I just wanted to give some feedback about playing ESO with a high level of latency (210-240ms ping) before my subscription expires.

I now realise that there is a very good reason that most mmo games separate people from different geographical regions (e.g: European, American, oceanic) usually by creating instanced versions of the game or ‘realms’ that are meant for different geographic groups. It’s not just because they don’t want these people to play together, it’s because it helps to keep the playing field fair. People from the same geographic region tend to have the same level of latency, so in player interactions (such as pvp) it keeps the playing field relatively level (people with 150ms playing against people with 150ms).

In a game with a ‘mega server’ that level playing field is pretty much destroyed. I have experienced virtual world interactions with other players that have really shown me how handicapped I am with high latency. Twice now I’ve run up to a mining node and pressed E to mine and then another player has run up behind me and arrived at the node just under a second later and IMMEDIATELY taken out their pick axe and mined the node and then run off, leaving my character standing there doing nothing with me grinding my teeth in frustration. I can’t seriously believe that this is how Zenimax wanted me to experience the game.

I haven’t tried pvp but I can imagine that with high latency it’s incredibly frustrating. With 240ms pve combat is already very slow and clunky, but against people with say 18ms pvp combat would be awful. Due to the real time combat elements people with lower latency are basically playing the game faster, they can get more instant attacks off in a lesser space of time. Plus you can’t line up these attacks you basically have to wait for the light attack to go off and the casting animation to finish before pressing for the next light attack/heavy attack.

Also in pve I have noticed that when I use attacks that are meant to stun the enemy for 2 seconds, sometimes the creature isn’t stunned at all, maybe it was on the server side but on my side it was hardly stunned. Also dodging aoe abilities is problematic as even though on my side I’ve clearly dodged it, I still receive the aoe damage.

I know there are some Australians that will say that they experience no lag whatsoever and the game plays fine. To that I can only reply that, you are probably so used to playing on high ping that you don’t know what it’s like to play with say 18ms which I played with as standard when I lived in the UK. I can clearly see the difference that a high ping makes: instant abilities are just not instant.