Private Hosted Server Not Showing Up For Friends

[omally72]

I'm running a private server, and it appears nobody can see it in the server browser except for me. Now this isn't a server on my network, it's a Microsoft Azure hosted server, so as far as I know everybody should be connecting to it exactly the same way, including me. But I just learned today that it doesn't appear to show up in the server list for my friends, even though I always connect that way - I go to join a game, set the filter to UnOfficial and Password Protected, type in a couple words of my server name, and in a few seconds it shows up.

But for at least 3 of my friends, they apparently never see the server - it seems they've always just waited till I was in the map, then joined my game through Steam or by using the Survivors or Friends tab in game.

This just doesn't make any sense to me - we're all connecting to the Azure server, so if it was a port forwarding issue, then it should affect my ability to see the server just like it does them. By extension, if I can see the server, then they should be able to see it, but since it's happening to 3 different people I can't figure out what could be wrong on their end. We tried turning off their Windows firewall, verifying game files, rebooting their computers; we tried rebooting the server and tried it with and without raw sockets enabled.

I also had one of my friends try to find it via the Steam server browser. In the Internet tab the server shows up fine for me, but not for him. However, if he browses for the server directly via IP address in the Favorites tab, it shows up right away.

Does anybody have any idea what could be going on here? Up to this point we've been only running scheduled sessions, but I want to leave the server up full time now, so obviously I can't be on all the time for people to join on me. They're going to need to be able to find the server in the browser. Any thoughts?

[o|-} Tony Shark]

Go onto your server and for now get your friends to click on the small Steam icon in the bottom right of your screen, go to servers and click friends (assuming you are all steam friends) and right click and save to favorites.

This means they can use the ingame favorites filter to find your server and they will only need to do this once.

I hope this helps in the short term

[DavonCrushin]

I've seen this problem with a few other servers too. Best fix I found is to go to view, servers, favorites tab, add a server button, and put the info in and add to favorites, and then go to favorites ingame and it should show up on the list.

[omally72]

Thanks to both for the suggestions.

That might help temporarily, but the problem is that the server has a dynamic IP address, which means that if it gets shut down it could start up again with a different public IP - in that case I don't think the saved Favorite will work any more. I'll have them give it a shot, but I suspect once the IP changes we'll have to do it again.

[[FHC] Pep 84]

i've experienced the same issue, just been using the steam friends route like that Tony posted. hope it'll be fixed in June