I don't know if this is what the OP is talking about, but yesterday I wasn't able to play between 9 PM and 12 AM (GMT+1) due to internal problems (according to the error message, I'm not 100% sure what it was saying). It also asked me to "repair" the game (and even though I have fiber optic, it always takes ages, so I just waited a bit and was finally able to launch the game again).

Also, when you get kicked from the game due to an internal error, the most frustrating part is the fact that the more you try to get back in (for example, if you're in an instance with mates), the worse the error gets. You have to wait like 5 minutes before trying to relog. Otherwise, you'll get some serious issues like this:



I still don't understand why the game needs so many maintenance times when the final results are so poor in the end.

I was one of those affected PTS players last year.

This was not some minor short 2 day issue like you make it sound. My account was locked for more than 2 weeks and wasn't able to participate in the whole anniversary event. So it was only normal they gave us these compensations for being locked out for so long, which was not our fault.

As for lootboxes; we can't buy those in my country here (Belgium) because they are forbidden by law because these are gambling mechanics without clear rules and our law requires you always to know in advance what you pay for. So you know what you get into when you gamble a lot of money in this.

ShadowWolf44 wrote: »

Another night of NO ESO. Last time? It was like 3 days, 5 days for some of us. What was done about this? Not much, really. What? Like 1k "Endeavors"? The PTS people missed like a day, two, tops. What was done?

Why, they were giving 16 THOUSAND, that's 16,000 Endeavors, PLUS all the gear the rest of us were trying to grind out, *(most of us unsuccessfully), Several Gold Purples boxes, and OH, so much more. See, those people they see as "important".

Eleven. We missed eleven days, and were not let in until after the even ended.

Keep in mind that the PTS people are the ones most likely to have already grinded out the pages by then anyway. I sure did. I didn't need them to give me those pages, because I'd gotten my fifth the day before the lockout. What I did end up missing was the entire rest of the event. How many Anniversary boxes did you get? How many motif pages that you could sell? How much XP did you get on your alts? How many progs did you not have to cancel?

And in return, I got a bunch of style pages that are still sitting in one character's inventory that I can't sell, and a bunch of Seals that I haven't used since I'm not that into Radiant Apex mounts.

The PTS testers are probably also the most important players, since they're the unpaid testers who take time out of their own schedule to check out the new content before it goes live and give feedback, either because they just love the game that much or because they are content creators who are advertising the game and their income literally depends on them being able to play. A lot of them are also the addon devs who, again unpaid, are making sure we have the QoL things that a lot of PC players rely on (and hopefully, some of them will also deign to spend time porting said addons to console when that is a possibility later this year). As to whether the devs are taking the feedback given is another question (and that was particularly bad all of last year), but communication does seem to be improving a bit and we hope it continues on that path.

Sure, the streamers got codes to share in giveaways. But what about those of us who do PTS all the time and don't stream, we just do it for the love of the game. Yeah, we don't get squat for doing it. And there are some things that we find - my big example is the fact that I found a quest-breaking bug in the Orsinium storyline on PTS the patch before they were going to have their big Orsinium celebration (with rewards for doing the main quest, which would have been impossible if that bug went live). And two weeks after I found it and reported it, I got a streamer to use their private channels to tell the devs and their response was "wait, what?" And then it got fixed before release, so then they didn't have to bug their event they were planning.

Everyone who got hit with the PTS lockout would rather have been playing the event instead of getting hit with it. Let's be fully clear about that.

ShadowWolf44 wrote: »

And for some of us? It's even worse than that. I've pretty much just given up on Crown Crates. Over 1k Crates? And not even a 400 crown gem reward. In fact? I had one "streak", where I got NOTHING BUT BLUE ITEMS, out of 25 crates. I guess "Blue" items, are considered a "reward" too. How, I've no idea.- But for hundreds of dollars? I got nothing, whatsoever.

"My bad RNG", or so they say, right? Funny how it seems all the players that get rewarded with 16,000 endeavors? You know, PTS peeps, Streamers, Bloggers, and those who's videos promote the game? All seem to have INCREDIBLE RNG.

I mean, sure, they SAY they're having "bad RNG"? But only because they got 2-3 400 crown gem mounts, instead of a Radiant Apex one- you know how that goes, right, regular, loyal players? Horrible when something like that happens to you....

Yes, the Crate odds seem to have gone down. Everyone's seeing that the purple/gold rewards are as rare now as the old apexes used to be and most people just get blues. We've also seen the reward tiers increase too, with costumes now making it into the 400 gem tier. I know a lot of people have stopped buying loads of Crates anymore, or at least just collect gems and seals for a few things instead of hoping for RNG.

The entire Crate thing is skeevy and the best game is not to play - or at least to mark a few things you want and save up gems or seals for them. That's one of my goals every patch is to check the Crown Store datamines to see what would be worth saving up for, since it's incredibly rare that any of that stuff will go anywhere but the next set of Crates.

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Now, as for the recent downtime:

This last one was short and started around 10:30 pm on a Sunday night (EST because that's where Zeni HQ is). Kevin actually responded at that point. On a Sunday night. I know if it were me, I'd say "that sounds like a Monday morning problem," but he actually came on really late at night just to give an update. He then updated at 1:30 am (again, he's probably gotta be at work soon!) that it was fixed.

The one a few days ago was also acknowledged as a malicious attack. There have been a number of malicious attacks recently, as mentioned in the letter Matt posted in January, where he also specifically acknowledged

Part of why we have not publicly addressed this sooner is because by even just talking about malicious network attacks against ESO, we run the risk of incurring more of them. This is why the standard playbook for internet companies is to not talk about them publicly - but this is information that I think you all need to know.

Also the two downtimes early this month were planned, both of which came up in the Maintenance Announcements section. See the threads for the one on Feb 5 and Feb 19. It was the Feb 5 one that actually ran long (20 hours or so), and because of that they are going to be offering extra rewards in March's login calendar for people who missed out that day.

Look, I know it's frustrating, but catastrophizing and exaggerating is never the way to make an argument. If you present fake facts, people will just not listen.