Server fill customization not working properly

[Maxwell_Edison]

Wow, way to ignore the very post you’re replying to, where I very very clearly state that is very very obviously not what is happening.

Riddle me this - How come when there’s 80 players, there’s almost always a single server, but the second the playercount drops below roughly 20, it starts splitting up like that?

Do you know how statistically unlikely it is that, in a very low playercount server, all the players joining happen to be in different regions, but on a server with many times more players, it virtually never happens? Something like that should spawn countless more extra servers the more players join, as the more players join the less likely they are to be compatible.

But this is not the case, and I refuse to even acknowledge any excuse like that for anything other than what it is - an excuse. It is very clearly not what is happening here.

Sorry for being snappy but I’m getting tired of this run-around - this is a real issue, and we can’t get distracted by disbelief.

This is a completely genuine bug that doesn’t logically adhere to any provided explanation.

Also: FILL MEANS FILL. Even if what you said is even remotely accurate to what is happening (Hint: it isn’t), that still means that the option to fill servers as much as possible, or reserve a custom amount of slots, simply isn’t working.

Fill means fill, darn it.

[Rae3504]

Agree with your last statement, considering roblox still give us the option to join any server we want from the list, developers should still have the option to force server filling.
Though I still believe this has something to do with server regions and disagree with it being “statistically unlikely” and “some roblox bug”. I did some experimentation on a game that has similar server behaviour to yours, I’m in Thailand and roblox would always connect me to the smaller servers with a few players or create a new one just for me, I tested this around 10 times. When I used a VPN and connected to the UK it would always connect me to the larger servers. You must also consider timezones, peak hours would be when those around EST are awake and that’s where the most players are online therefore it’s much more likely you’re going to get one big server with the more abundant players in the west and very occasionally get smaller servers from the very few people online in other far away regions who are in late night or early morning. I do not know at what time your screenshot was taken, but I’ll assume it was during off peak hours as it wasn’t ~99 players (this isn’t the sole basis of this sentence I exhibit the behaviour im about to explain my own game). So during these off peak hours it’s mostly going to be Asia where who knows how many servers there are and the few people online in eu and na so you would experience more server fragmentation during these off peak hours where you get lower player counts.
This is all speculation of course, maybe I’m wrong, the only people who know what’s going on are the roblox engineers but wanted to explain my theory a bit more because I was called ignorant. It could be that checking the fill server box does absolutely nothing or there is some sort of bug but I prefer my own argument

[Dylan56202 (Dylan)]

I am still experiencing this bug no matter which settings I choose. In fact, the first server in my game only had 3 people in it and another one got started with 2 people. It makes no sense that there are multiple servers being created when I had the server max set to 80 with the fill as full as possible settings on.

[Maxwell_Edison]

While I respect you not giving up, I have been observing my game for weeks on end, looking for this bug. Actively shutting down servers that experience this issue. I have been monitoring this.

The logic remains. I refuse to believe at 80 players there’s 1 server, while, lower counts break off. This happens regardless of timezone, my game is unpopular enough (No help from that stupid bug) that it simply isn’t a matter of different timezones allowing different people in. Sometimes there’s many players in the dead of night, sometimes there is none in the dead of day. And vice-versa. The ONLY CONSISTANT FACTOR is the player count. Every other reason would be easily observable.

Which is more likely, at the end of the day? I’ve already explained the statistical anomaly. I’m going to need something way more concrete.

[SheriffTaco]

If this is happening because people are in different regions, Roblox should disable server splitting by region for games with under 100 players.

[Maxwell_Edison]

Exactly. None of the excuses being provided are even valid, even if they were true.

But again it’s important to note that:

1. Developers put the ‘fill’ option on for a reason. Not all games are ping-reliant, and both the reserved slot feature and fill feature should probably recognize this fact.
   If we wanted roblox to optimize for ping, we’d leave it on roblox optimized.
2. It’s still not what’s happening here, through extensive testing. It’s statistically impossible that’s the problem here.

