As the title says, it’s possible for multiple instances of a Reserved Server to be running with the same ID if a console player with cross-play disabled teleports to that server.
This was discussed in a Feature Requests thread by Defaultio a few years ago, but I’m reporting this as a bug since this obviously doesn’t seem to be the intended or desired behavior for Reserved Servers, and because the old thread doesn’t seem to have any staff tracking it at the moment. This is also newly relevant of course with the launch on PlayStation.
Under normal conditions, only one Reserved Server of a particular ID can exist, and if you try to teleport to a Reserved Server that’s already full, you’ll get an error.
However, this restriction doesn’t apply to console players who have disabled cross-play. They will be able to generate a duplicate instance of that Reserved Server.
Expected behavior
Reserving a server implies that there should only be one instance of that server at any given time - and that is exactly how the feature behaves when dealing with all players across PC, tablet, mobile, and console with crossplay enabled, which makes it seem like that is the normal and expected behavior.
However, the fact that players with crossplay disabled can create a duplicate instance of a server introduces a bunch of extremely nasty edge cases that devs are forced to deal with. For example:
- If you’re doing matchmaking and want to create a reserved server which will host the match and then report the results, this could be screwed up by a crossplay-disabled player joining a duplicate instance of that server, playing their own match with the same ID, and causing invalid results to be reported.
- If you want players to have a single reserved server where they can build things together and save their progress to that server, their data could be corrupted by someone else creating a duplicate server, causing the original server’s changes to be overwritten by the duplicate server.
It should never be possible under any circumstances to start a duplicate instance of the same Reserved Server. If a player tries to join an existing Reserved Server that isn’t compatible with their cross-play settings, they should simply not be allowed to join, just like the standard behavior would lead you to expect.