With the recent rocky launch of Greymoor, the latest chapter for Elder Scrolls Online, Game Director Matt Firor has posted a lengthy update addressing the issues and ongoing actions.
If you recall, ESO was taken offline pretty much right after launch due to an issue with seemingly everyone having access to Greymoor, regardless if they purchased it. This is something Matt Firor addresses head-on in the update,
“The first issue we encountered on Tuesday morning was about two minutes after we opened the servers: we had the PTS flag set for live accounts, so everyone had access to Greymoor, whether they purchased it or not. So we had to take servers down and set everything straight – we had some lingering effects all week as some users were caught in limbo having purchased it but not being able to travel there. We have addressed almost all of these cases, but please contact Customer Support if you are still having issues.”
The second issue began with a combination of the addition of new achievements coupled with character records saved far more frequently. This resulted in increased save times,
“These two factors together meant that save times grew over time, backing up all character loads and saves, which led to infinite load screens, timeouts while zoning from one place to another, etc. It took us a while to find the root cause and fix this one, but by Wednesday afternoon (after another maintenance that morning), it was fixed.”
Zone lag was also discussed as an issue, resulting in a degradation of response the more and more people entered a zone. Apparently, this was a bug with combat synergies. In short, the more you happened to be in combat situations, the more this hindered performance across the zone,
“This bug was especially disheartening to us, because we included a bunch of performance improvement fixes in U26, but this Synergy bug masked all of them, rendering them moot. After much investigation and analysis, we found and fixed the problem. Friday morning's maintenance contained the fix and finally, by the end of Friday, things were in a better place.”
It appears this bug has been fixed, according to Matt’s letter, with the team continuing to monitor performance. The team is looking at various metrics and will continue to implement performance improvements. The post ends with Matt thanking the community for their patience,
“Thanks everyone. Seriously. We are doing the best we can under the circumstances, and we are very proud that we got Update 26 to launch only one week later than scheduled. Launch could have been smoother, but we will work hard to ensure that ESO is stable and fun for years to come. Stay safe and healthy, and wash your damn hands.”
In case you missed it, read our thoughts on why MMO launches must do better right out of the gate.
