Yesterday I had lag while those issues occured for about an hour or two with the chat and such. That was probably the only time I've had an issue with it since I started playing on early access release. Are you sure it's not on your end?

They do need to fix the progress blocking bugs though. I'm with you on that one.

If my eyes didn't decieve me, I did read something about 'live server maintenance' happening and people being thrown into the overflow pools because of it. I think they are trying to scale the amount of players -- Keep in mind it's the weekend and absolute prime time!

@verakum‌
Was in response to the second paragraph in your OP.

I read on another thread yesterday that there is a way to create lag in the game then use it to duplicate items. I reported the thread. This might be what you are seeing. Also there is a few things that you can try. Likely it's not server side unless it's that exploiting I was talking about. If you want to try and troubleshoot say so. I will give you a few things to try

And please don't say I can play these other games but only lag on this one because that doesn't mean anything. There are several places lag can happen and only one of them is the server

I agree with your frustration @verakum , but sadly I don't think your threat to quit the game will get things moving. There are threads where hundreds of people have been unable to play the game at all despite paying for it. Those people were all raging and threatening to quit, but after a week there still hasn't been a reply from ZOS regarding their troubles or how to fix them. If they aren't afraid to lose that many people, they won't be moved by what you say It's a sad reality where customers willing to give money are turned away because of poor customer service.

So tired of the cry-baby, entitled gamers.

I have the list of ports at home on my server/router (I do QoS on those ports so my roommate can't lag me on ESO with Steam downloads)...but I can't access that until I get home in an hour. I can reply then with what ports the game uses.

Actually, I just decided to SSH into my server from my phone and check my mangle table from there. ESO uses 24100-24131, and 24500-24507, both TCP and UDP.

It doesn't use all of those ports every time. It picks one from each section every time you log on (probably depends on which server within the megaserver you're on). It will usually be different each time.

You should not have to open or forward ports if you're using a router. NAT takes care of all of that for you in the background. You can't actually open ports on a router at all (people that say you can are misunderstanding the terminology). You CAN forward ports, but I do NOT recommend doing this except in specific situations (see below). Forwarding game ports will either do nothing, or stop other things from working.

The only reason I've done anything with ports is because I run HTB and SFQ QoS on my network (using a dedicated Linux server as a router has its advantages). Opening ports is for hosting a server of some type on the machine with a firewall (the server in my case - by default I deny all inbound traffic, and then only allow specific things that I want). For example, I have to open the port my Mumble server is on so that clients can connect. Forwarding ports is if you want to run a server on a machine behind the NAT (I do this for one port because my roommate runs a muck server on his computer). Neither of these should ever be necessary for playing a game.

I can give a more detailed explanation on this if needed (though be warned, a more detailed explanation will require knowledge of how TCP/IP works to understand). My "router" is a dedicated mini-ITX Linux server, with a dual core 3.2 GHz CPU, 8 gigs of RAM, and a terabyte of disk space. I actually run several servers (like Mumble) on this machine itself, hence my need to open certain ports. There are several gaming computers, game consoles, phones, tablets, printers, and portable devices like 3DS's on my network, and I have never once had to forward any ports for things like online gaming, PSN, Nintendo Network, etc to work.