ESO's most frustrating bugs... many of which have been around for years.

Asriel_Brightborn · September 2020

Effort versus impact, that’s the equation every product owner has to evaluate when making decisions about features to add and bugs to fix. Below are a list of long-standing issues, many of which have simple solutions that Zenimax has neglected to fix or implement. These contribute significantly towards player churn.

Bugs

Dungeon finder. When it’s broken altogether (as in the service has crashed)... in this case, I recommend Zabbix for diagnosing what’s happening to your microservices that’s causing them to exhibit such volatile behaviour. Per second telemetry will let you get to the bottom of these kinds of issues.
Dungeon finder. Being kicked from the queue for changing zones, or not receiving notification during zone change.
Dungeon finder. Being unable to respond to a request from the dungeon finder because the user interface to respond to the request never properly renders on the screen..
Dungeon finder. When you cancel yourself from the queue, but it doesn’t actually remove you from the queue. It requires logging out of the game and back in to properly dislodge yourself. I suspect this is client based: the server has properly removed the player but the client fails to receive or properly interpret the response from the server.
Dungeon finder. When you get called into a dungeon, respond, and end up waiting infinitely for another player to respond (and the only way to get unstuck is by logging out and back in).
Groups. When you get stuck in a group and the game will not release you from that group (despite relogging) until ESO decides to do full on server maintenance.
Stuck in combat. Generally caused by aggression of a monster you weren’t aware you aggressed, and has somehow become “stuck”. There really needs to be an event timer built into the game where any non-aggressive action for taken to or by the player results in removal from combat.
Steam Account Linking. “Unable to initialize connection to Steam” error that appears: I suspect this isn’t Zenimax’s issue, but they could update their error message to better describe how to resolve this. Fixing this issue requires logging out of Steam and back in before reloading ESO.
Loading screens in Craglorn while traveling the land. This only seems to happen in Craglorn, but you get an intermittent loading screen even though you’re not moving (and sometimes even if you are moving). It only lasts about 1 second but it’s extremely disruptive as it closes any open user interface.
Inability to loot enemies. This appears to be user interface related; despite an enemy body glowing indicating there is loot to grab, there is no way to grab it. Pointing at the enemy does not introduce the user interface to loot the body.
Inability to find enemy bodies. This may be related to the last item, but the server and client seem to render dead, lootable bodies at different locations. This results in the player seeing a lootable body but having to point at an invisible location where the body is actually located (likely based on where the server recorded the monster death).
Adric Spears does not cast all the time. Adric Spears doesn’t cast even though the animation fully plays out. The spear drops, hits the ground, and then disappears as though nothing happened.
Imperial City Prison. On occasion, pressing the “X” (synergy keybinding) key to slow descent during the Warden fight does not work. The user interface appears telling the player to press “X” but it simply doesn’t work.
The guild trader is not listed on the guild page. This has been a problem since Update 27 for sure and happens to at least two of the trading guilds I’m involved with.
Infinite loading screen when changing zones. What’s interesting about this one is you can hear sound effects as though the zone loaded correctly but it never moves past the loading screen. The only way out of this one is to end the eso.exe process in Windows and restart the game.
Endless client-server discrepancies. You block, but it doesn’t register on the server. You dodge AoE attacks, but it doesn’t register on the server. I have oodles of screenshots showing my player clearly outside damage zones and blocking attacks where the server was misaligned. This doesn’t seem to be entirely network latency as I hardly ever exceed 120ms and the game appears to be off by 500-1000ms latency at times.

Infrastructure

Latency on guild traders. Latency on guild banks. Latency on mail. I can’t think of any other MMO game I’ve played where players are sometimes required to wait anywhere from 8-15 seconds for transactions to complete.

User Experience

Mount speed. Increasing the requirements for Rapid Maneuver is by far one of the most disruptive rebalancing decisions Zenimax has made. I cannot express strongly enough how frustrating this change is for players who detest the PvP aspect of the game (PVP is a great feature, but not for everyone). It should not be mandatory to participate in PvP to get a reasonable mount speed increase ability. And, moving across the land, even with 60/60 riding, is dreadfully slow when you’re skyshard hunting, scrying, completing treasure maps, quests, or any of the other dozens of activities that aren’t PvP related which require mass amounts of travel. It's also not realistic to expect players to participate on *every* character to get Rapid Maneuver.
Chests. Players should be required to fully loot a chests items so that it properly respawns: often players will leave the invaluable items which causes the chest to not respawn until fully looted. It’s like cleaning up after somebody else’s mess.
Dismounting. The player is dismounted for a number of fairly ridiculous reasons: getting partially stuck, entering water, entering a city zone. Why? This doesn’t seem to serve any purpose.
Crafting feedback related to research. When mousing over items, the game should tell you whether or not you’ve researched traits associated with that item. I get that there are add-on’s but in it’s natural state, the game is almost unusable for crafting and research. I gave up on crafting well before I really got started and it wasn’t until players turned me to add-on’s that I decided to give it another shot.
Hide styles that a person doesn’t have materials to craft. There’s no good reason to show these and it makes it extremely difficult to navigate through when you have collected a large number of style motifs.
The game should remember the guild I’m actively “using”. When using the Guild Store to list items you set one guild, roam around the world for a bit, and it forgets which guild you were working with the next time you return. Alternatively, allowing the player to set a default guild that banks, guild store options, etc. default to would solve this issue.
Better system of traveling once you’ve acquired wayshrines. Let’s face it, people join big guilds so they can use other players’ locations to travel. That’s really goofy. If a player isn’t in a location you want to go, you often teleport to any player just to speed up getting to a wayshrine. At the end of the day this requires significantly more loading screens than a player should have to get to just to dodge the crazy (and useless?) fees charged for beaming to a wayshrine from any location. Mixed together with loading screen issues you could at least reduce the chances of hard crashes by minimizing the number of times player hit loading screens.
Filter out recipes from guild traders that a player already knows. Again, this really needs to be built into the game. Leaning on the add-on community to provide a reasonable user experience is irresponsible.
Get rid of the “type DELETE” to remove an item. Just allow us to pull it back from the trash like everything else. This is annoying… especially for weird items like Laurel that have almost no value and still require you to type out the full, capitalized word DELETE.