[Rae3504]

Well I can’t imagine Roblox doing anything about this for a while or ever because it mainly effects games with smaller player counts.

I thought of a better idea to the one I posted above, it’s similar to it though.

Set a new, empty, place as your games starting place (the default place players join) and then your main game as another place in your experience (Only way to do this is to overwrite the current start place and then republish the actual game into another place)

Then you can put a single script in this new empty starting place which teleports the player to the server that you want in the place that your game is in, using the same algorithm I wrote (However I would rewrite it to use MemoryStoreService instead of MessagingService as it would be much quicker and efficient in generating a list of all the current servers in-game).

That’s all you’d really have to do to get proper server filling, and players will likely not even notice the teleport as it happens when they’re loading in and it will probably add a second or two onto the loading time. Bummer we have to go through that much work to get proper server filling but if it really effects you that much, it is a viable option.

[Maxwell_Edison]

I do appreciate the interesting solution but there’s no way in hell I’m going to use such a convoluted workaround - It’s kind of insulting on roblox’s end that THIS is what we have to go through to get player fill to work. I definitely don’t want to have to get rid of my current start place.

Is there a version that doesn’t require the place swap? I’m not sure what that is necessary to begin with

Also, important to note, my game is struggling very hard to even get more players, because of this. I am genuinely thinking that my game’s playercount overall is suffering because the game doesn’t function well at under 10 players. How am I supposed to EVER get a game popular if it’s actively sabotaged by roblox?

[thirdtakeonit]

Hello ! We’ve looked into this and this issue definitely happens due to regional latency issues. Could you provide a place id so we can examine this issue ?

[Maxwell_Edison]

That seems statistically impossible. But if you insist.
Regardless, latency is not an issue in my game. The only time latency occurs is when roblox’s servers can’t keep up with a baseplate with literally nothing going on except players existing (…So, very often.)

Therefore, if the fill option doesn’t work for this, we might need a separate option to prevent this issue from occuring. Regional Latency should not put a single player into a server with a 99 playercap, regardless.

❌ VoteKick.io [BETA!] - Roblox is the place.

[Maxwell_Edison]

Ah, I just ran an ad. Now there’s 70 people across 2 servers.

Interesting, how, when there’s 20 people, it decides to split those 20 people among 3-4+ servers due to "region latency", but among 70+ players, now everyone is very coincidentally in the exact same region.

To be clear, I don’t think you’re lying, thirdtakeonit. But clearly something is amiss. If this is truly region latency, the code regarding how roblox handles said latency is very clearly janky and not functioning as it should, or just simply coded in a way that makes it very very bad at it’s job.

I am trying to be patient but it wears very thin to be told that the reason your game is being killed off whenever the playercount drops is due to something so statistically unlikely. Nobody appears to be taking the issue seriously, and it is frustrating.

Edit: Hm, now it IS behaving like that on bigger servers, where as it never has before. Yeah, fill is just busted, I think. It’s completely random, completely bonkers. Regional latency might be the cause in the end, but regardless - as I’ve been saying from day one of my replies on this thread, In the end it doesn’t matter - it’s still working poorly, and affecting my playercount very negatively.

[1nf1n1tyRX (F3lix)]

huh, i don’t experience it, in adopt me the servers fill up 48 people in 1 server, (48 people is the limit)…

Photo proof:

Same thing with SharkBite:

[Rae3504]

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

[OmegaInvictissimus (OmegaInvictus)]

@thirdtakeonit

Hello ! We’ve looked into this and this issue definitely happens due to regional latency issues.

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

[Maxwell_Edison]

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.

[SheriffTaco]

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.

[Abcreator]

@SheriffTaco

This message appears every time you try to join one of the empty servers:

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.

[SheriffTaco]

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.

[Deadwoodx (Woodx)]

It seems to appear in every game, and because of this bug, my game player count dropped from 500 to 20, please fix this

[Uglypoe (Poe)]

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)