Crashes: Adding Insult to Injury

Wily_Wizard · April 2015

Nothing like getting kicked when you are down, but unfortunately that's exactly what ESO is doing to me.

My crashes have come back for the 2nd time, and this time is much worse than before. Each crash is a HARD crash that resets my PC instantly. I suppose it was a matter of time that the ESO installation became corrupted due to the incessant shut-downs during the middle of a write cycle on the hard drive. I hope my windows file system hasn't become as corrupt as the game has. After a few days of crashes my game became completely unplayable even when it wasn't crashing. I started getting numerous arbitrary functions within the game that stopped working for all characters. Really persistent and weird things that couldn't be fixed with a reboot.

Currently I'm re-downloading and re-installing the game, I hope it works. Why oh why does it take so long to download this game?

Trollwut · April 2015

I don't know the exact names in the English version of Windows, but I guess I get them right enough:

Go to your Control Panel -> System. There you seek for the tab Advanced and on the third panel you click on Settings.

Uncheck "Automatically reset the PC" and go out by OK-clicking.

This may not prevent ESO from crashing, but I guess it avoids a hard reset, so that you only have to restart your game.

Wily_Wizard · April 2015

Thanks, I'll try it and see if it helps.

Also I reloaded the game from scratch and so far so god, no errors and no crashes *knocks on wood*

Wily_Wizard · April 2015

Trollwut wrote: »

This may not prevent ESO from crashing, but I guess it avoids a hard reset, so that you only have to restart your game.

OK, 1 day later after fresh reload and crashes returned. I tried the setting above, but is does not prevent the PC from crashing. That will only prevent a crash if its a Windows system initiated crash. Apparently ESO crashes hard enough to take the entire windows system down.

Wily_Wizard · April 2015

Hmmm...now that I think about it, the crashes returned exactly after I installed the 2.07 update. Plus I'm getting that version error after the upgrade.

Cathexis · April 2015

Its something in the settings INI. When I replaced it with my prepatch usersettings file everything went back to normal for me.

Intervein · April 2015

Usually when crashes occur like this it is because of an overheating CPU or a faulty/overloaded PSU. I would urge you do get ahold of something like Hwmonitor/Core Temp and Prime95 or another benchmarking/stress testing tool to rule out the issue being in your hardware. I personally don't like for my CPU to get above 60 degrees Celsius; however, CPUs are all different and have their safe zones.

Can I guarantee that this is your issue? No. Computers are fun little things that screw up for multitudes of reasons. So be sure to also update graphic card drivers, Windows Update, etc.

Good luck.

Tandor · April 2015

Also, check the numerous topics on the version error launcher bug, all you need to do is close and re-open the launcher for a day or two after patching and the "play" button will appear, after the day or two the bug will right itself.

Netswine · April 2015

Anything from a bad DIMM to a bad capacitor in the motherboard or PS can cause a hard crash like that. Try some memory tests with MemTest86.

Tashira · April 2015

Dont forget guys... there is a memory leak and a memory issue with 32bit windows where it tries to go over the limit of Win 32 bit

Wily_Wizard · April 2015

Thanks. I appreciate all the input, but unfortunately none of them apply to me. I'm a PC tech by trade, so mostly I build my own PCs and I understand all the intricacies. This one is water cooled and clean as they come, its always running cool

Its 64 bit windows as well and I have 16GB of fast RAM. Nothing is overclocked and my PC is stable as hell, with the exception of this game. It has 4GB VRAM too, and I have never seen it run out of VRAM yet. I run monitors on all my system usage and everything looks good right up till the moment the PC resets. I play several other modern games, some that even load down the PC's resources more than ESO, and no other game has ever caused my PC to crash/hard reset like this. ESO strictly owns this crash, nothing else.

After reading a lot of forum posts, it looks like they had this crashing problem a long time ago, then they finally fixed it and the game was running pretty smooth for several months in beta...then they went live and had the "official release". Low and behold, the crashing that had been solved before, has returned and the game is broken yet again.

If I had to shoot from the hip and take a wild guess at what went wrong, I would say this...
Someone from the trimmed down development team at ESO "accidentally" imported a section of old code into the new final release build. They may not have known better, because after layoffs its sometimes difficult to track all resources accurately. Its also possible they couldn't find the new section of fixed code they needed, so in an effort to save time/money, they elected to use the latest version of that section of code they could find. POOF! Now we are back to broken block 1. The astute developer that finally fixed the original code no longer works for ESO, and since the fixed code cant be located, we have to wait until someone from the minimized developer staff at ESO can A) find the time & B ) attempt to re-discover the original fix....anyway, just a guess, maybe I'm wrong lol.