Yes, this is extremely annoying.
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I thought it was just me. We’ve been having to leave and rejoin each others servers for months now.
It would be great to know when this bug is going to be fixed.
I think I’ve lost a ton of potential players due to this bug, but since I’m non-profit, I’m not heavily as affected as opposed to some of you guys who might suffer from this bug really hard.
I hope this bug gets addressed soon. It’s been hard maintaining players since they keep thinking no one is playing but there were actually four 1-2 players servers.
Off topic:
I find it strange ever since the robloxdev website’s been moved to this new forum, the admins of roblox doesn’t check this forum section as often anymore.
Probably because nobody took the time to make a repro, so I took the time to make one. This issue seems to be related to the one described here, so I guess I might as well mention @spotco
Here’s how you reproduce the bug: Go to any game’s page with no players in it (in this case I just tried it on a BasePlate I uploaded: BasePlate - Roblox). Next, ask someone to go to the same page. When you’re both on the same page, click ‘Play’ at the same time. It doesn’t have to be exactly at the same time, but make sure there’s not too much time in between. After you joined the game, click the ‘Servers’ tab on the game’s page. You should now see two servers, one with just you and one with your friend in it:
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Cool, I’ll take a look.
I made a post earlier about Teleport behaviour, and I imagine the “Play” button has similar behaviour as non-PlaceInstance non-PrivateServer teleport.
It is definitely possible there was a regression in server launch-to-discovery time, though that definitely isn’t behaviour that should be depended upon.
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This is really bad because most games are not fun with only 1 player and if all your players are splintered out into their own servers your game can never achieve critical mass and get popular.
In my opinion this is a deal breaker for using Universes with Teleports. You should design games in a way that never require you to teleport anyone anywhere.
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How is this a deal breaker? This looks like a bug and not intended.
Yep, it’s not intended, but there aren’t any plans to fix it :(
Edit: switched quoted thread to one with more info
So TeleportService:Teleport will not necessarily try to fill up servers? I don’t remember this being the case before
I don’t know what it does internally (I think it tries to), but the thread from the new quote (I switched it to a more informative one) says the issue for both teleporting and joining from the site is possibly related to an increase in servers, which is making it difficult to do that (at least from what I understand).
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I talked to Matt Dusek about this specific behavior with teleports ruining my SFOTH universe plans.
The formula they use to determine whether to spin up a new server doesn’t sufficiently penalize starting a new server with 1 player in it.
The result is that I can only realistically use universes if I expect to have 100+ players in each level of the universe. Only the top 5-10 games on ROBLOX can reasonably expect to meet this condition 24 hours a day. Everyone else will get hosed because players will leave when you put them in an empty server.
Maybe you can also hack around it using reserve slots but you will run into limitations that create essentially the same problem. You can probably solve those problems with a ton of code and possibly an external proxy. But that sounds more exploratory to me than a recipe for success.
My RPG isn’t even in top 40 popular but the 8 places in its universe are usually populated. I think it comes down to player distribution more than just playercount. But I see your point.
For my new RPG I’m planning on writing some sort of external python server to keep track of servers. My main issue is I need to teleport a group of players and I want them to play with other players, not be thrown into a new place so for this reason I need to keep track of place availability. We seriously need an API to do this though, I don’t see any new developer wanting to/having the skills required to do that.
There’s a ton of variables that go into the formula, enough that the results are non-deterministic. Some of them:
- Friends
- Geo
- Age
Maybe your game has a tighter clumping of one of these so the problem is less extreme.
My experience matches that of Tomarty’s however.
Yeah this is what I meant by “hack around it”.
Even if you get this to work you won’t be able to easily distribute the solution so that other devs can use it. So everyone who wants to use universes and teleports has to continually implement features that should be built into ROBLOX.
These features are hard enough to develop when you are in control of the ROBLOX infrastructure and web code. In general they are probably harder to get right if you only have user mode lua access and a 3rd party web server.
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Are there any plans for this to be fixed? clearly the formula you mentioned earlier is apart of this problem, and this is a problem that is seriously annoying. Shouldn’t the formula just be reverted or changed if it’s causing such a drastic issue like this?
Places with a higher max-player count should be more lenient in starting a new server. If a game with 7 max players has someone from the other side of the globe trying to join, sure make it start a new server so they don’t lag. But if a game has 100 max players with 100 preferred players it should try to cram 'em in like sardines.
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Apparently this is still an issue. My game has 70 players max, and with the option “Fill each server as full as possible” in the place configurations enabled. I pressed the Play option in my game’s page and it created a new server, and the first server had only 3 players. I had to join the first server manually through the servers tab. After that someone else did the same thing and also created a new server.
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Yep, something like this is definitely still happening, and it has been affecting my group’s HQ game for a while, now. It has been a minor problem now for months, rather rare and often fixed when the other servers are closed, but over the last 10 days or so, the issue has accelerated into a great problem. Now, when I close servers, they are immediately reopened instead of those players joining into one server, no matter what setting the game is on.
