monitoring that one is new to me for what i could tell using AMD adrenaline when the game is lagging for me the micro lag is really high.

burty61

• What server do you play on?
  PC EU
  
• What zones are you experiencing performance issues in?
  Any overland zones, predominantly while trying to load into them and crashing on the loading screen or just buying/selling questing. But so far never in Infinite Archive either solo or in pair
• Have you experienced the same performance issues without add-ons?
  Yes, first thing I did was to completely remove everything and it made no difference at all.
• Do you experience performance issues noted in this thread outside of combat?
  Yes lag spikes/crashes are predominantly outside of combat, but thats because I can't get to any combat (unless fighting against the games poor performance counts?)
• Are you or your group mates using scripted abilities when experiencing performance issues?
  Issues have happened on characters that do and don't have scripted abilities.But so far my observations are that my one character with scripted abilities suffers more issues and game crashes. Those without there is stutter/poor game performance which is less frequent and doesn't result in ant crash to desktop.
• If you remember any previous tickets you've submitted on this issue, please note them here.
  N/A

Dojohoda

baltic1284 wrote: »

Dojohoda wrote: »

Shut down the AI monitoring and see if that helps.

How do you shut down AI monitoring that one is new to me for what i could tell using AMD adrenaline when the game is lagging for me the micro lag is really high.

My suggestion was aimed at the company, not the players.

manukartofanu

Destai wrote: »

So question for the people here experiencing issues - do any of you have amazon prime open while attempting to play?

Reason I ask is because I was discussing this thread with some guildies last night and one of them was saying that any streaming service would interrupt his playing experience. I’m sure it’s unrelated but in the absence of official hypotheses, just wondering if there is some validity there.

I don't even have it.

And yes, someone among us created a separate thread with a poll to gather at least some information about the scale of the problem and who is experiencing it. Maybe, if we had been allowed to keep that thread, we could have identified some kind of pattern. Should I even mention who and what they did with that thread?

Destai

LadyGP wrote: »

Destai wrote: »

So question for the people here experiencing issues - do any of you have amazon prime open while attempting to play?

Reason I ask is because I was discussing this thread with some guildies last night and one of them was saying that any streaming service would interrupt his playing experience. I’m sure it’s unrelated but in the absence of official hypotheses, just wondering if there is some validity there.

For me personally I have gone as far as closing every application I possibly can, including antivirus, while playing eso and the issues are the same.

What about other users on your network?

LadyGP

Destai wrote: »

LadyGP wrote: »

Destai wrote: »

So question for the people here experiencing issues - do any of you have amazon prime open while attempting to play?

Reason I ask is because I was discussing this thread with some guildies last night and one of them was saying that any streaming service would interrupt his playing experience. I’m sure it’s unrelated but in the absence of official hypotheses, just wondering if there is some validity there.

For me personally I have gone as far as closing every application I possibly can, including antivirus, while playing eso and the issues are the same.

What about other users on your network?

Yes. 4 different systems some with AMD some with Intel.. one with 4090, one with 2070.. played on a Surface Book Pro... some wired some wifi... vpn no vpn... different routers and even have tried 3 ISPs (no, I'm not making any of this up).

This issue was consistent across all the various situations. The only one that saw even a minor improvement was with a VPN on.

blktauna

MincMincMinc wrote: »

FYI for people to test. I found out that if steam is open on my pc while playing my TESO version of the game I will experience latency and fps issues. I simply just have steam nolonger open on startup.

Note Steam wasnt downloading at all or doing anything significant. Just by having it in the background is enough to freak out my game.

I don't run on steam.

SkaiFaith

Flameweaver1951 wrote: »

XBOX/EU
Major lag today, doing daily crafting writs and opening the boxes takes ages, to the point where I am logged out by the game.

Update. It’s get worse. Can’t open doors at Elden Root to turn in daily updates. Try to open, wait a few minutes then kicked offline.

Agree, but has anyone tried playing through Cloud Gaming via GamePass to see what happens?
I would do it on my console if we'd have the option to choose how to launch the game, but we have not.
Anyone tried this on a PC or mobile device?
Curious if it has issues this way too...

For me, on console, unplayable since last week's maintenance. Hope this week one "fix it"...

EDIT: I'll add I am trying to login from an hour today and I keep getting errors at ESO login like "your console doesn't have internet connection" when every other online game works and I don't have any connection issues outside of ESO.

Coo_PnT

This problem is occurring on a variety of platforms. It is not a problem on our clients' side. If there is a problem on the user side, add-ons, etc., please point it out to us on the ZoS side. We will gladly fix it.

Please fix this problem ASAP.That's all.

LadyGP

Alright. Holiday break is over.... 7th month anv of this thread is coming up in a few days... where are we at @ZOS_Kevin ?

