how tf does games list work?

How do they cluster games / users when viewing the Join Game tab? we’ve all felt it — surely there’s more people and more games going on than is shown.

Yesterday was just farming in public trade games, no one joined for like an hour of play and then 3 people joined all at once. So what gives, was my game just not being listed or being listed on some shitty subnet with no players for a while?

Short answer, it doesn't...

I don't know but it sure seems like a random selection.

I am sure, not even Blizzard knows.

If they do know, they (afaik) at least never really explained it.

What they did let slip is that you don't see all region games. You see a measly fraction of them based on where exactly you are, supposedly for "performance reasons". So..ya know..you can connect from Paris to Asia or US games just fine but from Paris to Berlin would be too slow cuz...that makes sense...(random examples, no idea where the clusters really are).

Beyond that, there's just all sorts of rumors with games being filtered/sorted by "activity", last joins and even things like "legacy drop spacing gets sorted to top". No idea how much if any of that is accurate but none of it would surprise me, intended or not.

Long story short, lobby sucks and desperately needs an overhaul.

Lobbies definitely need some attention. I love logging on and seeing a Baal run that's been open for 18 hours.

Schnorki wrote: 4 years ago

If they do know, they (afaik) at least never really explained it.

What they did let slip is that you don't see all region games. You see a measly fraction of them based on where exactly you are, supposedly for "performance reasons". So..ya know..you can connect from Paris to Asia or US games just fine but from Paris to Berlin would be too slow cuz...that makes sense...(random examples, no idea where the clusters really are).

Beyond that, there's just all sorts of rumors with games being filtered/sorted by "activity", last joins and even things like "legacy drop spacing gets sorted to top". No idea how much if any of that is accurate but none of it would surprise me, intended or not.

Long story short, lobby sucks and desperately needs an overhaul.

they published an organigram once for wow. this was a few years ago.
they have at least 11500 physical servers all around the world (not game servers in-game, these are server clusters, has primarily nothing to do with servers visible in games) where wow runs on. I don’t remember when they published this. must have been 2015-ish.
now, server setups have come a long way since then and they said somewhere that they switched to virtual servers. this means the physical computer can run different game servers at the same time and start more and scale as the respective game needs it.

with diablo being old and code not having been adapted to modern times, I think diablo as a whole runs on a fraction of blizzards‘ servers and with the code being old and shit it would need a complete overhaul to run like we all wish. I think most problems exist because diablo is very old code.

(n00b thinking here, not a coder, not a server admin )