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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This reminded me of something: apparently the “creating new servers” issue also happens even if the game has one server slot reserved. This happened in a small place I have, it does have 100 player slots and the option “customize how many server slots to reserve” set to 1. Once, someone joined by clicking the play button and it created a second server, even with the game having only one server slots reserved.
Bumping this topic another time, this is still an issue and is happening again on my game.
This time it happened with a even lower amount of players connected. 2 players connected in a server with the max of 70, and a new server started just for a single player. But now the server with 2 players was online for quite some time, it wasn’t because people clicked play at the same time when there were no servers. This issue is pretty weird and annoying, hope it gets fixed soon, it’s been 5 years!
A quick fix for this would be to use MessagingService to send the job ID of the biggest server available and then send all players in the smallest servers there using TeleportService:TeleportToPlaceInstance. This is purely a bandaid, though, and Roblox really needs to implement their own fix.
I’ve written up a (very quick) example of what should work, however it is not very effective since multiple servers can fight over movement requests and should be used as a reference only. View it on Pastebin here.
This happens to me since 2016, game usually puts me in empty or 1 player servers. I think this is something with countries (people in same countries are generally being put in same server) but if it is, there shall be an option to change it.
Still happening. I will bump the topic another time, this is really getting annoying. I’m usually hosting events at my game and it creates a lot of servers instead of making people join the existing one.
It happened three times already in less than 4 hours.
That’s why I designed a custom server communication module that automatically merges and controls server instances since I am a community based game developer.
Just a hypothetical, but it might be because the players are in different regions? It would make sense if Roblox did this so that not everyone, regardless of region, would join a potentially high latency server.
