The Elder Scrolls Online has been struggling with console and PC stability ever since The Ascending Tide DLC and its associated patch rolled out last week, particularly on the North American PC servers. While the team has since fixed most of the issues, ZeniMax Online Studios’ Matt Firor has now addressed the whole situation in a post-mortem, saying the performance problems “deserve some explanation.”
Firor notes that ZOS made performance a priority last year, specifically homing in on database sharding old vs. new characters upon login. With so many people joining the game, the megaserver login process had become a bottleneck. That was previously fixed for console, but the PC NA megaserver is much larger than on console. The team expected to enable sharding for PC NA after update 33, but it didn’t go to plan.
“[A]ll of you who play on the PC NA megaserver know what happened once we flipped the DB Sharding switch: the entire server slowed down even more during primetime,” Firor admits. “The DB processes got backed up, which meant that all transfers between processes (i.e. zoning) were even slower, as well as logouts (where your character’s DB record is updated) and the Activity Finder (which accesses your character records) became so bogged down it essentially ceased to function at all.”
The team has been tracing the problems all week, assuming they were a result of the sharding, but it turns out they were digging in the wrong place.
“The issue was actually caused by a bad (as in failing) network port that was unable to process as much bandwidth as it was configured for,” Firor explains. “It wasn’t a software problem at all; it was a hardware failure that, in essence, slowed down the entire megaserver. […] The TL;DR is that it wasn’t related to Update 33, Account Wide Achievements or DB Sharding at all, even though they all happened around the same time and we spent too much time investigating a red herring because of it.”
Firor apologizes for the errors and says the studio will be compensating players with “five 150% Experience Scrolls on the first day of April through the Daily Login Rewards calendar” as well as “tripling the number of Weekly Endeavor Seals the week of 4/4 for players on all ESO platforms.”
