The Limbo between login and character select.....

Evangelon · October 2014

sigh, again.

Bethesda patch , I dutifully download a metric ***-ton of data from a not-as-fast-as-my-connection-speed-source(s) - I dont get to play the game at that time. I go play warframe instead.

I come back once all is patched and happy. I start the game, no updates, I launch the game, all good so far, I log in and I wait. and I wait. and I wait.

I go off to have dinner and come back half an hour later, load screen is still up with the logo spinning in the bottom right. The music is still playing and still stop/starting at random intervals so its actually quite annoying at this stage. I go away again.

half hour later. no change. What worked the last time this happened? Oh yeah, I exited and restarted. but what if its calculating stuff? its using 93% CPU after all. feck it. restart the game.

launcher. good
skip cinematics. good
log in. good
loading screen limbo......ffs

what if I reboot my PC? that seems to work.
But why? Why do I have to reboot my PC every time there's a monster patch?

why are there monster patches and not background trickle downloads that get activated with a final much smaller patch file?

why do I have this huge delay at log in EVERY TIME there is a patch? And why don't the developers include some sort of progress meter so I can see what the game is doing and KNOW that its stuck or not loading instead of having to guess.

I'm not bashing the game. I enjoy the game. The patching and updating system though may very well cause me to decide its not worth the hassle. Even the constant updates of warframe are less hassle than this.

come back CoH all is forgiven! I have a subscription fee slot being used that I will happily transfer at this stage!

staxjax · October 2014

your client was borked, and the patcher was repairing it...not really a patch. but long loading screen is from interwebs cutting out while screen was loading.

KenjiJU · October 2014

If you have a decent machine, LSOD should be pretty recognizable within 1-2 minutes(this happens to other games too) which means you should probably kill and reload the game. How long does your game usually take to load?

AshySamurai · October 2014

This is all Sheogorath pranks! Beware of Mad God!

Evangelon · October 2014

@KenjiJu in what way is it recognisable? I just get an infinite loading screen with music that cuts out irregularly. Usual load times are pretty quick, a few seconds at most. This only happens after a patch and so far, its happened with every patch issued.

@staxjax you could be right that the client is broken and needs to be repaired. Thing is, it works fine before the patch and then its borked after the patch and no other process accesses any of the ESO game files in the meantime (I've used a hard drive monitor to confirm that) other than the standard windows search indexer (which doesn't make changes and accesses the fail at other times even when not patching without causing damage). So the only logical conclusion is that the patching process is corrupting my game file causing this repair process....which doesn't work because it just keeps repairing ad infinitum until I reboot my system - which is the centre of my home network so rebooting it means media centre and any other synchronising systems need to be interrupted as well.
-
yes, I can reboot. That's not the issue.

the issue is: why should I have to reboot and

why does the loading screen not inform the user of what it is doing (ala DDO perhaps) so we KNOW if something is wrong and if its something we can do anything about. if its stuck on queueing for the server then I know its not my hard drive, if its stuck accessing a file then maybe I need to run a disk repair but in the meantime I'm not left guessing and wasting time - time that I'm paying a subscription fee for by the way, its not just "ah, I'll play it later" it, "the game I'm paying for is, yet again, not available because hteir patching system requires me to jump through hoops for content I'm not even accessing yet! (I don't have any characters in craglorn , all are sub lvl 15)."

Evangelon · October 2014

@AshySamurai mmmmmm cheesey cabbage........

AshySamurai · October 2014

jason.farinab16_ESO wrote: »

@AshySamurai mmmmmm cheesey cabbage........

Homer, is that you?

@jason.farinab16_ESO You need to reset only after patch or every day?

AreoHotah · October 2014

I also have longer load after patch but it doesnt take longer than 2-3 mins.

deepseamk20b14_ESO · October 2014

I'm glad I do not have this problem. Good luck, hope you get it fixed.

Ghettobird52 · October 2014

I will note my problem as well. I've only been playing for a month ( and wasn't able to tell if it only happened after a patch) but occasionally I'll get the "loading limbo" op is talking about. I'll login and get the loading screen with music for 5-7mins, but music will stay on not skipping. It will eventually go to my character selection screen. This has happened only twice in the month of playing. My computer is

I7-4770 CPU
Gtx660 GpU
8gb 1600mhz ddr3 ram
On 1tb hard drive

Drivers up to date.

Something obviously reoccurring is happening with players, if we have very similar loading screens occasionally I'm guessing there are more of us. Report bug?

adean27 · October 2014

I have personally never ran into this issue. I do get some load time between logging in and the character load screen. Amusingly, they have a load time in the same area at Zenimax Online, I commented on it when a Developer was logging into their account, that it had a similar load time from login to character select.

As for the rest, I'm assuming you're running everything in Administrator mode? And you're closing the launcher as soon as the game loads?

Another thing you might want to try is deactivating all your add-ons and then try logging in a few times without them, see if that fixes the issue. If it does, slowly turn each add-on back on one at a time and see which is causing it.

