re: Elder Scrolls PS4 Beta

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I tested the computer version a year ago. Was pretty terrible. However I'm super pumped now that the new reviews have come out for Tamriel Unlimited.

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Definitely try it out again. Now that they've fixed their instancing and are running smoothly, it plays very well. Add in the fact that they plan to add a ton of stuff once they'd gotten patch 1.6 out and launched the console versions, and it makes the additions such as the bounty system and dyes seem much less shitty. It's amazing what a game running smoothly can do to alter an opinion.

I played during the early betas where the technology was really being pushed to fail, and people were raging over how the game just "didn't work". All sorts of issues in every aspect, and it really ruined the experience for a lot of people. They all stemmed from the same problem, though, and I wrote a very lengthy post on it in the beta forums that got some love from a few developers, actually. Here's a condensed(lol) version of what that post said for anyone who may be interested in why there were so many problems at launch with a few added thoughts from after launch.

TL;DR WARNING: This is long as shite and semi-technical. It is probably only interesting to people who care to learn about these things.

Most of the issues like bugged quests that can't be finished and terrible instancing were related to their Mega Server technology. It was designed to do instancing on the fly based on demand, and if isn't working properly, nothing is. They either underestimated the demand for their game or the guys who designed their resource management for allocation of instances had either never taken an OS course or heard of the term "deadlock" or didn't think to check for edge case behavior. I say this because almost every issue at launch was due to a new technology (at that scale, anyway) being sent through the gauntlet and experiencing terrible instancing due to a very classic problem in Computer Science. In fact, my username, Dijkstra, is the name of a legend in Computer Science who came up with one of the most classic problems, the Dining Philosophers problem, dealing with issues in terms of resource allocation and deadlock. While this wasn't truly deadlock, the situation ended up seeming like it was purposely designed as problem on a final to analyze why things went wrong. It's possible that they accepted the initial rush causing problems and decided not to go crazy trying to prevent it, but they found afterwards that the system had some pretty gaping flaws in it along the way.

The whole point of Mega Server is to create one world where everything everyone does in-game is connected in a sense. This solves a ton of problems such as traditional servers going down for maintenance or failing, and it especially is good for handling periods of high load. Wherever there is more activity, more instances are created and more resources are allocated to them. The problem with this, though, is that if the system begins to "crumble" then every single aspect of the game is affected all the way from questing to mail to fast travel. This isn't a problem in 99.9% of the time because the chances of all resources being allocated terrible enough to cripple the whole system at normal to reasonable high load in the vast majority of cases is almost impossible.

In this case, the old programming adage about always double-checking edge cases struck in the worst possible way. The game launched, and everyone was funneled into Coldharbour. 100% of the population was in the same exact zone, and the system did what it was designed to do and gave that instance all of its resources. Coldharbor doesn't take long to finish, though, so players were leaving the zone, and the minimum resources saved for remaining instances were now being used. The problem, though, was that the stream of people into Coldharbour was growing, and the system got to the point to where it had no more resources to give. By design, instances with a decent amount of people were protected to make sure nothing crazy happens to anyone in that instance. So, at this point, the system can't get rid of any of the Coldharbour instances, people keep coming in and progressing to the end of Coldharbour and leaving, which requires more resources for more instances of zones. Finally, the system locks because it can't shift anymore resources without defying it entire design, and people can't even leave Coldharbour anymore. Yet, people keep coming into Coldharbour. At this point, a giant majority of the population was stuck at the end of Coldharbour unable to go forward, and anyone who made it past was on their starting islands experiencing bugged quests. Pressure was building at the end of Coldharbour so they did what they had to. They shut down the servers and restarted them.

Now, in theory, this should have done the trick for a while because all of the resources were freed, and they could now be allocated more evenly. This was exactly what it was designed for, and it should have become infinitely more playable. Instead, it quickly got worse. The starting islands were larger than Coldharbour, but not long enough to keep an experienced player there longer than an hour or two. This is a major problem. Why? Players have been building in droves at the doors of Coldharbour waiting rabidly to get to the next zone, and players are still coming into Coldharbour in droves because everyone wanted to try it out. If you read between the lines, you'll realize that not only were they about to experience the same case due to the pressure built up to go into the same zones, but they also still need huge resources for the Coldharbour. Not only was the system being punished again by a very rare case, but it was about to have to handle it from two sides.

All of the people who were at the doors rushed into their starting zones which required all of the resources that those people had just locked up in addition to resources required for the still growing population starting in Coldharbour. On top of that, the game was damn near completely broken during all of this. It was damn near Inception like levels of the same case. Not only was the design of Mega Server punished initially, but it and the bugs caused by this issue kept players from progressing. So, not only did it fail initially, the bugs that resulted (i.e. not being able to leave a zone, quests to progress not working, etc) ensured that every time they restarted the servers, they'd experience the exact same case on a smaller level. It was keeping the players in a perpetual state of broken gameplay and painfully slow progress, and it was doing this all by design. After a bunch of downtime and attempted fixes, the best fix was just to allow people to skip to the second zone to allow people to level faster and spread them out to let the system breathe until the population eventually stabilized itself.

While not typical deadlock in the sense of processing, their server technology was inadequately taking into account the possibility of "deadlock" in terms of resource allocation for instancing. Obviously, there were a bunch of other bugs that piled onto this, and no one could have predicted it'd experience that case repeatedly. That being said, it shows how much of a struggle a massive launch is. You can design a system tailor-made to handle these things 99% of the time, and if that 1% shows up due to an oversight in the design or some random act of god, it can come crashing down in dramatic fashion. Not only was it annoying and affected progress, but almost every system was broken at some point early on as a result of all of the chaos, as well. Anyone who played within the first or two month felt the effects of this.