Update 4 Causing iMac to freeze

creme-delacreme · October 2014

ESO is the first game I've played on the mac, and only because the PS4 version was delayed. Even with all of the issues i've had, i've enjoyed it immensely…until Update 4.
When it first launched, i had lag issues and eventually started running my video settings on minimal. After update 2 came out, I had the data load errors continuously until it was fixed in Update 4. Now, with update 4, ESO freezes and also locks up my computer, (no commands work to force quit as computer is unresponsive) anywhere from a few seconds - 11 minutes. The freeze will eventually release and i'm taken back to main log-in screen.

I've been working with ESO support (the guys have been great) for a month now [140904-001582] and have tried everything including sending crash and hang reports, running tests, replacing and doubling my RAM.

The next step is to call Apple support to see if they have any suggestions.

Just wanted to know if anyone else having this issue with Update 4?

UlthweWraithlord · October 2014

Yup, just ran into this myself. It kept freezing intermittently after logging in, and when i zoned into the bank, I could see some characters and NPCs and some furniture, but it was all against a featureless white background. After a few minutes the room eventually appeared. After taking care of some banking, I went to leave the bank....The screen froze up nearly black (I think it was almost done fading out when it froze as i could make out a few shapes of the lightest objects in view). No command keys worked to force quit.

zappamdb16_ESO · October 2014

Same for me, I usually play on a windows laptop but when I try with my iMac it randomly freezes and locks everything. Never tried to wait more than 5 minutes to see if it releases anyway, you're saying it is a temporary thing?

chris.dillman · October 2014

Hi Everyone,

Can I have everyones machine specs?
OS version?
GPU?
RAM?

creme-delacreme have you tried reinstalling the entire game?

creme-delacreme · October 2014

I've frozen up going into/out of bank, talking to banker. Traveling to way shrine, just after arriving at way shrine. Fishing. Walking or riding horse. Grinding, in trials, arena, dungeons, questing. You name it, I've frozen doing it.

95% of the time It will eventually release my computer. The longest it took for me was 11 minutes so far. There have been a few instances when it never released and I've had to hard boot.

I have an apt at the apple store Friday to see if they can figure out if it's something on the Mac side. Being that it just started happening with Update 4 i'm not optimistic, but you never know!

creme-delacreme · October 2014

Hi Chris, i've tried everything support recommended, including reinstalling the game. I'm running OS 10.7.5, just installed new RAM (went from 4 GB to 8) and had no noticeable improvement. my graphics card is lower spec than recommended but I'm running on Minimal settings and as stated, never had a freeze issue (except for cyrodill) until Update 4 came out. ATI Radeon HD 4670.

KhajitFurTrader · October 2014

creme-delacreme wrote: »

ATI Radeon HD 4670.

So it's either

a 27" or 21,5" iMac from late 2009, or
a 21,5" iMac from mid 2010

All three have the ATI Radeon HD 4670 with only 256 MB of video RAM, which is pretty low, and at least two generations of hardware below the minimum system requirement of an ATI Radeon HD 6490M.

chris.dillman · October 2014

Hi creme-delacreme

The extra Ram will improve virtual memory thrashing. So it should eliminant briefs pauses and stutter when running around the world.
( This is not the problem you are having )

Could you try running the game in windowed mode?
And when it locks up report back if you can still use the rest of the Mac.

You don't get the spinning beach ball when ESO locks up do you?

creme-delacreme · October 2014

Hi Chris,
Unfortunately, the add'l RAM had no noticeable affect. I turned on activity monitor to see if there was a noticeable increase in virtual or real memory prior to a crash, but that was never the case. I've also have been monitoring temps to see if the graphics card was overheating but again, not the case.
I've always run in windowed mode since day 1, and repair every morning before i start the game, which is a habit i started with the data load errors that were fixed in Update 4.
I've listed my support case # up in my initial post if that helps.
When the game locks up the computer, 95% of the time there is no spinning beach ball…it's just frozen. The other 5% it is frozen, with spinning beach ball, but still unable to perform any actions.
Just not sure why i started freezing with update 4…

creme-delacreme · October 2014

I'm at the genius bar at Apple store and they just performed hardware check on all of my components. Everything checks out fine.

chris.dillman · October 2014

UlthweWraithlord and zappamdb16_ESO

Can we have your hardware specs also?

wastedeb17_ESO · October 2014

My client freezes directly after choosen a characther, no matter wich, cant even create a new one either, it used to work before 1.4.6 ;/ It just freezes and it stops moving after like 2-3 sec, and never unfreezes, waited for 60+ mins. I have reinstalled EOS, i have reinstalled my OSX (Yosemite since cant get older now) Used to work fine on Yosemite beta so shudent be the problem either

i have reinstalled EOS, i have reinstalled my mac clean install and reinstalled EOS again, still same problem

i have reset the SMC, i have reset the PRAM, well i done everything I can possible think of and still freezes directly after choosen a char.

