new server search function is horrible

[EdwardSmith]

use to be able to just search through all the servers at once, anywhere in the world, now you have to one-by-one search through regions, and theres no 'all regions' setting.

finding the server im a moderator for was difficult because the new browser didnt save my favorites or history so i had to open the bot manager in chrome and direct ip connect, if i didnt know the exact ip of the server i literaly wouldnt have been able to connect to it, had to ctrl+v into discord because no one else could figure out the awful pile of trash thats the new server browser.

dont fix what aint broke because you tend to make it worse

[MikeSixx]

Is otherwise ok, except ... 

the mandatory region selection is absolute failure.
     You could fix this simple adding Region selection "Any" to make the Region filter optional. 

Region selection does not work and never will. It only works (somewhat) on games where the servers are fixed and provided and installed by the game vendor itself. Because GeoIP does not work reliably. As you can clearly see : 
pick any region and 1/3 of the servers are Chinese.  It makes finding the server you are looking for really difficult as now you need to check half dozed regions separately. (outside planet America) Continents or "regions" are so close to each others that good part of earth population lives in region "incorrect". At least as far as internet is concerned.  The Region selection is not useless but big negative User Experience and it is the fist thing customers see in this game. Most gamers have very low tolerance for bad servers search. As they have so much bad experiences in games where they spent most of their game time trying to find right server. 

An example: 
   My friend wanted to start playing this game again as one of our friend was thinking of buying this game. With new server search we could not the server we played on so we gave up on this game and our friend refunded this game that he just purchased. 

P.S. I really liked the server history as it was working fairly well. That is THE MOST important feature of the game ! If you spent days playing one some server then can not find the server,  that is really really annoying. Make sure the favorites show the servers even if the server are not found currently.   

Edited April 26, 2022 by MikeSixx (see edit history)

[Telric]

10 minutes ago, MikeSixx said:

My friend wanted to start playing this game again as one of our friend was thinking of buying this game. With new server search we could not the server we played on so we gave up on this game and our friend refunded this game that he just purchased. 

Sounds more like impatience than a fault of the game. It's day 1 of a new patch. You can't expect everyone from every server, all across the world to update their servers on your time. It will take a few weeks for everyone to get on board with how things work now. It's like when things went from having to choose single player worlds vs mp worlds, to how it is now, where you're considered always a MP server with settings that hide the name of it. Confusion happened at first, but since then it's become a non issue. Same concept here. No sense in rage quitting day one of a new system patch. Give players time to update their servers to use the new feature.

[pApA^LeGBa]

It generally sucks that i have to use the filter before i get into the server list and can´t just use my history. I have no clue where the servers i joined are located. I simply didn´t care about the location when i joined them and now i have to try every region to find them because there is no "any" setting for the region.

 

I simply don´t get why we can´t have our history available without having to apply a search.

 

@Telric Update my server? i do have a server running, it´s located in Germany. On the hosting website the region is set to Europe.

 

Still the game doesn´t find it when i use Europe as a region. I tried going trough every region with the search. All settings in the filter at "any".  My server couldn´t be found. Now i can easily join my own server via IP, but i don´t know the IP of the servers that aren´t mine nor do i know the region or any other settings.

 

Do i now need to write everything down when i join a server, just so that i can find it again later?

My history needs to be there without having to do a search first. Period. Everything else is just bad design. And the worst thing is, even after a search, my whole history was gone. No option to just turn off the filter so that i can see every server that was in my history, no matter wich search criteria i used.

 

And to top it off, if i now go online after beeing on my server and  applying the search filter with the standard search criteria and region europe, it shows that there should be one server at the history&favorites icon on the top. But when i click on the icon it shows me an empty list. What? Why? How?

Edited April 26, 2022 by pApA^LeGBa (see edit history)

[Gilfalas]

the entries for region and language are continuously deleted from the config. 
Europe remains in the basic settings in the dashboard of the server, but language is constantly changed to English.
History and favorites are NEVER displayed although there is a number.
This is the biggest crap. 

