Some people are not terribly happy about the 12-player group limit in The Elder Scrolls Online for understandable reasons. It makes anything you’d want to do with more people pretty well impossible, including more social experiences like housing tours. So what’s the reasoning behind it? A lot of players had speculated that it was based on performance, and community manager Gina Bruno has confirmed on the official forums that this is exactly the reason behind it.
Of course, this doesn’t do much to mollify the people who are affected by this situation and want larger group sizes, as there’s no real recourse offered for things like housing tours where performance isn’t as much of an issue. Nothing in Bruno’s statement implies that the group size limit is up for debate. Still, at least players have an actual reason now instead of just speculation.We’ve been continually looking at ways to improve performance and stability across the game and we found reducing the group size was an effective way to ensure there would be fewer situations where you hit critical memory. Additionally, there’s a fair amount of data that has to be exchanged on the backend for every person in your group. By limiting the group size to 12, we’re introducing additional performance gains.
