Region based lobbies as of this patch?

[Blue]

My friend who I've played with many times before said she could no longer see my lobby today, I had her read the lobbies and sure enough she had a different list then mine. I changed my download region from US Miami to US Columbus and this made it so we could see each other again.

Was this intentional?

[darko]

Originally posted by PhleBusterFruitbat Factory:

The part about download region affecting it is an interesting find, but I suppose it just means Steam is primarily using that to gauge the 'proximity' of a player to speed up the process.

If you can't find a friend's lobby, and Search doesn't work either, the trusty tip remains to restart Steam. But of course if you can trick the system with the download region and that works for you, why not go for it.

That would make sense and explains how it can flub the "ping" that would normally take precedence.

Restarting Steam with no settings alterations doesn't actually seem to fix the lobby issue that's going on now, multiple friends as well as myself tried it and only download region provided an actual fix and did it immediately after the change.

[Jon | Maso]

Can confirm. Was ripping my hair out trying to figure out why I couldn't find my Steam friends' lobby (search feature didn't work, no green steam icon, nothing). Then I changed my download region from US New York to US Miami and there it was on the top of the list.

[Blue]

Originally posted by PhleBusterFruitbat Factory:

I don't think there was anything in 1.9.8. changes that could reversely affect finding lobbies, but this problem tends to crop up whenever there are over 50 lobbies up. This update was supposed to fix it by letting you retrieve more than 50 lobbies, but looks like it's still capped despite documentation.

The part about download region affecting it is an interesting find, but I suppose it just means Steam is primarily using that to gauge the 'proximity' of a player to speed up the process.

If you can't find a friend's lobby, and Search doesn't work either, the trusty tip remains to restart Steam. But of course if you can trick the system with the download region and that works for you, why not go for it.

IDK, Sonic racing all-stars had the same thing initially, they later had to "fix" it. Some other games do use region locked settings based on the DL zone on purpose. I do some QA IRL, so naturally I just want to tell the programmer they are wrong, but you would know what you guys changed better then me.

EDIT: OH, one thing I forgot that may help you confirm. If I as a US Miami, invite my friend who is US Columbus to a lobbie through steam(invite through friends lst). Their game does not even try to load anything. However when we match DL regions, the invite works flawlessly.

[Mr_Rive [Fruitbat Factory]]

Here's a somewhat lengthy update on the issue.

We didn't change anything major with the matchmaking code for this patch. We set out to do two things:

1) Allow more than 50 lobbies to be listed. Before 1.9.8, we noticed a thread on Steamworks Development forum in which it was said that Steam's limit of retrieving up to 50 lobbies / search actually wasn't in place. We changed our lobby list retrieve's code accordingly but had no real way to test it because there weren't that many lobbies up. The information turned out to be false and the limit is still 50 lobbies / search. This itself doesn't change anything, it's working exactly like it used to.

2) Make the lobby search function more flexible with support for partial names etc. Instead of using Steam's provided search filters, we now retrieve the default lobbies and filter the results afterwards. The problem of this approach is that since the amount of retrieved lobbies turned out to be limited after all, the lobby you're searching for might not be in those 50 returned results.

By default, Steam sorts the retrieved lobbies based on distance. When there are many lobbies up (sales, new patch etc), the limit of 50 lobbies can be met pretty easily. This means that the further the distance, the higher the likelihood that the lobby you're looking for might not fit in the retrieved 50 lobby results.

We've made a post on Steamworks Development forum asking for advice on how best to handle this situation. If all else fails, we'll revert the search function to its pre-1.9.8 state since it allowed you to search for lobbies beyond the 50 lobbies Steam would retrieve.

[darko]

Oh, huh. That makes sense, hope you all get a good response on that. The search function revert would probably be smart to implement for the time being if you ask me though lobby numbers have dropped some.

[Gao]

Thanks for the explanation, Mr_Rive. Would it be possible to pre-filter lobbies, like by Game Speed? Or would that still be restricted by 50 lobby limit?

[Mr_Rive [Fruitbat Factory]]

Originally posted by Gao:

Thanks for the explanation, Mr_Rive. Would it be possible to pre-filter lobbies, like by Game Speed? Or would that still be restricted by 50 lobby limit?

I think numeric and string filters should work okay - name search is one such thing. For example, I think it could be possible to add a GUI choice for a group that players can use to create / search lobbies in (Poppolandia, Pudding Planet etc...). That selection would be nothing but a masked filter in reality, but it could make finding more lobbies a bit more elegant than having to type a lobby's full name. We're still checking things on Steamworks Development side though.

[Crramalama]

Is it possible to have the filter favor public lobbies over private lobbies? getting a full list and only having 10 of them public is kinda lame.

[Slashley]

Originally posted by Mr_Rive Fruitbat Factory:

Here's a somewhat lengthy update on the issue.

We didn't change anything major with the matchmaking code for this patch. We set out to do two things:

1) Allow more than 50 lobbies to be listed. Before 1.9.8, we noticed a thread on Steamworks Development forum in which it was said that Steam's limit of retrieving up to 50 lobbies / search actually wasn't in place. We changed our lobby list retrieve's code accordingly but had no real way to test it because there weren't that many lobbies up. The information turned out to be false and the limit is still 50 lobbies / search. This itself doesn't change anything, it's working exactly like it used to.

2) Make the lobby search function more flexible with support for partial names etc. Instead of using Steam's provided search filters, we now retrieve the default lobbies and filter the results afterwards. The problem of this approach is that since the amount of retrieved lobbies turned out to be limited after all, the lobby you're searching for might not be in those 50 returned results.

By default, Steam sorts the retrieved lobbies based on distance. When there are many lobbies up (sales, new patch etc), the limit of 50 lobbies can be met pretty easily. This means that the further the distance, the higher the likelihood that the lobby you're looking for might not fit in the retrieved 50 lobby results.

We've made a post on Steamworks Development forum asking for advice on how best to handle this situation. If all else fails, we'll revert the search function to its pre-1.9.8 state since it allowed you to search for lobbies beyond the 50 lobbies Steam would retrieve.

Thank you so much for this post.

Let's hope that Valve/Steamworks gets this issue fixed so that we can all enjoy our games.