Since a few days ago, it has become very difficult to access European-based servers when you start a new server in a game, especially during peak playing hours (for example, while writing this post: around 8 PM UTC).
Before this issue started occuring, ROBLOX would automatically start a new game server in the nearest possible location to the first user joining it.
Now:
Whenever a player from Europe tries to create a new server, it automatically redirects traffic to a US server, as in the example in the picture below - as I am from Russia, I usually start a server with location set in Germany (or Poland, when those existed too), but now it is in Virginia, US. The ping meter on leaderboard gives accurate information (per test with Shift+F3 menu).
This issue happens across all ROBLOX experiences, where I can test the issue by starting a new server, with different development teams. It has also been reported in our community (RO-Football Association - Roblox), which is EU-based, and heavily relies on having a low ping on EU servers, which are not accessible at the moment due to this problem.
There have been multiple attempts by other players to start a EU-located server, but it happens too rarely, and nobody has a clue how to actually consistently start EU servers again.
Expected behavior
Attempt to join an empty game/private server;
A new server is created with the location set to the nearest possible to yours (or your presumed geolocation by IP address).
This issue is particularly bad for competitive ROBLOX soccer games such as Professional ROBLOX Soccer as well, which has a large player base that play actively. This means for scheduled events such as league games, it can make the game borderline unplayable at certain times as the majority of the player base play on a European host. A fix is needed quickly.
Thank you for surfacing this concern. Our systems try to keep the started games as close to the player as possible. However, this is not a guarantee - one example is during peak hours, if the servers closer are fully occupied, the game might be started at a further away location.
Can I get some userIDs of players from European region for whom games were started in USA? I can help take a look to see if this behavior is by design or a bug.
Thanks for the patience. I went over the data and I do see that we start games further away more frequently during the high peak hours. I’ve made some changes in our backend to tune bias more towards closer servers, but that said, while this change will increase the chance of finding a closer game, it will not guarantee it. Please let me know if you observe the frequency of finding a EU server increase after this change. I’ll continue monitoring and tuning our configurations to find the right balance.
Didn’t seem to do so for me, I still get sent to Australian, Singaporean or American servers and very very rarely to European ones. It’s not even Saturday or Sunday and it’s still early in the afternoons in here. There needs to be serious immediate investments on expanding the capacity of European servers as Roblox’s playerbase from Europe and other regions close to it grow.
Still having this problem no change in frequency of EU servers even with the use of VPNs its directing server creation to mostly Ashburn or other US servers.
Issues on EU servers are appearing earlier than expected (13:13 GMT). This is causing problems for communities that rely on European servers for scheduled games. The backend changes made so far do not appear to have improved the situation.
This is definitely not a user-specific issue. It happens to anyone trying to create an EU server when joining an experience. Hopefully this gets resolved quickly, because it impacts a large number of communities across Roblox. Even during peak player counts before this bug appeared, European players were consistently routed to EU servers, which suggests the issue may have been introduced by a recent Roblox update.
Private Server (another player’s):
Attempts 1-4: US, Ashburn (all times)
Public Server: US, Ashburn (all times)
With Cloudflare WARP:
Attempts 1-3: US, Dublin (all times)
Other game: (EU: under 100 ms, US: above 130 ms): Battlegrounds - Roblox
Attempts 1-5: >130 ms, >130 ms, >160 ms, >160 ms, >130 ms
As you can see, all attempts to try a EU server for me have failed. I’ve also included attempts with Cloudflare WARP (proxying to another location) and with other games too.
You should consider undoing the changes to your server startup mechanism back to the state it was a month ago or earlier, because this absolutely ruins the gameplay for majority of EU communities relying on low latency.
if the servers closer are fully occupied, the game might be started at a further away location
How come are all EU servers ‘fully occupied’ this November, when this issue has never occurred before this point, neither in summer, during any holiday, or even a month ago? This is too much of a sudden change to explain it with servers all simply being occupied.
Please escalate this and open an incident report. This is a widespread issue that will negatively affect engagement for latency-dependent titles including The Strongest Battlegrounds, Ink Games, Rivals, Murder Mystery 2, and similar experiences.
Players are being routed to non-local regions due to adjusted balancing logic, and this change disproportionately harms smaller titles that rely on consistent local server availability.
I first started noticing it today, where industralist wouldn’t load up a world anymore
I played bee swarm simulator, and I didn’t notice anything until I went to the retro swarm challenge hub, where it suddenly stopped networking properly
I was just able to play industralist properly again, but I can’t tell if it’s resolved itself or intermittent
Issue is still very persistent, in fact it’s felt worse in the last couple of days than ever.
Borderline game-breaking in heavily ping-based games like Volleyball Legends where in-game lobbies of full EU players are being placed on US-based hosts giving everyone 100+ ping. It becomes impossible to receive the ball from powerful serves before it hits the ground due to the latency, essentially guaranteeing a loss (in highly competitive ranked gameplay, mind) if the opponent gets the first ball and has selected a character with a high serving stat.
Note that I’m one of the lucky ones who gets away with it sometimes due to living in Dublin (IE), yet it still feels like half of my games are on a US host.