Other than that, you could try checking for a memory leak while this is occurring.

Cathrin · October 2014

I have the same issues as OP, but only after a patch, after log in and after character select, I get an endless loading screen. Most of the time, only a restart of the game helps.

KenjiJU · October 2014

jason.farinab16_ESO wrote: »

@KenjiJu in what way is it recognisable? I just get an infinite loading screen with music that cuts out irregularly. Usual load times are pretty quick, a few seconds at most. This only happens after a patch and so far, its happened with every patch issued.

How is it not? Come to think of it, this same thing probably happened to me after the last patch, but after a minute or two I restarted the game once or twice and went on playing. Why let it sit for a half hour?

I'm not saying it's a non-issue, but it isn't nearly as big a fuss as you're making it.

Tandor · October 2014

I always get a break in the music the first time I log in after a patch, but it's for a micro-second. It usually takes a little longer to log in after a patch, but not much, seconds rather than minutes.

Evangelon · October 2014

@KenjiJU I'm making a "fuss" about it because this is not the way a computer program is meant to behave. it shows activity so you cannot be sure that restarting wont cause some corruption to a file it is writing or updating. You have zero knowledge of what it is doing and what is taking the time. I left it for half an hour to see if it would finish up whatever tasks it was running. I would also argue that no patch to a non-system application should require a restart of the entire system.

Last patch , after restart, I ran a system monitor while it was doing "first run after restart after update" - the longest file write was generating the shadercache file - it seems the system pre-renders during this load period. Second longest were a lot of small updates to smaller files like machinesettings and localconfig

now, my "fuss" is not that it has to do these operations, that's fine - all applications need updates - the size of the updates and speed of download is a separate matter, its that there is no progress or notification of action so I had to use a third party tool to get even the most basic information about what was causing the delay before I could properly make the decision to interrupt the application.

Just an update to this, went to run the game last night and yays a patch... but I haven't had to restart yet because I'm actually suffering from the "manifest corrupt" issue instead. At least that has an error message that I can look up myself.

Evangelon · October 2014

@‌ Shindig
I dont run as admin, I run as an admin-capable user which has worked fine for years and for every other game an application I have run on this system.

I don't have any plugins or addons and my AV isn't so much as hiccupping during this time from the logs.

I'll try turning off the launcher next time it happens. thanks.

Evangelon · October 2014

ps. had a good warframe session while the game patched. Tank Prime hit 30! so it wasn't all bad

Rylana · October 2014

I tracked this down using some of my administrator tools, perfmon being the main one that caught the culprit, and during this insane long loading screen, the client is going through every single ESO dat file and reading/writing it all to pagefile.sys

Its like the game is caching itself before you even play it, it would also explain why you get crashes related to art and so forth under heavy load, its constantly accessing the pagefile (which on most machines is fricken massive, some are over 4 gigs) instead of the 8meg or so .dat file it should have looked in in the first place and ran in volatile memory instead.

I am pretty sure it has to do with pre-rendering shaders, but cmon zos, this puts a massive bottleneck on any non-SSD using machine, and can even drop performance on one using an SSD depending on bus speed.

Pendrillion · October 2014

jason.farinab16_ESO wrote: »

@KenjiJu in what way is it recognisable? I just get an infinite loading screen with music that cuts out irregularly. Usual load times are pretty quick, a few seconds at most. This only happens after a patch and so far, its happened with every patch issued.

@staxjax you could be right that the client is broken and needs to be repaired. Thing is, it works fine before the patch and then its borked after the patch and no other process accesses any of the ESO game files in the meantime (I've used a hard drive monitor to confirm that) other than the standard windows search indexer (which doesn't make changes and accesses the fail at other times even when not patching without causing damage). So the only logical conclusion is that the patching process is corrupting my game file causing this repair process....which doesn't work because it just keeps repairing ad infinitum until I reboot my system - which is the centre of my home network so rebooting it means media centre and any other synchronising systems need to be interrupted as well.
-
yes, I can reboot. That's not the issue.

the issue is: why should I have to reboot and

why does the loading screen not inform the user of what it is doing (ala DDO perhaps) so we KNOW if something is wrong and if its something we can do anything about. if its stuck on queueing for the server then I know its not my hard drive, if its stuck accessing a file then maybe I need to run a disk repair but in the meantime I'm not left guessing and wasting time - time that I'm paying a subscription fee for by the way, its not just "ah, I'll play it later" it, "the game I'm paying for is, yet again, not available because hteir patching system requires me to jump through hoops for content I'm not even accessing yet! (I don't have any characters in craglorn , all are sub lvl 15)."

I didn't read if anyone said it already. I have longer loading times as well after a new Patch. But I usually connect after a long time waiting. I suspected usually that patch is implemented when you start it the first time, which leads to those long loads. I never had much trouble connecting recently. And loading times have gone down, since Beta.