 

die Einträge für Region und Sprache werden laufend wieder aus der config gelöscht. 

Europa bleibt in den Basis-Einstellungen im dashboard des Servers stehen, Sprache wird aber laufend in englisch geändert.
Verlauf und Favoriten werden NIE angezeigt obwohl da eine Zahl steht
Das ist größter Mist.

Note: posts must be in English, with any other languages in a spoilers tag.

Edited April 28, 2022 by Crater Creator
non-English post (see edit history)

[Josy1986]

get rid of this @%$# way of looking for a server, why try to fix something that was perfectly fine to begin with!

[Mr Ziffel]

No @%$#ing kidding. I have a private server I pay for and no one who has played it can find it even me. I can however go into the server and launch it from their. 

This is the biggest MISTAKE!!! the fun pimps have ever made. I'm telling everyone don't bother playing you will never find my server. 

[soulsbane]

I'm someone who's always server hopped a lot. While some of the old server filter was frustrating, like the mod or no mod selection that did absolutely nothing, this version of filtering servers is multiple times worse than the old one. Want to search for us servers, have to search between just east or west coast, and anyone can label their server as east or west coast no matter where the actual server is located.

[Pernicious]

18 hours ago, Josy1986 said:

get rid of this @%$# way of looking for a server, why try to fix something that was perfectly fine to begin with!

 

Full disclosure - I only play on a single server that I host, so this feature isn't even relevant to me.

 

However, as a network engineer, I'm probably a bit more aware than most that scalability is a huge issue. In most technologies that use a queue of any sort, there comes a point where a tiny bit of extra traffic causes huge latency. Think stuff like cars on the road - Apparently school holidays takes only 5-10% of cars off the road, but can reduce travel times by 30%+. Or your CPU - at 95% utilisation, everything feels normal. At 98% utilisation, it feels like everything is laggy and frozen. Same thing happens in networking where you are so close to capacity, you start wasting time with re-transmits, back offs and retries, etc. 

 

I don't know exactly how the server finder works, but from what I can observe, it seems like the client reaches out to a centralised server for a list of available servers. This part is very scalable. If there are 10 servers online, you get 10 results. If there are 100 servers online, the results returned to you are exactly 10x larger. Even to the tens of thousands, this is scalable.

 

The next bit is still mostly scalable. It looks like your client then goes through that list and tries to retrieve data about it - latency, number of players, descriptions, etc. You would think if you double the number of servers, refreshing the list simply takes twice as long. Not exactly. Aside from the bandwidth used, any network device can only hold open a certain number of connections. But we still wouldn't be close to that limit.

 

Where it becomes unscalable, is when you have more users and more servers. Imagine if you had 10 users searching for 10 servers. You'd have a total of 100 queries. Now imagine you have 100 players looking for 100 servers. You have 10,000 queries. If you had 10,000 players looking for 10,000 servers, you have 100 million queries going out, and each player really only cares about 1 server they want to join. It's extremely wasteful and at some point can cause network issues.

 

So what was "perfectly fine to begin with", might not stay perfectly fine as the game grows in popularity - and perhaps they are expecting a spike in users and servers once the game goes gold and is no longer early release. 

 

 I don't even know if Geo IP is how regional selection works. But if it was, it's one of the simpler methods of segmenting a network, and mostly effective, even with inaccurate location. You might have thought "Why try to fix something that was perfectly fine", but in reality, the old server finder might have been heading straight for a cliff you couldn't see. 

 

I know this sounds like a fan-boy defence of TFP, but it's something that can really get the goat of a lot of IT workers who have capacity planning as part of their job descriptions. 

[soulsbane]

2 hours ago, Pernicious said:

 

Full disclosure - I only play on a single server that I host, so this feature isn't even relevant to me.