Processor Name: Intel Core i7
Processor Speed: 2,4 GHz
Memory: 8 GB
Chipset Model: NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M
VRAM (Total): 1024 MB

zenzic67 · October 2014

The previous posts sound very familiar to what I've been experiencing since the last update - freezing of the game animation. I can't enter doors, swap skills or interact with other players. I can occasionally continue to chat, however. Sometimes the game 'catches up' - animations zooming around at high speed until I'm back to normal. Other times I will disconnect. I always play in windowed mode. This happens whether I use mods or not, and dropping my video settings (to medium) hasn't solved the issue. I've repaired the game a number of times.

My specs:
IMac (late 2013)
Running OS 10.9.5
3.5 GHz i7 processsor
16 GB memory
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M video card

KhajitFurTrader · October 2014

zenzic67 wrote: »

The previous posts sound very familiar to what I've been experiencing since the last update - freezing of the game animation. I can't enter doors, swap skills or interact with other players. I can occasionally continue to chat, however. Sometimes the game 'catches up' - animations zooming around at high speed until I'm back to normal. Other times I will disconnect. I always play in windowed mode. This happens whether I use mods or not, and dropping my video settings (to medium) hasn't solved the issue. I've repaired the game a number of times.

I have the same machine as yours and do not see these issues. Are you on Wi-Fi, and do the issues persist if you directly connect to the router via network cable?

creme-delacreme · October 2014

Created new profile and ran ESO as per support. Unfortunately, had same negative affect…game still hanging and locking up computer. This was to try to rule out a bad file.

NickWindust · October 2014

I have had the same freezing issue on my MacBook Pro after update 4 fixed the data load error bug. I concur with the random nature, complete lockup, and spontaneous return to the login screen.

I put in a ticket and was I was told by Support that it was because my MacBook Pro was below spec (mid 2009 NVidia 9600M GT 256 MB).

But evidently that is not the sole reason, because many of the Macs described in the prior posts have graphics cards way above the minimum spec of NVidia 330M, e.g. 750M.

Just to add to the confusion, I have noticed that even on minimum settings the fps varies wildly between about 15 fps - 50 fps, sometimes as low as 1 fps or as high as 60 fps. However, the freeze can occur at any fps, even as high as 60 fps.

zenzic67 · October 2014

As a follow-up to my previous post, I took the advice of KhajitFurTrader and replaced my wireless with a cable. While I still have locking and dcing issues in Cyrodiil, my PvE experiences were much, much better over this last weekend. Thanks for the advice!

KhajitFurTrader · October 2014

zenzic67 wrote: »

As a follow-up to my previous post, I took the advice of KhajitFurTrader and replaced my wireless with a cable. While I still have locking and dcing issues in Cyrodiil, my PvE experiences were much, much better over this last weekend. Thanks for the advice!

Glad I could help.

WiFi can be problematic, especially in urban environments, where potentially dozens of access points could use the same few channels. The 2.4 GHz band is notoriously overcrowded, while the 5 GHz band can get blocked by so much as a wet rag.

Even if the displayed signal strength is good, the transmission rates can be abysmal, because WiFi is a shared medium. Packet drop and/or resend rate might be high without proper indication, and this is detrimental to a persistent TCP/IP connection like ESO uses. Connection latency automatically rises, and you see effects like the game "catching up", because TCP always tries to deliver packets "in order"; if a packet in a sequence fails to arrive, the whole connection stalls until it shows up, and then the data gets delivered to the application en bloc.

