I’ve had this issue without even using Teleport. When Leates, ghostleader, Reinitialized, and myself were in the process of creating our April Fools ROBLOX voice chat “leak”, we would join essentially an empty baseplate (with only a small bit of clientside code to highlight a GUI icon when ‘/’ was pressed) using the Play button on the site and were sometimes sent to different servers. This is the place we were using, but it looks like Leates has updated it since.
You say there is no guaranteed server creation to discovery time, but I’ve never experienced this issue until recently. Regarding joining from Play on the site, it’d be great if this could be fixed to where it never happened, and regarding Teleport, it’d be great if there was a batch teleport where we could teleport multiple players at once, sending them to an existing server (aside from the current one) if there was one with enough room, or a new one if there wasn’t one with enough room.
Yeah, technically we can use DataStore checks and teleport them to the saved instance, but that’s pretty hacky and ugly since we have to 1) wait for one player to teleport into a different server (which may fail if they disconnect), 2) in the new server, wait for the client to replicate to the server that the instanceId needs to be saved in the datastore under the player who just joined (which may take even more time if there aren’t enough datastore requests), 3) either wait for OnUpdate to fire in the other server (which sometimes doesn’t even fire) or repeatedly waste datastore requests to check if the teleported player’s instanceId has been saved yet, and 4) finally teleport everyone into that server and hope that there’s enough space for all of them. Even if there is enough room, the players in the party that didn’t initially get teleported will have to wait a noticeable amount of time (maybe 30 seconds) to even teleport to the server the first person in their party was teleported to.
We can also use private servers once they’re fixed, but even when they’re fixed they might not be a viable option. Players can’t automatically join private servers, so if you just want to teleport a part of players to a new server with enough space for all of them (e.g. they warp from City A to City B and you want them to all teleport to the same server that has enough space for all of them), private servers would technically work but gameplay would get dull without any other players. We could do custom matchmaking with datastores, but that’s over-the-top for just wanting to ensure there’s enough space for a party of players in the server they’re getting teleported to, similar to how CreatePlaceAsync creating an entire place when we only wanted a server was over-the-top.
It’d be really nice if we could batch teleport players, since neither TeleportToPlaceInstance (potentially not enough room in server + wait period for rest of party to teleport) nor TeleportToPrivateServer (no new players can join) really solve that need to teleport a party of players into a different server.