 

However, as a network engineer, I'm probably a bit more aware than most that scalability is a huge issue. In most technologies that use a queue of any sort, there comes a point where a tiny bit of extra traffic causes huge latency. Think stuff like cars on the road - Apparently school holidays takes only 5-10% of cars off the road, but can reduce travel times by 30%+. Or your CPU - at 95% utilisation, everything feels normal. At 98% utilisation, it feels like everything is laggy and frozen. Same thing happens in networking where you are so close to capacity, you start wasting time with re-transmits, back offs and retries, etc. 

 

I don't know exactly how the server finder works, but from what I can observe, it seems like the client reaches out to a centralised server for a list of available servers. This part is very scalable. If there are 10 servers online, you get 10 results. If there are 100 servers online, the results returned to you are exactly 10x larger. Even to the tens of thousands, this is scalable.

 

The next bit is still mostly scalable. It looks like your client then goes through that list and tries to retrieve data about it - latency, number of players, descriptions, etc. You would think if you double the number of servers, refreshing the list simply takes twice as long. Not exactly. Aside from the bandwidth used, any network device can only hold open a certain number of connections. But we still wouldn't be close to that limit.

 

Where it becomes unscalable, is when you have more users and more servers. Imagine if you had 10 users searching for 10 servers. You'd have a total of 100 queries. Now imagine you have 100 players looking for 100 servers. You have 10,000 queries. If you had 10,000 players looking for 10,000 servers, you have 100 million queries going out, and each player really only cares about 1 server they want to join. It's extremely wasteful and at some point can cause network issues.

 

So what was "perfectly fine to begin with", might not stay perfectly fine as the game grows in popularity - and perhaps they are expecting a spike in users and servers once the game goes gold and is no longer early release. 

 

 I don't even know if Geo IP is how regional selection works. But if it was, it's one of the simpler methods of segmenting a network, and mostly effective, even with inaccurate location. You might have thought "Why try to fix something that was perfectly fine", but in reality, the old server finder might have been heading straight for a cliff you couldn't see. 

 

I know this sounds like a fan-boy defence of TFP, but it's something that can really get the goat of a lot of IT workers who have capacity planning as part of their job descriptions. 

So is it our pc resources that are looking up those stats or TFP servers? Hint, i don't think we're using their servers in any way when we look up dedicated servers. I can still use steam to view server's pings bypassing TFP's way of looking up and sorting servers. I don't think it's working as intended.

[JCrook1028]

28 minutes ago, soulsbane said:

So is it our pc resources that are looking up those stats or TFP servers

There are no "TFP servers".

[soulsbane]

20 minutes ago, JCrook1028 said:

There are no "TFP servers".

I'm sure they have servers, just not ones that are being utilized for these searches.

[JCrook1028]

No kidding. That's why I used the quotation marks... They have no servers relating to players using them in any way. Better?

[Pernicious]

7 hours ago, soulsbane said:

So is it our pc resources that are looking up those stats or TFP servers? Hint, i don't think we're using their servers in any way when we look up dedicated servers. I can still use steam to view server's pings bypassing TFP's way of looking up and sorting servers. I don't think it's working as intended.

Don't know. I haven't reverse engineered their protocol, but I have seen references to Steamworks, which means it could use the Steamworks Datagram Relay as part of the way to find player hosted games without revealing their IPs.

 

But unless you're very certain it doesn't use any centralised resources at all, the point stands - you might not know what was the reason behind the new feature, and it could be a performance/scalability one.

[Pernicious]

7 hours ago, JCrook1028 said:

No kidding. That's why I used the quotation marks... They have no servers relating to players using them in any way. Better?

Nope. Worse.

 

Even very decentralised networks like Bitcoin have hard coded default "peers", and Torrents have seed files to get them started before using the network to find more peers.

 

How do you think a player finds a list of servers without asking TFP for them? Broadcast across the entire internet on port 26900 asking if they are a 7d2d server? It's a serious question. I'm curious as to how you think player matching works if TFP don't get involved at all.

