It was much more common in the early days of UO and EQ. Sometimes you'd even lose a night's worth of work when you would login the next day and find a rollback.

Still, it happens. Maintaining a massive, persistent world takes a lot of infrastructure.

Back in the day WoW could go down for whole days, eso is pretty stable.

Nope. During the -

7+ years of EQ2 - had some server outages here and there, of course. But nowhere near as prevalent as the new normal of ZOS routine outages and patch failures

On and off, and ARPG not MMO per se, but Diablo 3 since launch has had fairly good uptime. Again, outages here and there, and can complain about content and balance, but far less servers run by hamster jokes than ZOS

4 years of Linege 2 - am sure it had to have happened, but in my personal play times, can't recall single time servers were down outside of scheduled maintenance

Can go on, but during my gaming life, I'd rank ZOS as #1 in unreliability - to be fair, I concede some of this can be also shared blame to ddos attacks but either way, other online mandatory games I've played are actually online whereas elder scrolls offline - while being just a joke as of course it is up far more than down - has enough grains of truth to perpetuate the line

It's happened a number of times recently due to denial of service attacks.

Yeah, its normal for MMO's....


In the sense that all you people do is complain about everything being nerf or a new class is being Over Powered and the whole BS excuse of "pay to win"...

Yeah, perfectly normal.

Jacozilla wrote: »

Nope. During the -

7+ years of EQ2 - had some server outages here and there, of course. But nowhere near as prevalent as the new normal of ZOS routine outages and patch failures

On and off, and ARPG not MMO per se, but Diablo 3 since launch has had fairly good uptime. Again, outages here and there, and can complain about content and balance, but far less servers run by hamster jokes than ZOS

4 years of Linege 2 - am sure it had to have happened, but in my personal play times, can't recall single time servers were down outside of scheduled maintenance

Can go on, but during my gaming life, I'd rank ZOS as #1 in unreliability - to be fair, I concede some of this can be also shared blame to ddos attacks but either way, other online mandatory games I've played are actually online whereas elder scrolls offline - while being just a joke as of course it is up far more than down - has enough grains of truth to perpetuate the line

You didn't play WoW launch.

I have a couple weeks of credit in my history because of outages.

And they still have full day maintenance sometimes, as well as day long ddos.

CapnPhoton wrote: »

Jacozilla wrote: »

Nope. During the -

7+ years of EQ2 - had some server outages here and there, of course. But nowhere near as prevalent as the new normal of ZOS routine outages and patch failures

On and off, and ARPG not MMO per se, but Diablo 3 since launch has had fairly good uptime. Again, outages here and there, and can complain about content and balance, but far less servers run by hamster jokes than ZOS

4 years of Linege 2 - am sure it had to have happened, but in my personal play times, can't recall single time servers were down outside of scheduled maintenance

Can go on, but during my gaming life, I'd rank ZOS as #1 in unreliability - to be fair, I concede some of this can be also shared blame to ddos attacks but either way, other online mandatory games I've played are actually online whereas elder scrolls offline - while being just a joke as of course it is up far more than down - has enough grains of truth to perpetuate the line

I played EQ2 for 5 years and had a rollback at least once every few weeks. But with the older server design, it was more common it seemed to have a zone outage rather than a whole game. This is where just the zone server (or virtual machine) would crash. Characters in the zone would be unusable for a while, and/or when zoning in it would bounce you out.

Concede the zone outages - yea we had a good number of those, during the years I played on LDL then Crushbone when it merged. But as you said - it was zone only, and for whatever reason seemed to be a few zones in particular like Lavastorm.

Whether this was by plan or accident, it meant no real full server login denial like we have with ZOS. You could login, play, and just go everywhere but the 1-2 zones affected.

And while rollbacks sucked, at least the EQ2 customer service was pretty consistent in restoring you in a rollback ended up screwing you. I'm sure will be off, but as I recall most rollbacks were like a couple hours from your char save, not days or anything like that. In ESO, just the last 2-3 months, we've had substantial portions of 3-4 weekends completely offline for many people.

They mystery is why it affects some but not all or most. And I know sometimes it is regional ISP issues, of course it is. But it doesn't affect times like now where 2 people in the same household with same ISP has 1 spouse able to login and the other one denied all weekend.

I'm not binge bashing ZOS btw - I still think overall my sub money is worth it (for now - waiting to actually see Morrowind before hysterically reacting. If I see it actually is what it is - then I reserve the right to hysterically react). But it is the truth that overall ESO has been enough of the parody 'Elder Scrolls Offline' that while it is completely untrue from a hours uptime metric, it has just enough grains of truth to understand why that comical motto exists.

ESO runs on Megaservers where everyone is playing together PvP, RP and PvE where as other MMOs typically have multiple servers that players can choose to play on.

