ZOS_MattFiror

It is approaching midyear and time to give an update on how our multithreading work is going. If you remember, back at the end of last year, I gave the news that we would be performing an ongoing series of server work aimed at spreading out ESO processes across more CPU cores, with the goal that it would result in a substantial increase in server performance. Over Update 37 – launched back in March – and in Update 38, we have completed some of this work.

Initial metrics, however, show that these steps in multithreading are not having as much of a performance improvement as desired, and so we had to roll back one of the process changes because it introduced an unacceptable level of instability. Fortunately, the recent upgrade to server hardware has resulted in more customer-facing server performance improvements than any of our multithreading work in all public realms where we’ve completed the work. (Xbox EU is still scheduled for later this year.) In fact, the recent Whitest... Read more

Now that we are well under way on our server hardware upgrade project, it's time for an update. Most of you reading this know that we successfully replaced the PC North American megaserver's hardware back in May, and we have been hard at work planning, ordering, and preparing for the PC European server upgrade.

The last time we gave you an update, I mentioned that timelines to order, prepare, and configure this amount of hardware would take many months, and unfortunately those timelines have only gotten longer. Even though we ordered the hardware for PC EU long ago, we still are waiting for some critical parts, some of which are foundational to the whole service.

To be completely transparent, it will take about ten more weeks before all the pieces are delivered. Then the process of building and testing begins, which takes weeks longer. Based on what we know today, we anticipate everything being updated, tested, and running the live version of the game around March 202... Read more

For those that still don't appear to have your ESO+ benefits in-game, could you please provide your UserID and platform?

Greetings everyone – I’m very happy to be able to give you a progress update on our datacenter hardware refresh. We’ve talked about this a few times in the past but to remind everyone what this is, here are a few things to keep in mind:

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[*] In most cases, we are still running on 2012-era server hardware and it needs to be updated before components start failing more than they are. So, we are literally swapping out (“refreshing”) all hardware in our two datacenters.
[*] This will not result in any appreciable performance gain in-game, but it will result in a more reliable service overall that needs fewer unplanned maintenances.
[*] This was originally planned for last year, but the pandemic pushed back the timelines as it has become difficult to acquire new hardware because of global shortages.
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It’s worth noting we installed and transitioned all the hardware for the PTS a few weeks ago, before the U34 PTS update, and we’re happy to report it h... Read more

Just a quick note to give everyone an update on our ongoing server/login issues. Over the past few weeks, we’ve seen a large increase in the number of players logging into the PC EU server. This caused some congestion and the issues you saw on that server including long load screens and guild traders not updating, to name a few. Now that things are more stable, we are continuing to very closely monitor server performance, especially during peak play times on our North American and European PC servers.

We are taking this very seriously, especially as our player logins have increased substantially over the last two weeks - this increase is normal during this time of year as we go through our Anniversary event in the run up to the annual Chapter launch. Additionally, we have the Free Play Event starting today on all platforms. So, if needed, we will institute a login queue on servers that are experiencing particularly heavy load due to the combination of the Anniversary and Free... Read more

Since Update 33 launched, I think the PC North American megaserver performance problems deserve some explanation. This post outlines what has been going on the last week or so for our North American PC players.

First, last year (which seems like decades ago) we announced a plan to increase ESO’s stability and performance, and we have been diligently performing tasks behind the scenes with every update to implement them. One of the larger items on this list was "Database Sharding" which is a simple concept: take our giant player database (DB) and separate it into two sections for "current characters" and "older characters" so the entire DB doesn't have to be queried when a player logs in. Over time, our character DB (one per Megaserver) has been growing and about two years ago, its sheer size became a bottleneck. This is why the "requesting character load" part of the login process sometimes takes a lot longer than it should.

The DB Sharding process separates our cha... Read more

Now that the dust has settled and the ESO PlayStation service is back up, here's a quick summary of what happened and what we'll do to make up the day of playtime that our PS4/5 community lost. The extended downtime was particularly unfortunate timing as yesterday was a holiday for many of you, and we know you were looking forward to spending your time off adventuring in Tamriel. We understand how frustrating this was.

First, the issue itself was caused by a service problem between ESO and the PSN platform and was entirely our fault. Because it was a problem between the ESO game and the PSN service, our solution was to rebuild the ESO patch, test it, and submit it for certification. This process takes time, which is where the initial 24-48 hour estimate came from.

However, with critical help from our PSN partners, we figured out a much faster solution - to modify the service itself. With that, it only took a service update and a restart, and after testing and verific... Read more