WARNING: TES Online Install Deletes Files

DArtagnan said:

Yeah, I'm seeing some interesting dungeon content in that video.

Too bad it has that annoying dude talking all the time. He seems to think strangers mean guarenteed nice and smart people, which is the first sign he's not very smart himself. Beyond that, he seems to think that because WoW had bosses drop loot - you can't place it in chests instead. That's the second sign he's not very smart.

A smart person understands that strangers come with few guarentees - and games aren't all designed in the same way.

If you take strangers along in WoW, chances are they'll "need" on all the loot and you'll get the same result.

But, you're right, that video does show some cool and atmospheric dungeon content.

I also really like how organized the list UI seems to be - and how easy it is to sort through your stuff in that way.

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That is the most apologetic fanboyism I’ve ever seen. Your answer for completely and unacceptably poor game design is to only group with friends? How does someone new to MMOs get groups? What if your friends aren’t online?

Wait a second…does ESO encourage grouping? Is there a dungeon finder? If so, are they not trying to get strangers to group for group content? Without implementing the necessary tools to deal with uncivilized strangers?

This isn’t anything new. Leaders kicking, need/greed rolls, etc. It is extremely poor design by console developers.

You can apologize all day, but crap is crap. I would like to hear your reasoning for all the random banning going on for no reason with no recourse? People paid top dollar for a game and get banned for nothing, in large numbers. Unacceptable.

So we have 1987 lists for inventories, mass bannings for no reason of people who paid top dollar to play and did absolutely nothing wrong, major installer issues, the loot comes from chests that anyone can loot and take everything from, party leaders can’t kick idiots, and you will be stuck without being able to progress if you get an idiot. Sounds like a lot of win. Charge premium dollar for a B game.

You can bleat all the apologies you want, but when the devs finally fix the dungeons and grouping options to work correctly it will 100% prove they messed up royally and dropped the ball.

Lev said:

It's probably a good idea to check if other players have similar problem with installer. If there's a handful users on ESO forum with the same experience, the answer is clear. If you are alone then it's a good time to double check your anti-virus and check your hard disks on errors with scandisk.

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I google-ed this and I found a couple of thread forums on different sites where this has happened to others. This was not isolated to just me, still, the instances of this happening are not widespread.

The theory floating around that makes the most sense to me goes like this.

Typically when you install a game, you can use the default location given by the installer or browse to a location where you want the game to install. In my case, I changed the default location to:

D:\Games

At this point, normally, most games will then tack-on a sub-folder labeled similarly to the title of the game. In the case of ESO however, it does not. Instead, it uses the location you specify as a root folder - hold this thought for a moment. ESO then installs to that folder three sub-folders each called 'launcher,' 'The Elder Scrolls,' and 'uninstall.'

It is being speculated that since the installer uses the location specified by the user as the root folder, that it is, for reasons unknown, clearing the contents of that folder in preparation for installing the game.

It is unclear if the installer goes wonky if you allow it to install to the default location. I speculate that it behaves properly since if it did not, this problem would most definitely be widespread. I have no intention to test this since installing and restoring is a lengthy and boring process and I'd rather be playing.

However, the speculation above jives with what I experienced installing the game. As the game was installing, in short order I browsed to D:\Games and observed ESO related folders and files being installed to that location, but to my horror all my sub-folders for all my other games were already gone. So the installer had to have deleted those files within seconds of when I clicked, 'install.'

To be totally safe, I recommend users create a sub-folder for ESO in advance of running the ESO installer. In my case I wish I had created this in advance to running the ESO installer:

D:\Games\ESO

Then, when running the installer, I would have browsed to D:\Games\ESO and let the game install. Since there would have been no folders or files in D:\Games\ESO to begin with, if the installer is doing something wonky and deleting stuff from the specified location, nothing would have been affected as the folder had just been created and there was nothing in it to be deleted.

THE GOOD NEWS
The good news is that I do keep backups of my PCs. I let my backup restore my lost folders (about 350gb worth) over night last night. This morning, I checked things and it's as if the mishap never happened. In fact, I did not lose a single bit of data. All my save games of games I'm playing are exactly where I left off. So I'm happy about that and cannot stress enough the importance of backing up your PC - it just saved my ass - again. In this situation I would have lost about 45 hours of a new Skyrim character, and about 25 hours of my first romp through M&M X - which would have hurt mightily.

TheMadGamer said:

I google-ed this and I found a couple of thread forums on different sites where this has happened to others. This was not isolated to just me, still, the instances of this happening are not widespread.

The theory floating around that makes the most sense to me goes like this.

Typically when you install a game, you can use the default location given by the installer or browse to a location where you want the game to install. In my case, I changed the default location to:

D:\Games

At this point, normally, most games will then tack-on a sub-folder labeled similarly to the title of the game. In the case of ESO however, it does not. Instead, it uses the location you specify as a root folder - hold this thought for a moment. ESO then installs to that folder three sub-folders each called 'launcher,' 'The Elder Scrolls,' and 'uninstall.'

It is being speculated that since the installer uses the location specified by the user as the root folder, that it is, for reasons unknown, clearing the contents of that folder in preparation for installing the game.

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Basically. It's because it's peforming sort of a copy-and-replace on the entire directory with the installation contents with the specified directory as the target. The specific command that would do this would be "robocopy <source> <destination> /mir" plus a few other options, but the "/mir" is the really key one.

This is useful because it copies the entire directory structure and content and removes old versions or loose files from previous versions (and if you've played Elder Scrolls games you know why dangling loose files can become an issue particularly if you they're depricated/orphaned.) Alternatively "/e /purge" would do similar damage, but I think protected files and folders containing them might not have been wiped in that case.