Orbital78

I had issues for awhile after switching to a new fiber company that had recently expanded coverage to my area. There was still construction going on in neighborhoods which may have been part of the issue, but it was definitely a routing issue. Things were work fine most of the time and then at certain times routing to Dallas, TX would plummet. Meanwhile routing to Chicago and other areas of the USA would be quite fine. I contacted my ISP support with IP addresses and described the issue, within a week or two the issue disappeared for the most part. I do notice evenings when there is higher than usual ping (180-200+, when I am normally at 60-80) but I rarely disconnect. I haven't experienced a disconnect in weeks, other than being idle for the 15+ min time out.

I do feel for those having issues, but make sure you do your part in contacting your ISP and trying to resolve the issue as well. There does seem to be some routing issues at least with PC-NA and some ISP. I remember I had a weird issue with a totally different ISP that I could not use the patcher unless I used a VPN. I could login to the game fine without it after that, but only the patcher was an issue. Quite odd, but that issue went away.

Destai

Ok, so since we're still waiting on ZOS to give us more information, figured I'd help by giving you guys some additional questions to help with their analysis. Seems like there's a lot information flying around, maybe this will help:

Just using my own experiences, here's an update on my experience after having a laggy night last night:

Background Questions:
Operating System: PlayStation 5
Additional Game Launcher (Steam, Cloud Gaming): None
Server: PS-NA
VPN: No
Network speed: 1 Gbps Fiber
Wired/Wifi: Wired
Metro Area: Detroit

Diagnostics:
When did the problem first begin? Shortly after the May update. Worsened after U44.
What time of the day do you experience them most often? All times of day, most before ~12am
What troubleshooting, if any have you performed? Reset router, reinstall game, clear caches
Is there anything you've done that lessens or temporarily resolves the issues? No.
Are other users using your network while gaming? Sometimes, not always though when experiencing issues
Are you running any other applications like streaming while using the game? No.
Do other applications on your machine experience connectivity or performance issues? No.
Have you contacted or changed ISP over this issue: No.

What symptoms are you experiencing? (occurrences per hour)
Disconnects: Not many disconnects, mostly intermittent issues logging in
Lag: Persistent
Ping: Cannot determine on console
Application Crashes: Rarely
Skill Delays: Persistent

Rate (Scale of 1 to 10) the severity of symptoms in each of the activities:
General Combat: 3/10
Overland Questing: 3/10, any zone
Craglorn: 4/10
Delves/Public Dungeons: 2/10
Trading: 3/10
Cyrodiil: N/A, haven't tested
Imperial City: N/A, haven't tested
Dungeons: 5/10
Trials: N/A, haven't tested
Infinite Archive: 2/10

manukartofanu

Orbital78 wrote: »

I do feel for those having issues, but make sure you do your part in contacting your ISP and trying to resolve the issue as well. There does seem to be some routing issues at least with PC-NA and some ISP. I remember I had a weird issue with a totally different ISP that I could not use the patcher unless I used a VPN. I could login to the game fine without it after that, but only the patcher was an issue. Quite odd, but that issue went away.

The issue worsened after specific maintenance or updates, but it existed even before those changes. If it could be resolved on a large scale by simply updating the delivery path of packets to the ZOS (Service Provider) systems, it should have already been addressed by ZOS engineers. After all, it is ZOS, not ISPs, that ultimately determines through which points and how packets are routed to their systems. ISPs at best influence the path, but plenty of evidence has already been shared here that the issue arises specifically when packets reach ZOS systems.

If ZOS has problematic nodes in their infrastructure, why are these nodes still operational, causing us continuous problems? Why is the responsibility of identifying which nodes on their service to use or avoid being shifted to us? It seems unreasonable that we, as users or ISPs, are expected to handle this, especially given that the problem lies within their systems.

LadyGP

Destai wrote: »

Ok, so since we're still waiting on ZOS to give us more information, figured I'd help by giving you guys some additional questions to help with their analysis. Seems like there's a lot information flying around, maybe this will help:

Just using my own experiences, here's an update on my experience after having a laggy night last night:

Background Questions:
Operating System: PlayStation 5
Additional Game Launcher (Steam, Cloud Gaming): None
Server: PS-NA
VPN: No
Network speed: 1 Gbps Fiber
Wired/Wifi: Wired
Metro Area: Detroit

Diagnostics:
When did the problem first begin? Shortly after the May update. Worsened after U44.
What time of the day do you experience them most often? All times of day, most before ~12am
What troubleshooting, if any have you performed? Reset router, reinstall game, clear caches
Is there anything you've done that lessens or temporarily resolves the issues? No.
Are other users using your network while gaming? Sometimes, not always though when experiencing issues
Are you running any other applications like streaming while using the game? No.
Do other applications on your machine experience connectivity or performance issues? No.
Have you contacted or changed ISP over this issue: No.

