Game Freezing and Crashing When Entering Skingrad (Live and PTS)

FabresFour · October 1

It’s really strange. I had the game open on live server and it worked normally with all my characters that aren’t in Skingrad. However, when I log in with the character that’s in Skingrad, the game freezes and then, after a few minutes, it crashes. The first time, I entered the city, stayed there for a few minutes in the crafting area (less than 5 minutes), and the game froze and then closed shortly after. Now, just loading into the city is enough for it to happen.

To test if it was only a West Weald issue, I opened the PTS (where I had been online earlier for about half an hour in Solstice) and teleported to Skingrad to check if the error also happened there—and yes, it does. The error occurs in the PTS as well.

Now, I can’t log into my main character or several other characters on my account anymore, since Skingrad was my main crafting hub.

Detail: I changed my graphics card—before I was using a GTX 1070, now I’m on a 5060 Ti, and the performance has improved A LOT. I’m even running games like Oblivion Remastered. But it only makes sense if it’s a GPU-related issue… could there be some incompatibility going on? What can I try to make this stop happening? I already tried using the launcher to repair the files, but it didn’t seem to do anything. I’ll try reinstalling the game now, maybe even moving it from the HDD to the SSD (I usually reserve the SSD for heavier games than ESO).

FabresFour · October 11

An update regarding the crashes: I found out that my interpretation of what was causing them was completely wrong. In reality, here’s what’s actually happening:

When I open ESO for the first time after installation, it works perfectly and continues to work flawlessly for the entire play session until I close the game. If I close the game and reopen it, it still works fine. However, once I close the launcher, it changes the settings in the UserSettings file, and when I try to open the game again, it no longer works. Basically, it crashes just as I described in the original post.

In other words: somehow, closing the launcher is altering the settings that originally allowed the game to run correctly. I’ll keep testing to try to understand why this is happening.

Note: I DISCOVERED that it’s possible to play the game if, every time I close the launcher, I also delete the “live” folder. That way, when I open the game again, it behaves as if I’m launching ESO for the first time after installation. But if I close the launcher, the issue happens again.

Anyway, this was a good discovery — it was really frustrating to have this happen right before Writhing Wall, but at least I managed to partially solve it. Now, it’s just a matter of figuring out what’s causing it. I’ll run some tests with different monitors in the next days.

Sarannah · October 11

Are your usersettings perhaps on onedrive? As that is known to have caused issues with user settings not being saved in the past, and players having to keep setting their game settings over and over.

FabresFour · October 11

Sarannah wrote: »

Are your usersettings perhaps on onedrive? As that is known to have caused issues with user settings not being saved in the past, and players having to keep setting their game settings over and over.

I was testing it last night and found out that was the issue — I just saw your message LOL! Thanks for replying here! Yeah, it’s basically a conflict between OneDrive and the ESO folder, since it keeps overwriting it. The problem is finally 100% solved!

thanks!!