Of course that purging behavior means that if you (meaning coder of the installer script) forgot the step where you create the root installation directory and/or append it to the target path specified by the user that they're going to have a bad day. It's something that can be as simple as a missing or malformed line but considering how few lines and how off-the-shelf and standard the proper installer behavior is it's kind of amazing.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc733145.aspx#BKMK_remarks

It's screwing up pretty much the simplest part of creating an installation script that off the shelf solutions and deployment services like Steam and Origin don't really screw it up anymore. Actually I can't remember seeing this kind of stuff since windows 3.1 - I almost wonder if someone made a mistake copying and pasting an example script from a college textbook or something.

jhwisner said:

Actually I can't remember seeing this kind of stuff since windows 3.1 - I almost wonder if someone made a mistake copying and pasting an example script from a college textbook or something.

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I remember some ugly install/uninstall experiences back in the days of DOS and early versions of windows myself.

Apparently, what happened to me with my files being deleted DURING ESO installation has also happened to others when uninstalling ESO. The bug seems bi-directional. So note to self (and others) - backup files BEFORE uninstalling ESO just in case...

TheMadGamer said:

I remember some ugly install/uninstall experiences back in the days of DOS and early versions of windows myself.

Apparently, what happened to me with my files being deleted DURING ESO installation has also happened to others when uninstalling ESO. The bug seems bi-directional. So note to self (and others) - backup files BEFORE uninstalling ESO just in case…

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Sounds similar to this issue:
http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?t=288112

"Warning: using RMDir /r $INSTDIR in the uninstaller is not safe. Though it is unlikely, the user might select to install to the Program Files folder and so this command will wipe out the entire Program Files folder, including other programs that has nothing to do with the uninstaller. The user can also put other files but the program's files and would expect them to get deleted with the program. Solutions are available for easily uninstalling only files which were installed by the installer.

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Basically explaining that an. inappropriately used command (which is kind of a lazy way of doing it too) could do that

SirJames said:

Well, one might argue anyone who bought TESO at this point is slowing its transition into the free2play model and is a bit of a moron for that. The game has an item mall already and, in Australia, a $89 retail box, making it one of the most expensive games around. Especially so considering the lack of a gamers insight in its design:

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Sure, if I was ignorant enough to believe F2P would yield a better game and I really cared about money more than time like most people are unfortunate enough to do, I might be a moron for doing the smart thing.

But I'm not ignorant on that level.

How do you prevent morons? Well, the first thought that comes to mind is full PVP, full loot. He's not gonna steal the chests if you can kill him and take it back.

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Yeah, if you want a tiny playerbase with a few thousand people running around. Instead, they opted for content and a design that's appealing to millions of people. Full PvP tends to attract a different kind of moron - and they tend to dominate the playfield - as they have no problem exploiting and cheating their way to imagined success.

Nah, not a good idea.

That said, I'm a great fan of the full PvP concept - I just don't want to see another half-assed example of it.

People who understand it and are willing to take that chance and throw money at it, I'd gladly support. But that's not the game they wanted to make.

They had an obligation with TES - and they wanted to create a large exploration based MMO with a ton of freedom - and they've succeeded, warts and all.

In WoW, say a BindOnEquip epic drops randomly. Someone who can't use it rolls for it and wins. He can just laugh at you as you plead, "omg please! I'd use that, its my main spec". Pity you can't kill him. If you see what actually happens when people are accountable for their actions, say Ultima Online or Darkfall, people are a lot cooler and go out of their way to avoid making enemies! Moron trolls won't even set foot in games where they can see their bullshit won't be tolerated and protected by the games design.

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You clearly didn't pay attention playing Darkfall and Ultima Online. If you have this fantasy of stable games without exploits and pure community-driven justice - then let's talk more when you wake up.

I've played pretty much all established MMOs, including the two mentioned - and let's just say I'm not impressed with your fantasy depiction of them. A more cesspoolish sight of human interaction than I witnessed in UO and DFO is a rare thing indeed.

Of course, we could also take a lesson from other games and have separate loot "worlds". If you see loot - its yours! Just like diablo3. Make chests have individual loot for everyone rolled on chest_opened just like in Neverwinter online.

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Sure, if you wanted to decrease immersion and make it into a loot-driven game like WoW or Diablo.

But it's not a loot-driven game and you shouldn't play with morons in the first place.

It's not hard to avoid.

Again, you craft your loot in this game if you want the best stuff. You don't really care about the occasional ninja-looter - as he's not going to find anything vital.

The game is not about stats or gear. It's about immersion, exploration and freedom.

A LOT of people are having a very hard time realising there are more than one way to do an MMO.

I'd call it the WoW-syndrome - but WoW was a great game in its own right. It introduced a strong genre to millions of people.

Unfortunately, those people now believe it's the only way to go.

It seems pretty fair to blame TESO for not predicting these issues ahead of time when so many other, free2play, far lower budget, lower development time, games have.

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It's fair to blame ESO for anything you can imagine. But that doesn't really make it rational or impressive.

To me, it's a-ok to invent whatever alternatives based on your own limited understanding of how people interact and how these games work.

But if you're going to make an impression or you're going to appear smarter than the ESO designers - you have to work a lot harder.

You have to understand what they're trying to do - and you need the kind of experience that would make you informed about the F2P model. You don't seem to have that, sorry.

In any case, I'm now officially on vacation - and I can't be bogged down by longwinded debates here.

Too much ignorance and I don't know where to start, really.

I'll be back and see if this topic is still alive in 10 days or so.

Have fun not knowing!

DArtagnan said:

More than likely, the actual game development team has nothing to do with the software used to install the game.

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Sure, you're absolutely right but does that mean that as the top most entity in the process of creation they aren't responsible either… ? If you lead a project, you respond for any problem occurring, whatever the level it occurs.