 

[Ramethzer0]

Yeah its no bueno.  I would like an explanation why this is a thing.

[Mr Ziffel]

Has anyone come up with a solution to this crap? I was told a couple of code lines fixes it. Something to do with where the server is located. Once that is done you can find the server. That's all I have. Contacted my server company but no answer yet. 

 

[pApA^LeGBa]

@Mr Ziffel You need to add a line into your serverconfig.xml.  But you can also find it via IP, you should see your server IP somewhere on your commandcenter at your hosting website. Simply apply any search and click on "join via IP" in the bottom right once you are in the server list.

 

Here you can find the line in the first post that you need to add to your serverconfig: https://community.7daystodie.com/topic/28529-alpha-204-stable/

Edited April 28, 2022 by pApA^LeGBa (see edit history)

[pApA^LeGBa]

8 hours ago, Ramethzer0 said:

Yeah its no bueno.  I would like an explanation why this is a thing.

 

Because MS says so and they are part of the MS gamepass and MS game store now. Same goes for the mod folder changes. 

Edited April 28, 2022 by pApA^LeGBa (see edit history)

[Matt115]

12 minutes ago, pApA^LeGBa said:

 

Because MS says so and they are part of the MS gamepass and MS game store now. Same goes for the mod folder changes. 

Yep. I wish TFP would say no to MS xd

 

[Ramethzer0]

5 hours ago, pApA^LeGBa said:

 

Because MS says so and they are part of the MS gamepass and MS game store now. Same goes for the mod folder changes. 

[MikeSixx]

On 4/26/2022 at 2:28 PM, Telric said:

Sounds more like impatience than a fault of the game. It's day 1 of a new patch. You can't expect everyone from every server, all across the world to update their servers on your time. It will take a few weeks for everyone to get on board with how things work now. It's like when things went from having to choose single player worlds vs mp worlds, to how it is now, where you're considered always a MP server with settings that hide the name of it. Confusion happened at first, but since then it's become a non issue. Same concept here. No sense in rage quitting day one of a new system patch. Give players time to update their servers to use the new feature.

Nope, as I stated: Geographical regions in Internet DO NOT WORK !  Geographical regions >>> ONLY <<<< work for official server that are provided by the game vendor to few predefined regional data centers. For random player installed servers the regional accuracy is around 50%, so basically it is pure guesswork. 

[SylenThunder]

27 minutes ago, MikeSixx said:

Nope, as I stated: Geographical regions in Internet DO NOT WORK !  Geographical regions >>> ONLY <<<< work for official server that are provided by the game vendor to few predefined regional data centers. For random player installed servers the regional accuracy is around 50%, so basically it is pure guesswork. 

Well lets be at least a little bit realistic. 

 

The entire reason for segregating geographical regions is exactly because of how the global internet works.

For a game like this, you want to connect to a server with the lowest possible ping. You aren't going to get a low ping when your data is having to cross an international trunk line. It has nothing at all to do with "official servers provided by the vendor". They do that purposely so that you will choose a server in your region. By being on a server in your region, you will have a lower ping, and will be more likely to interact with players that speak your own language.

[Gamida]

Hopefully they fix it so I(We?) don't keep getting all these chinese servers when we choose our region (I use USA East). And as you mentioned the ping, I do hope they also add a spot so you can search for a max ping rate to try and get some of those lower ping servers.

[MikeSixx]

@SylenThunder 
I work in IT and this  whole GeoIP and the Regions detection is just fantasy. 

That is exactly what I am saying: It would be smarter to just use the latency, not this fantasy of "regions". As the "wrong" region might have lower ping. "Where you are located" depends on the network topology and routing and it is often off by hundreds of kilometres of your physical location. And even if it get that right the latency of other Region might actually be lower for you connection. The regions only work when it is not professionally installed data centers. And professional I mean people who know the network topology of international data networks.