Paket loss can occur anywhere between the client and the server, and there are many parties involved. Unfortunately, the customer only has a fair amount of control on his side of the router (this applies to ZOS as well); what happens beyond is in the hands of multi-national corporations, some of which aren't on speaking terms with each other...

creme-delacreme · October 2014

I just received a note from support that the only logical explanation for the hangs since update 4, is that my graphics card is too old. I find it hard to believe since I've been playing the game find since April, and all was well up until that point. I've also been running temp gage and the graphics card never overheats. The only two options given were to upgrade card (which you can't do on an iMac) or stop plying the game. So, I guess this is Sayonara! I enjoyed it while it lasted.

ZOS_MollyH · October 2014

Hello folks! We do have a couple of things to test regarding the hangs and potential packet loss that could be causing these problems. To check your packet loss and see how your connection is faring, please try the following steps:

Open Terminal (just typing "terminal" into Finder should bring it up)
Type the following: ping yahoo.com
It will run indefinitely if you don't end it, so let it run for about ~10-15 times and then hit ctrl + C to cancel it.

The results you see will display your packet loss. It should be at 0%. If you have 10%-15% it's bad, and 30% or more is awful and would mean you need to contact your ISP to have your wifi router or modem checked out to ensure that you don't have faulty hardware.

Sometimes the ISP can also adjust outside cables, change switches, or sometimes replace the hardware entirely. This can happen a lot more frequently than people notice, and sometimes the devices can just fail unfortunately.

Another thing you can try in Terminal is typing the following: traceroute launcher.bethesda.net

This can sometimes show if your connection is dropping off along the way, which would be another reason there could be problems with disconnects or poor performance due to connection issues.

Thank you!

creme-delacreme · October 2014

Hi ZOS (have to say our name makes me think of the mainframe OS z/OS). i ran ping command and am attaching. no packet loss for me. i ran the trace route but not sure what to do with it?

lecarcajou_ESO · November 2014

27" iMac, 3.4 GHz Core i7, 8 GB 1600 MHz DDR3, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680MX 2048 MB, running OS 10.10.

Still not enough to keep this game from crashing? Come on.

linow · November 2014

I have not been able to launch the game for two days. After I started the Game Consultant it took several hours for the process to complete. When I re-launched the same issue happened - "Missing Files / Not Updated".

My computer has been running the Game Consultant and downloading files at a very slow rate (2mb/sec) OVER ETHERNET Cable NOT wifi. It's been 12 hours and the downloading and "checking files" is still happening. The bar says 99% but has 2 Gigs to download.

I have a 27" iMac, 3.4 Ghz Core i7, 16 gig of RAM, with AMD Radeon HD 6970.
Everything else about my internet connection is running fine. Web bowsers, ROKU, PS4, yet even overnight when the only thing on the net was my Mac, it was downloading slow.

What do I do so I can play the game? If this isn't the right forum could some one please tell me where it should be posted or how to reach costumer service directly?

Thanks.

KhajitFurTrader · November 2014

@linow, you can reach tech support anytime using the Ask for Help feature via phone or email here: https://help.elderscrollsonline.com/app/ask

The GameConsultant within the launcher finishes within seconds for me. If you take a look at its output file (~/Documents/output.txt), you'll see that it executes the following commands:

netstat -an
ps aux
cat /etc/hosts
ping -c 4 a1092.d.akamai.net
ping -c 4 a1213.g1.akamai.net
traceroute -n 80.157.151.17
traceroute -n 80.157.170.168

Please note that the hostnames and IP addresses in the last four lines may change dynamically, as they point to Akamai's CDN. You'll get different hosts/addresses depending on global location and load situation. Did you get the output file after the last run?

Take a look at the FAQs I've pointed out in this post. Make sure that there are no proxy settings or blocked ports on your side of things. How do you access internet? Via DSL, cable, or mobile (HSDPA, LTE, satellite)? Is a VPN involved at any point? Do you have restrictions on data volumes, or does your ISP throttle ports?

I'd love to say that maybe your ISP has (temporary) peering problems, but the Launcher connects to global CDNs in order to download the patch data, so this shouldn't happen.

zappamdb16_ESO · January 2015

Sorry I didn't follow this thread but i had to move from my old house to a new one and so didn't read the forum for a while. I just expanded my ram (iMac, late 2009 yes the ATI Radeon doesn't match minimum requirements) from 4 gb to 8 gb and I must say it doen't freeze anymore. I do experience some random transient freezing (like 4 or 5 seconds and then the game releases) here and there, but no more do I need to force a hard reset.

creme-delacreme · January 2015

Zappa i doubled my RAM also with no noticeable affect…:(