That’s exactly what’s been going on in The Elder Scrolls Online the last few months. According to ZeniMax, there’s been a “massive influx of players” to the game on the European side, causing “server performance issues for [its] players on the PC-EU megaserver, especially during prime-time hours.” In a note to players this morning, ZeniMax’s Matt Firor explained that the influx began in January.
“We’ve have had some of our highest weekly average user, daily active user, and peak concurrent user numbers in the last six weeks since we launched on console back in 2015,” he writes. “However, in late March, we really saw a huge spike in the number of users logging in, which led to too many concurrent users for the platform to effectively support. As a result, players on PC EU have seen a severe degradation in service. This degradation started in January, but has greatly accelerated in the last week – lag spikes, disconnects, inability to zone from instance to instance, weird interactions with LFG, etc.”
(Interesting note: Firor says EU is affected more heavily because the EU market is more highly PC-centric and because peak playtime isn’t as spread out as in NA since there are two timezones instead of four, creating higher peak usage.)
The bottom line? The studio’s implemented queues to handle it.
“As a short-term solution to address these issues, we are turning on a login queueing system for that server. Set in place to create an optimal player experience for our ESO fans playing on the PC-EU server, this queueing system allows for a set number of players to be in the game at a time. Players waiting in the queueing system will be able to enter the game as soon as a spot opens up. (Please note that your estimated on-screen wait time may not reflect your actual wait time.)”
The good news, especially for those grousing in the comments about paying a sub and still being confronted with queues, is that this is a temporary thing. That’s because ZOS is ultimately planning to boost capacity for the EU servers, “spinning up additional hardware in both our NA and EU datacenters in order to support our growing user base” since the company is “rapidly approaching the same problem in NA and want[s] to get ahead of it.”
Yeah, there are definitely worse problems to have.