What symptoms are you experiencing? (occurrences per hour)
Disconnects: Not many disconnects, mostly intermittent issues logging in
Lag: Persistent
Ping: Cannot determine on console
Application Crashes: Rarely
Skill Delays: Persistent

Rate (Scale of 1 to 10) the severity of symptoms in each of the activities:
General Combat: 3/10
Overland Questing: 3/10, any zone
Craglorn: 4/10
Delves/Public Dungeons: 2/10
Trading: 3/10
Cyrodiil: N/A, haven't tested
Imperial City: N/A, haven't tested
Dungeons: 5/10
Trials: N/A, haven't tested
Infinite Archive: 2/10

ZoS would do themself a favor if they made an official performance related survey and posted it on the forums and in-game.

Background Questions:
Operating System: W10 & W11 with Intel and AMD CPUs
Additional Game Launcher (Steam, Cloud Gaming): None
Server: PC-NA
VPN: I've tried with and without VPN
Network speed: 1 Gbps Fiber - also tried Starlink High Performance and a different Fiber ISP
Wired/Wifi: Wired
Metro Area: Nashville

Diagnostics:
When did the problem first begin? Shortly after the May update. Worsened after U44.
What time of the day do you experience them most often? All times of day, most before ~12am

What troubleshooting, if any have you performed? You ready?
- Bought 3 different routers of various price points ($99-$1,500)
- VPN Service
- 3 Different ISPs
- QoS enabled/disabled
- Built 3 different desktops (AMD/Intel/4090/64gb Ram/16GB i've tried all possible hardware configs to try to isolate if it's a hardware issue)
- Ran PingPlotter hitting the various ESO IPs and compared against internal network/DNS for packet loss/latency issues)
- Reinstalled ALL drivers/Windows 10/11
- Reinstalled ESO
- Ran ESO with no Add-Ons
- Reached out to ISP and had their Senior Engineers look into routing for issues
- Played on laptop
- Literally have spent over $10,000 on hardware/ISP changes to try to resolve this issue - not including the thousands I've spent on ESO over the years

Is there anything you've done that lessens or temporarily resolves the issues? Eh - VPN slightly... and I mean slightly improved it. I suffer 3 disconnects an hour instead of 10-15 when I'm not on a VPN.
Are other users using your network while gaming? Yes, my partner is playing ESO along side me
Are you running any other applications like streaming while using the game? No.
Do other applications on your machine experience connectivity or performance issues? Nope - not once. I have logs to back up it's isolated to ESO ONLY.
Have you contacted or changed ISP over this issue: YES!

What symptoms are you experiencing? (occurrences per hour)
Disconnects: Disconnects every 5 or so minutes. When I'm not trying to get back into the game my ping goes from 250-999+
Lag: Persistent
Ping: 250-999 (used to be under 100)
Application Crashes: Often
Skill Delays: Persistent
FPS: 10-15fps... with 4090 and AMD CPU... Cyberpunk ultra runs at ~100 FPS fyi

Rate (Scale of 1 to 10) the severity of symptoms in each of the activities:
General Combat: 7/10
Overland Questing: 7/10, any zone
Craglorn: 7/10
Delves/Public Dungeons: 7/10
Trading: 7/10
Cyrodiil: 10/10 - literally can't play in Cyro
Imperial City: N/A, haven't tested
Dungeons: 7/10
Trials: 9/10
Infinite Archive: 5/10

skyrimfantasy

Parsing the dummy in my house. Was able to kill it once with no issues, then I started getting high ping. I gave it a few minutes and tried again. Seemed better at first the lag kicked back in and shortly after the 999+ ping and then of course the kick. At this rate or almost complete silence (Kevin can only do so much, he's just the poor middleman) I'm almost expecting that the January announcement for 2025 is they aren't going to do anything further and just let the game die a slow death. That's not what I'm hoping for of course, and I'm hoping Firor's annual letter will give us some much needed positivity we don't seem to be feeling right now.

JonnytheKing

LadyLethalla wrote: »

My ping - before the Jubilee - averaged 280-320. I was away from April 6th to 21st: when I logged in on 21st I saw my average ping had gone to 380-420. I had hoped it was just because of extra people logging in for the Jubilee, but it has not gone back down.

What would cause it to jump by a third?!

I do acknowledge however that it may be caused by outside factors... I live in Australia, the land of potato internet after all.

same thing happend to me, im in wa. using exitlag lowers it back down

loosej

Orbital78 wrote: »

I had issues for awhile after switching to a new fiber company that had recently expanded coverage to my area. There was still construction going on in neighborhoods which may have been part of the issue, but it was definitely a routing issue. Things were work fine most of the time and then at certain times routing to Dallas, TX would plummet. Meanwhile routing to Chicago and other areas of the USA would be quite fine. I contacted my ISP support with IP addresses and described the issue, within a week or two the issue disappeared for the most part. I do notice evenings when there is higher than usual ping (180-200+, when I am normally at 60-80) but I rarely disconnect. I haven't experienced a disconnect in weeks, other than being idle for the 15+ min time out.

