Did They Try Unplugging It And Plugging It Back In? Elder Scrolls Online MAY Have Found The Cause Of Recent Heavy Issues

For a while now, The Elder Scrolls Online team has been working on restructuring their server systems in order to improve load times. To achieve this, they've been setting up two different shards, one for current characters and one with characters that haven't been touched in a while. If the characters on the latter are logged into they’re moved to the newer character shard. It all sounds pretty efficient and has worked well enough on consoles.

That said, it has yet to be implemented on PC. The reason for this is that they wanted to drop Update 33 first, get all those kinks worked out, and then begin the process of creating the shards. Unfortunately, this hasn't worked out to their benefit as, while they expected a certain number of bugs and other issues, they've been experiencing bigger issues as well. These include load screen timeouts and the Activity Finder bogging down – an issue they have attributed to certain processes running "hot", spiking, and returning to normal.

Things got worse when they tried to initiate the sharding, slowing down the whole server, backing up the database, and more. As it turns out, the sharding system was designed to deal with normal server behavior and not everything else that was currently going on. But, it wasn't specifically this that was causing the problem. Instead, it turns out the issue was traced to a network port that wasn't made to process the bandwidth it was handling.

Knowing this, they believe they're in the process of getting everything back under control. However, the post does state that they make no guarantees. They've also noted that they’ll be compensating players with 150% XP Scrolls on the first day of April and tripling the number of weekly Endeavor Seals.