Is this normal for MMO's in general?

Kay1 · April 2017

No.

WoW was worst and if you try a game like GW2 you won't ever get a crash.

danno8 · April 2017

Only mmo I played that had incredible uptime was GW2. They don't even need to take the servers down for patches.

Honestly I don't even know what kind of message you receive from that game if you can't log in because I was always able to. Their server architecture should be copied but strangely seems widely ignored. Even the lead of that game stated at one point that he "wasn't sure why everyone is not setting their games up in the same way. It's a no-brainer." (paraphrased)

James-Wayne · April 2017

sadownik wrote: »

@James-Wayne compared to what? Tell me what AAA MMO game in 2017 has worse server stability?

When more games start using Megaserver technology like Elder Scrolls does then we shall compare.

Jitterbug wrote: »

vyndral13preub18_ESO wrote: »

Back in the day when WoW was alone it was fairly common for them. In any MMO I have played since I left WoW I have never seen something like this before.

Ive seen other MMO that would have problems on holidays like Christmas break due to the load. But not one that would go down every weekend.

Does NA have problems every weekend? O.o
That sucks!
EU very rarely has any problems at all in my experience.. aren't the servers maintained at the same location?

PC NA has no issues, it's always been stable.

Alaztor91 · April 2017

Not normal at all IMO.

Like other people in this thread I also played GW2 (I still do, but not that often), which also has a similar ''megaserver'' technology.

I seriously wonder if ZoS isn't improving server stability because most of the players think that problems like these are ''normal''. The point of the weekly maintenance is to prevent those kind of problems in the first place, and sure, maybe these were common problems in MMOS from 10+ years ago but come on, it's 2017.

I am not trying to sound like a fanboy but for example in the past 3 months ESO PC-NA has probably had more downtime than GW2 in it's 4+ years. Maybe GW2 is an exception and has incredible uptime compared to other modern mmos, but I don't think that the downtime that ESO has is normal at all, and you can't always blame it on DDoS lol.

kevlarto_ESO · April 2017

Even in the best of games it happens from time to time, just happen here way to much.

sadownik · April 2017

@Alaztor91 actually you can, but you have to understand that most of DDOS are self inflicted. So ddos doesn't necessary mean hostile actions.

ParaNostram · April 2017

It's pretty normal. Could be much worse, they could get hacked like Sony did and everyone's information could be stolen.

Cêltic421 · April 2017

The only other MMO I played was EQ2 and servers rarely went down. In the beginning they would take servers down everyday for about 30-60 minutes for maintenance or whatever but was always planned. In the occasion server crashed always was a word and eta from devs/moderators.

ZoS seems to be a company that does a terrible job at communicating and doesn't seem to care enough to do something about it.

danno8 · April 2017

Alaztor91 wrote: »

Not normal at all IMO.

Like other people in this thread I also played GW2 (I still do, but not that often), which also has a similar ''megaserver'' technology.

I seriously wonder if ZoS isn't improving server stability because most of the players think that problems like these are ''normal''. The point of the weekly maintenance is to prevent those kind of problems in the first place, and sure, maybe these were common problems in MMOS from 10+ years ago but come on, it's 2017.

I am not trying to sound like a fanboy but for example in the past 3 months ESO PC-NA has probably had more downtime than GW2 in it's 4+ years. Maybe GW2 is an exception and has incredible uptime compared to other modern mmos, but I don't think that the downtime that ESO has is normal at all, and you can't always blame it on DDoS lol.

GW2 is exceptional. And even that pales compared to GW1, which in it's first 7 years had a total downtime of less than 30 hours. That's right, 30 hours. That's 4 hours per year on average.

I could go on and on about problems with GW2 in content and design, but server structure is quite frankly not even comparable to other games.