I do feel for those having issues, but make sure you do your part in contacting your ISP and trying to resolve the issue as well. There does seem to be some routing issues at least with PC-NA and some ISP. I remember I had a weird issue with a totally different ISP that I could not use the patcher unless I used a VPN. I could login to the game fine without it after that, but only the patcher was an issue. Quite odd, but that issue went away.

I appreciate the effort to help find a solution, and your advice might be the only solution for a few edge cases, but up to 24 million people contacting their ISP to resolve routing issues is not "doing our part". Running an online game is more challenging than testing it on a local network, but other game companies have been able to figure it out, zos should be able to do so as well.

My disconnects are rare but predictable these days, ballgroups and hammer fights in Cyrodiil. I'll approach a fight and see a bunch of players not moving, that's when I need to act fast. If I'm lucky I can hide somewhere near the fight and sit it out while having 999+ latency, and at least get the AP tick. If I'm too slow I'll disconnect before the latency even has a chance to spike from 120 to 999+, and be unable to log back in until that fight is finished.

LadyGP

loosej wrote: »

Orbital78 wrote: »

I had issues for awhile after switching to a new fiber company that had recently expanded coverage to my area. There was still construction going on in neighborhoods which may have been part of the issue, but it was definitely a routing issue. Things were work fine most of the time and then at certain times routing to Dallas, TX would plummet. Meanwhile routing to Chicago and other areas of the USA would be quite fine. I contacted my ISP support with IP addresses and described the issue, within a week or two the issue disappeared for the most part. I do notice evenings when there is higher than usual ping (180-200+, when I am normally at 60-80) but I rarely disconnect. I haven't experienced a disconnect in weeks, other than being idle for the 15+ min time out.

I do feel for those having issues, but make sure you do your part in contacting your ISP and trying to resolve the issue as well. There does seem to be some routing issues at least with PC-NA and some ISP. I remember I had a weird issue with a totally different ISP that I could not use the patcher unless I used a VPN. I could login to the game fine without it after that, but only the patcher was an issue. Quite odd, but that issue went away.

I appreciate the effort to help find a solution, and your advice might be the only solution for a few edge cases, but up to 24 million people contacting their ISP to resolve routing issues is not "doing our part". Running an online game is more challenging than testing it on a local network, but other game companies have been able to figure it out, zos should be able to do so as well.

My disconnects are rare but predictable these days, ballgroups and hammer fights in Cyrodiil. I'll approach a fight and see a bunch of players not moving, that's when I need to act fast. If I'm lucky I can hide somewhere near the fight and sit it out while having 999+ latency, and at least get the AP tick. If I'm too slow I'll disconnect before the latency even has a chance to spike from 120 to 999+, and be unable to log back in until that fight is finished.

Agreed - NO ONE should have to reach out to their ISP to ask them to look at routing. Full stop.

Good tip by the way. I too have noticed that when I'm playing (PvE/Housing/PvP) the second I see my ping start to tick up I need to take my hands off the mouse/keyboard and wait. Ping will spike to 999_ for about 30 seconds then settle.

If I move for even a few seconds once the ping starts to go up I'm guaranteed to get a disconnect. 100% of the time.

@ZOS_Kevin where are we at with this. 7 months... and... the communication has been "nothing new to report" and "we are looking into it".

Destai

@ZOS_JessicaFolsom I'm wondering if you could step in here. Updating again because last night there were severe problems across multiple platforms, the most severe I've seen in some time. We're going on 7 months here, and the most we've gotten is "there's no information". All we're asking for here is an update.

Here's what I see as the outstanding questions & concerns:
Administrative concerns:

1. What work has been completed so far?
2. What work is currently being done?
3. What is the severity of this issue from ZOS's perspective?
4. Is a team actively working on the issue?
5. Is there an ETA on a fix?
6. What is the communications plan going forward?

Technical concerns:

1. Has anyone at ZOS been able to replicate the issue?
2. Can someone confirm the role of the AI chat monitoring here?
3. VPN seems to alleviate the issue, at least to some degree. Any investigations there?
4. What investigation, if any, has been done on Akamai and it's role in this situation?
5. What are your internal analytics telling you?

These questions have been asked a few times, and I've yet to see someone acknowledge them directly. It'd be nice if we could get some details here. I think the expectation is that someone from ZOS can spend 30 minutes here, type up a paragraph, and give us some degree of comfort.