The Elder Scrolls Online had massive issues at the launch of Greymoor. There were login problems, bugs, and some players gained access to the new chapter without purchasing it. ZeniMax CEO Matt Firor explained in an open letter what went wrong and how it was fixed.
What happened with ESO? At the launch of Greymoor, there were considerable problems and for days there was at least one downtime with server maintenance and hotfixes. The reason for the seemingly endless issues was a combination of several factors. What exactly went wrong is explained by ESO CEO Matt Firor himself.
Problem 1 – Skyrim for Everyone!
This was the first problem: Hardly had the servers finally gone online hours after the planned start, confusion reigned. Some players, despite purchase and pre-order, could not enter the new area in western Skyrim. Others, however, who had not purchased Greymoor, could happily frolic in the new chapter and even grab the coveted pre-order bonuses. According to Firor, this was due to a faulty setting of the test server settings:
The first problem we encountered on Tuesday morning occurred about two minutes after we opened the servers: We had set the “PTS flag” on live accounts so that everyone had access to Greymoor, whether they had purchased it or not. So we had to shut down the servers and fix everything – we dealt with some aftereffects all week as some users were left in limbo because they had purchased it but could not travel there. We took care of almost all of these cases, but please contact customer service if you still have problems.
Problem 2 – The Death Load Screens
This is how the next problem arose: The issue with the faulty Greymoor purchases was bearable, but then the next annoyance came up. Because Greymoor had a lot of new achievements thanks to the new skill line from the Antiquities System. That wouldn’t have been a problem, but a bug caused character saves to be triggered much more often than intended. The result was a massive system overload:
These two factors together meant that save times increased over time and all character load and save times became congested, leading to endless loading screens, timeouts when transitioning from one location to another, etc. It took a while for us to find and fix the cause, but by Wednesday afternoon (after another maintenance in the morning) it was resolved.
Problem 3 – The Lag from Hell
This problem came next: The aforementioned issues were already enough to give any development team gray hairs. But ESO did not rest. Terrible lag plagued players at times, making combat nearly unplayable. This was due to the following causes:
Next, there was the problem of “zone lag”, which continued until Friday, where each instance of a zone reacted slower and slower the more players entered that instance. This was a bug with the combat synergies – the more you found yourself in large combat situations (PvP, dungeons, trials, Harrowstorms, etc.), the more it clogged up the entire zone, making it “laggy”. This bug was particularly discouraging for us, as we had included a number of performance improvements in Update 26, but this synergy bug overshadowed them all and nullified them. After extensive investigations and analyses, we found and resolved the issue. The maintenance on Friday morning included the fix, and by the end of Friday, everything was finally fixed.
What’s next: Matt Firor is glad that the worst issues could be fixed through the hard work of his team. Moreover, the fixes will also be part of the new releases of Greymoor on PS4 and Xbox on June 9 and the long-awaited Stadia launch on June 16, 2020. So there are good hopes that the release of Greymoor on these platforms will go better than on PC.