ESO is actually pretty stable for what you get.

Jacozilla wrote: »

CapnPhoton wrote: »

Jacozilla wrote: »

Nope. During the -

7+ years of EQ2 - had some server outages here and there, of course. But nowhere near as prevalent as the new normal of ZOS routine outages and patch failures

On and off, and ARPG not MMO per se, but Diablo 3 since launch has had fairly good uptime. Again, outages here and there, and can complain about content and balance, but far less servers run by hamster jokes than ZOS

4 years of Linege 2 - am sure it had to have happened, but in my personal play times, can't recall single time servers were down outside of scheduled maintenance

Can go on, but during my gaming life, I'd rank ZOS as #1 in unreliability - to be fair, I concede some of this can be also shared blame to ddos attacks but either way, other online mandatory games I've played are actually online whereas elder scrolls offline - while being just a joke as of course it is up far more than down - has enough grains of truth to perpetuate the line

I played EQ2 for 5 years and had a rollback at least once every few weeks. But with the older server design, it was more common it seemed to have a zone outage rather than a whole game. This is where just the zone server (or virtual machine) would crash. Characters in the zone would be unusable for a while, and/or when zoning in it would bounce you out.

Concede the zone outages - yea we had a good number of those, during the years I played on LDL then Crushbone when it merged. But as you said - it was zone only, and for whatever reason seemed to be a few zones in particular like Lavastorm.

Whether this was by plan or accident, it meant no real full server login denial like we have with ZOS. You could login, play, and just go everywhere but the 1-2 zones affected.

And while rollbacks sucked, at least the EQ2 customer service was pretty consistent in restoring you in a rollback ended up screwing you. I'm sure will be off, but as I recall most rollbacks were like a couple hours from your char save, not days or anything like that. In ESO, just the last 2-3 months, we've had substantial portions of 3-4 weekends completely offline for many people.

They mystery is why it affects some but not all or most. And I know sometimes it is regional ISP issues, of course it is. But it doesn't affect times like now where 2 people in the same household with same ISP has 1 spouse able to login and the other one denied all weekend.

I'm not binge bashing ZOS btw - I still think overall my sub money is worth it (for now - waiting to actually see Morrowind before hysterically reacting. If I see it actually is what it is - then I reserve the right to hysterically react). But it is the truth that overall ESO has been enough of the parody 'Elder Scrolls Offline' that while it is completely untrue from a hours uptime metric, it has just enough grains of truth to understand why that comical motto exists.

Hello fellow LDL/Crushboner!

Sakiri wrote: »

Hello fellow LDL/Crushboner!

Ratongas 4-ever!

All mages, all ratongas. That's all I played.

I can't get back in, either.

mtwiggz wrote: »

ESO servers crash far more often than any MMO I've ever played. Back in EQ days the servers would crash once and a while, the rollbacks as someone else mentioned were quite horrendous as well. Had a few instances while playing Eve Online that the servers crashed, which was the worst, but that was very rare and usually due to DDoS attacks.

At least we don't get multiple hours worth of roll backs in ESO... yet.

Not necessarily defending EQ2 rollbacks, but in all fairness - the current level of server to server replication technology is a lot faster, reliable, and cheaper than it was back in the EQ2 glory days.

I'm not saying it wasn't possible, but looking back in hindsight with what we know now vs available then, I'm not that surprised rollbacks were necessary vs modern replication syncs being so good you lose no data at all. You lose the server down time yes, but you don't have to roll back to a known good point.

It's like comparing two athletes with comparable records, but one had to play during the take a bus everywhere and do your own laundry, vs today's charter jet + tour crew pampering.

Vaoh wrote: »

WalksonGraves wrote: »

Back in the day WoW could go down for whole days, eso is pretty stable.

@WalksonGraves
Just out of curiousity - Did WoW players ever get refunded days of their Sub or given some other benefits due to outages?

It's not something I recall ZOS ever doing. I wonder if that's also standard for MMO's.

(.....this is my first MMO).

Don't know about WoW but in EQ2 the few times outages or some bad PR issue impacted gameplay, SOE added time to our subs.

They didn't give refunds per se, but they added X days of credit to your sub.

Month or so ago when we had the double outage where login outge required an unscheduled maintenance that ZOS responded to on forums, said was fixing and did a maintenance that needed another maintenance to fix what they broke with first one, I actually put in a ticket with ZOS for request of (2) days ESO+ sub time to compensate for the weekend plus weekday I had zero login.

It was not denied, but totally ignored. Yup, flat out ignored. It's in the system, I could see the open ticket, but was ignored and then just closed. So I suppose answer is ZOS doesn't give sub days even when they admit the outage was real and not a user local issue

Not a big deal in terms of finance and days lost, but brand loyalty is certainly not there for me re ZOS.