Elder Scrolls Online's Longest-Running Issue Is The Target Of A New Play Test, But It's Just A First Step

When The Elder Scrolls Online first launched in 2014, one of its biggest selling points was Cyrodiil: the MMORPG's large scale, open-world PvP zone where hundreds of players across the game's three factions could lay siege to each other's territory. Cyrodiil was even a major positive note in GameSpot's original Elder Scrolls Online review, with reviewer Kevin VanOrd calling developer ZeniMax Online's MMO "at its best when the PvP action heats up" and its massive battles "good fun."

Flash forward to shortly after ESO's post-launch honeymoon period, and the cracks in Cyrodiil quickly began to show. The huge number of players, and the complexity of the underlying game as a whole, led to major server performance problems that the mode still struggles with today despite numerous attempts by ZeniMax Online to fix the situation. Playing Cyrodiil in 2025 means contending with poor frame rates and extremely laggy battles, ultimately making the PvP sieges unplayable for many--a sad state of affairs for what was once a key back-of-the-box feature. But that may be about to change thanks to Cyrodiil Champions, a new experimental test mode.

ESO's three-faction Cyrodiil PvP battles were a major selling point at launch in 2014.

Cyrodiil Champions is an ambitious open test on ESO's live PC servers running March 24-31 that ZeniMax Online is hoping will definitively identify the core problem behind the mode's frustrating performance. This test campaign will keep all the large-scale siege battles Cyrodiil is known for but massively simplify class abilities and disable nearly everything else (passive abilities, armor types, stats, and more) in order to (hopefully) prove a point--that it is the sheer complexity of each player's stats and abilities interacting with one another that is resulting in server-breaking performance issues, rather than poorly written code or bad server infrastructure.

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