WhiteMage · April 2017

I played LotRO for a few years, and, for a time, every once in a while the servers would go down, but since the devs gave everyone free stuff whenever that happened, we almost looked forward to it. These were brief crashes that everyone was able to get back within minutes from. About once a year though, between March and May, after the release of an update, the game would go down for a day, maybe 2. One year the servers were down for 5 days. Everyone was frustrated that week, but we all forgot about it because they gave us lots of goodies to make up for lost time, including a full week of the ESO+ equivalent to compensate.

Unfortunately, ESO is not big on compensating players, so players react the way they do when things go wrong.

So, no, in other games, crashes are not unheard of. Sometimes they just happen. Extended downtime does happen too. What is different from company to company is how they compensate players for the inconvenience.

silvermistktralasub17_ESO · April 2017

For what it's worth, whenever I end up lagging out of the server or can't connect, I also do a quick check on the internet backbone over the area that I suspect that the main server for ESO is. More often than not, Level 3 is showing problem areas in that section of the map (middle of the eastern seaboard for the Us). So I don't blame ESO entirely. Yesterday, we were in a vet dungeon and everyone except our aussie player d/c'd and had a hard time getting back in. When you get a discrepency like that, it's likely an internet routing issue rather than the server's own fault. She had no real problems with pings, where those of us in the US did. But still, about 15 minutes or so later, we were able to finish that last boss and things straightened out for a while, though there have been other problems since then. It never hurts to look at a level 3 outage map when you run into problems like this. It might not be zenimax' fault.

Tabbycat · April 2017

ESO does seem less stable than other MMO's I've played. But they pretty much all have issues at one point or another. Especially after major game patches or expansions they are prone to crashing. Lately, DDoS attacks seem quite common. WoW suffered one a while back after they banned cheaters from a completely different Blizzard game.

Cêltic421 · April 2017

Sakiri 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

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.

ESO is years pass launch.

alexkdd99 · April 2017

Pancake-Tragedy wrote: »

Yup

While I believe it to be normal for servers to crash from time to time, it is not normal for them to remain silent. Most will give notification of some sort.

Zos has given notification of server crash before, not sure why they haven't this time.

O_LYKOS · April 2017

Get used to it. Server disconnects and blue screens (on ps4) are very common.

alexkdd99 · April 2017

Tandor wrote: »

People need to differentiate between servers and platforms. ESO appears to be rather more unstable on console than on PC, and substantially more unstable on the NA servers than on the EU servers.

As a result, if you play on say XBox NA server you probably are experiencing frequent problems, but if you play on PC EU then my own experience since launch is that ESO is one of the most stable MMOs I've played since 1998. It helps that I don't PvP in ESO, but then I didn't PvP in most of the others and they had problems that I simply don't have with ESO.

Weird, from what I read they all seem to have problems fairly equally. That is if you differentiate eso server problems from xbox live/ PSN server problems.

Why it may seem like eso pc servers have problems less is because console relies on 2 servers to play. 1 for the console and 1 for eso.

UrQuan · April 2017

alexkdd99 wrote: »

Pancake-Tragedy wrote: »

Yup

While I believe it to be normal for servers to crash from time to time, it is not normal for them to remain silent. Most will give notification of some sort.

Zos has given notification of server crash before, not sure why they haven't this time.

It's because they don't know about it. They thought they fixed the problem yesterday, and everyone went home for the weekend without leaving anything in place to monitor if there were actually any ongoing issues. It's the exact same situation that happened about a month and a half ago, when lots of players were left unable to log in for 3 days because ZOS didn't even know there was still a problem.

This speaks to complete incompetence on the part of whoever deals with the continuity planning at ZOS. When this happened last time it should have been a wakeup call for them to urgently put a system in place that would keep it from happening again. At a minimum they should have algorithms monitoring their automated CS ticket system for unusual spikes in ticket volumes by type and sending urgent alerts to someone in the server tech support team 24 hours a day if something is detected that needs investigation, and when there is a server issue that they "resolve" they should have a process in place whereby an employee monitors the forums, reddit, twitter, etc to see if there are still reports pouring in from players of being unable to connect.

The fact that this has happened a second time is completely inexcusable and means that heads need to roll.

[Deleted User] · April 2017

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