Yeah that’s because those are larger games, the issue is still present but doesn’t effect the game or is noticeable and that’s assuming they even have server fill turned on. The issue only effects smaller games who will only usually have 1 or 2 running servers and therefore need those servers to be full no matter what or the game experience is ruined
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In my experience, you are correct in that it happens due to regional latency issues. I often find that my game, which rarely has over 100 players at once, regularly splits say 75 players into 3, 4, or sometimes more servers, with many of the extra servers being based out of Europe or Asia. I think we all understand why server splitting like this would be useful, but for small games that usually only have enough players for 1 server, it damages the experience. I would be benefitted quite a lot if Roblox were to make this regional splitting optional, or disabled on smaller games. My game is a group HQ game where having our ~80 player count in a single server is much more fun than having four 20 person servers. I know a lot of us would appreciate it very much if this issue were addressed somehow. Many thanks
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Will there ever be a way to make servers fill properly without coding? I’m looking into the message service to try and automatically correct it but I need to be perfectly clear when i say that is not an acceptable solution in the long run. A waste of time and message quota.
Those 2 servers with nobody in them are dead on arrival. My game does not function well without at least 20 or so players, this is killing my game slowly and insidiously.
I have been manually shutting these servers down in mass, because if I don’t, it’ll just ruin other player’s experiences. But if I do, I risk those players not rejoining.
I cannot be any more clear in how the way roblox prevents you from consolidating players into one server is essentially sabotage for any small social game. Either spend literally thousands of dollars on ads to ensure server fullness, or risk having a dozen 2-3 player servers that are useless and ruining the game.
EDIT: In the past 5-10 minutes I have manually ejected dozens of players from inadequately filled servers that were destined to die within minutes of creation.
These players may never come back. But if I don’t, they’ll leave of boredom anyways.
ROBLOX, if this was a just world i’d be getting direct compensation for this. This is a social game that cannot function when players are thrown across tiny servers with 3-4 players in them. It simply does not function. The entire mechanic of the game doesn’t. I’m not complaining that my playercount is too low - it isn’t. 30+ players on a main server is FINE for the experience. It’s just that they’re spread across multiple servers constantly despite that being against the very core of the game.
I am hemmoraging money on this game because roblox effectively takes 20% of my players and goes "you don’t get these players. We’re going to put these players alone in a dark room!"
it is contributing negatively to my game’s like/dislike ratio. It’s ruining player experience. It is bad.
I have better things to do than to make an entire script dedicated to detecting a new useless server and re-directing everyone to the populated server. It slows down player’s ability to actually get into the game. It is genuine self-sabotage by roblox at this point.
Fix the “fill servers” option. Please.
For the love of god, if my game is losing profit because of this, how many other games could be? We already know for a fact that plenty of people have com forward to demonstrate this is a real problem, and I will not stop talking about it until we get a reply that’s more than “oh this is how it’s supposed to work, you’re SUPPOSED to be hemorrhaging players like this! think about the piiing!”. Because that is and always was a non answer.
The inability to force full server compliance on games that benefit from it could be costing roblox hundreds of thousands across the board. I know it’s costing me upwards of hundreds currently, at best.
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I have run into this bug again today on my new game. My servers were working normally for the first few days, and now they look like this with 100 people in the game:
This is completely destroying my game, and this bug continues to be an issue two years later.
EDIT: The issue this time appears to be because Roblox sees the servers as full for some reason, even though they’re not. This message appears every time you try to join any of the servers:
EDIT 2: This new issue seemed to resolve itself after a few hours either on its own or due to me shutting down the servers a few times.
I believe this is just the default message that appears when no servers are available / could be found, same thing happens when attempting to join a 0 concurrent player game.
This occurred when joining one of the servers that were half-full, but it seems to be a separate issue that fixed itself after a few hours.
It seems to appear in every game, and because of this bug, my game player count dropped from 500 to 20, please fix this
This is still a big issue with smaller games.
Recently (within the past week?), it feels like Roblox made more changes to how players are placed in servers. These changes are having an extremely negative effect on my game and its concurrent player count. My game revolves around roleplay and open-world combat, which requires many players in the same server, but server fill places players in newly-created servers that are never filled.
Shown in the attached image are myself and two QA testers for my game. We were attempting to test a new update together, but cannot because TeleportService fails to place us in the same server. It is also impossible to directly join each other from the server list on the website because this is a subplace within the universe, which is only accessible via TeleportService. This was never an issue until recently. This same thing is happening on the main game, resulting in many players getting stuck in empty servers and leaving as a result.
@thirdtakeonit Relevant PlaceIds are:
- 194416885 (PVP subplace)
- 368445129 (Roleplay subplace)
- 314132162 (QA Testing subplace)
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Adding our game Legends RP to the pile of games having this issue. Neither of the other server fill options change anything; we keep getting players placed into new servers even though there are plenty of other open servers.
Hi SheriffTaco, I’m happy the issue appears to have resolved on its own after a few hours. We would like to investigate why this might’ve happened - could you provide more details around this bug, especially the approximate time frame you’ve experienced it?
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I would like to add that I haver recently noticed many players that play my game getting placed into new empty servers when there are already servers with a lot of available player slots. It seems to have gotten worse within the past few days and I noticed a sharp decline in my daily visits recently as my game heavily depends on multiple players in a server.