Map Design

Wayrest Sewers. Delete the crocodile at the beginning of the map. When damage dealers use AoE they often engage the crocodiles without killing them. This results in the infamous “unable to get through the door” bug following the third boss because people are stuck in combat from the crocodiles.
Hel Ra Citadel
The gate closes and the team fighting on the bottom is indefinitely stuck in combat due to the infinite spawn. If a player gets disconnected or quits it’s impossible to backfill that players role because of being stuck in combat.
There needs to be a way to disable hard mode. Between malicious players and naive players, it’s not reasonable to force a group to restart an entire trial because of the actions of one player. Like most ESO dungeons and trials, hard mode should be reset following a wipe. The solution is simple: the group wipes, the statues spawn back, and the team gets to decide to enable hard mode a second time or not.

New feature requests

Trial group finder. Just a chat -- a place for people to go to connect with other players who want to run a specific trial. You already have zone chats. You need to give players the tools they need to have successful experiences in the game. The zone instantiation and segregation of players makes it very, very challenging at times to get trials together.

One of the things I will commend the Elder Scrolls Online about: it's a vibrant, non-toxic community made of up fairly mature players. I think this attests to your moderation team dealing swiftly with toxicity. This game is a great way to blow off steam and I hope this list help prioritize things that I think are important. If you're a player reading this, and you agree, drop a note below and apply pressure on the areas of the game that need improving. And, if you disagree, be specific about why: I'd personally like to know what the greater community thinks of these issues and how they stack up against things that aren't in my list.

katanagirl1 · September 2020

I mostly agree with the above except for hiding styles when player doesn’t have mats, I wouldn’t want to be looking for a style for a writ and not be able to find it just because I am out of that style mat at the time.

The stamina mount bug needs to be addressed ASAP due to the impact to Cyrodiil PvP. If you can manage to not sprint before mounting, the mount’s stamina bar sometimes doesn’t drain as fast but the mount does get slower after only a few seconds of sprinting. Rapid Manuever doesn’t seem to be as fast as before either when mounted.

Skills are still not working as they should. I fought Ysmgar in Western Skyrim today with another player and I was unable to bar swap and almost all staff skills stopped working. The staff was on my character’s back instead. Had to get killed and respawn to fix it. I think getting hit with his sword attack or other skills may have caused it as I was taking most of the damage.

Asriel_Brightborn · January 2021

Five months later: number of bugs on this list that have been fixed, none. Last night we had a player (guildie) rage quit the game due to crashing -- it was hard for them to even run a trial. Any time there was a zone shift they crashed (e.g. entering the door to the final stage of Hel Ra Citadel). You can't blame this on client-side issues (e.g. malware, inadequate system) given it happens to almost every player -- just some more than others.

Surely Zenimax (and now Microsoft) must realize that failing to address the underlying major bugs in the game results in player churn. If people are leaving, they're certainly not buying crowns or subscriptions.

I'm getting tired of hearing about new expansions and DLC without anyone directly addressing the one thing that impacts everyone players experience: stability. I had high hopes when Microsoft purchased Zenimax that we might see better prioritization of development effort so that issues like the list above might be quenched once and for all. Please give serious consideration to investing more time into fixing the core game issues that continue to plague players. The content creation team does a great job, it's unfortunate to see their efforts undermined by these kinds of core issues.

Qbiken · January 2021

Chests. Players should be required to fully loot a chests items so that it properly respawns: often players will leave the invaluable items which causes the chest to not respawn until fully looted. It’s like cleaning up after somebody else’s mess.

The despawn/respawn timer starts from the moment a player interacts with it, not when it´s emptied. A new chest will respawn at the same rate regardless if the chest was properly looted or not.

Darcwolf · January 2021

Don't forget the great werewolf pounce bug that is being completely ignored.

Mr_Arce88 · January 2021

Those are not bugs, those are clearly features if they stay in the game so long XD