Back in 2014, 50v50v50 people fighting for a single castle, while plenty other players were doing their thing elsewhere in Cyrodiil, was a thing. Over the years though, you could see how performance got worse and worse. While I only can speculate about the reasons, several incidents over the years showed that the more stuff your toon has done in ESO the more "luggage" it carries around in terms of data, which needs to be loaded by servers of course. I still remember that ESO had issues at one point to load characters that completed plenty of quests and zone completions due to DB timeouts and the like while new chars could log in without any issue in seconds. Sure, ZOS off-loaded data of players that haven't logged in in a while to a cold storage, but IMO the actual problem was just deferred to some later point.

That calculating various combat related numbers outside of groups and the like may have an impact here as well. And with over 600 sets in the game, where some have some "unique" combat mechanic additions just tells a story on its own. ESO got probably to complex behind the curtain over the years. Those issues you showcased though exist for several years. I remember those just to well before my 2y+ break.

Kessra wrote: »

While I only can speculate about the reasons, several incidents over the years showed that the more stuff your toon has done in ESO the more "luggage" it carries around in terms of data, which needs to be loaded by servers of course.

OMG! I've been saying this for years, and thought I was imagining it - bemoaning sorcs for being laggy - maybe it's the lightning particle effects? Maybe it's the pets? But after I made a new Sorc it wasn't anything like my main achievement character Sorc was so I blamed it on achievements. Now we have account wide achievements and everything is worse for all characters except my main. It makes sense if this is a thing