I hope Roblox can look into this because if any changes to the way servers are filled has been made, they are having negative impacts on my game and I am sure for other games as well.
Hi Dylan, we are looking into this issue now. Do you know what date you first began to notice this issue?
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I noticed it starting Wednesday night, so April 27th. I tried to join my game using a different account and it placed the account in a new empty server. I did notice that my daily visits started dropping since this Tuesday so it is possible that it started sometime around the beginning of this week.
I also noticed it still happening yesterday night when I shutdown a few of my servers for game updates, it placed a few of people (maybe about 4) in a new empty server by themselves. When I would shutdown those empty servers and they rejoined, it still placed them in an empty server.
Thank you for reaching out!
The first report of the new bug was on April 9th at 1:46 PM CST. I believe the issue fixed itself around April 10th around 1 AM CST. When clicking the green play button below the game’s title, a new server would be created, and you would be the only player in the server. If you tried to join any of the servers from the server list, even if they were 1/60 full, the “experience is full” message would appear infinitely.
When I checked about 12 hours later, the servers seemed to return back to normal, possibly because the game is less active around these times. This issue began a few hours into peak joining times during the day, which was around 1 PM CST.
Hi @Deadwoodx would you also be able to provide more details on around how you’ve experienced this issue? In particular the placeId and timeframe you experienced it (the more precise the better) will be able to help us figure out why you might’ve experienced it and hopefully come to a resolution.
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Sure, uh so basically my game is an obby game, and the more players in each server, the more chances the players find others to help them, like no one likes to be in quiet server, and in a obby game, you wish for players to keep chatting or stay online, so it would get you motivated or maybe it will keep you up, and will also have the hope that someone in the server can teach you how to do a stage if your stuck, so the players don’t leave quickly and have a decent amount of chance to stay up a bit longer
Now the thing is, I need to make every player in a full server most of the time, so I enabled the Server fill, and then I hoped this work, but tommorow I realized, nothing worked, my game had 850 people approx, and each server can fit upto 40, now the thing is, if each server gets filled, the max servers needed are:
Total = 850 players
Server count = 40
Servers needed = 850/40 = 21.25 = 22
So there should be 22 servers or at max 24
Now the server count was 53, it makes no sense, very few servers were full ,and managing it was hard, to keep each server maintained, I hired a few admins to moderate each server and try their best to keep it active all the time, and for a few days it worked, like 2-3 days, now after that, the admins were bored, and therefore they left, I had to hire another set of admins, and they did not work
Now because of this inconsistent actively-based servers, the obby became hard, like if there are more people, there are more chances someone can speak with you about how to do it right? Like the game have spectate and buttons to move between stages
The game managed to have an average count of 800 players for a time-range of 2 weeks, and things changed, now many players think the game is too inactive or the players are not chatting or helping much, and the game servers are always empty, and started to ignore my game, and slowly, every week the count dropped by 85%
My game fell from 1.5k players to 20 players on average, after 3 weeks after the fall of the game, the trend of the game genre started to fade, but atleast if the server fill worked, my game could have been with 500+ players for 2-3 more weeks, and I don’t say the trend is gone fully, many games of the genre are having 100+ and 500+, this wasn’t expected by me, my game was doing good, so I tried to maintain the engagement time by doing frequent updates on the game thoughts mostly
Now, I thought the obby was too hard, and the server fill don’t work either, so I tried to make obby simple, but it takes alot of time, and its still in progress, I mean, this affected games and games such as story games, where alot of people get on a queue, get affected the most if not my game, because there should be alot of players in the same lobby, the same server for the server to be populated at all times, causing a lesser leave rate of players
When alot of admins were hired to manage:
Now:
Thanks for reading
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It seems like roblox takes region to account at a higher priority of the setting that the developer has selected. Even with the setting as fill each server as full as possible, I have 200 capacity servers that are only getting filled halfway before a new one is created. This has been happening for years, so we’ve been forced to watch the server list closely and shutdown any new servers opened by random players who live in opposite time zones.
When the developer selects “fill each server as full as possible”, it should prioritize that setting completely, regardless of latency of players connecting to the server or any other factors. Those should only take effect when the developer has roblox optimize server fill for them.
In a perfect world, the developer would be able to write their own logic about how players are put into servers and when new servers are created.
Just FYI, you were specifically asked above to provide a universe/place ID and time frame, might want to add that to your post if you want to get further help. They might not be able to find your game as easily from just the game tile screenshot.
Oh ok sorry I forgot that
Hi, I want to provide you all with an update. We’ve identified a bug that makes the behavior of the fill server not work as expected. We’ll be working on this in the near future and this will hopefully allow you to not experience this problem as severely as you’ve listed in this thread.
I do want to list some caveats: Some of the behavior you’ve all described may be attributed to other factors, such as users blocking each other or being in different geographic regions. The server fill option, once the fix is there, should no longer cause the latter being a factor to split players across multiple servers, assuming your game’s concurrent player count isn’t high enough be able to support multiple regions. I do want to note that choosing that option will likely significantly increase ping times between players and other potential issues from players being far apart geographically, like differences in native language.
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