Needlessly Difficult Server Experience: Issues joining a server
reznoriam
Join Date: 2013-04-17 Member: 184865Members
Join Date: 2013-04-17 Member: 184865Members
Ever since the last patch with the removal of modded server filters from the game, it has become increasingly difficult to perform the simple function of locating a server to play on. Before this last patch, we had to deal with a very poor implementation of Reserved Slots wherein it appears in the server browser has space available leading people to join and subsequently being kicked for a lack of reserved slot. That was annoying enough because of the wasted time loading into the server only to be tossed off, but recently we've encountered an even greater problem.
The modded server option has resulted in many players, myself included, not being able to find a reliable server to play on. I can respect a server owner's desire to run mods on their server, and I don't dispute their right to do so, but many of these server owners have disabled the ability to download the mods when joining that server. This results in an aborted connection attempt where we get tossed back to the main menu with a message that says missing required mod.
The end result? It's hit or miss when trying to join any server these days. A frustratingly long amount of time is spent just trying to find a server that you can get into with no way of blacklisting a server from your browser so you wont accidentally try to connect to it again at some point in the future.
Maybe some day the ideal will be reached where this all works as intended, but as is it's just not working out.
The modded server option has resulted in many players, myself included, not being able to find a reliable server to play on. I can respect a server owner's desire to run mods on their server, and I don't dispute their right to do so, but many of these server owners have disabled the ability to download the mods when joining that server. This results in an aborted connection attempt where we get tossed back to the main menu with a message that says missing required mod.
The end result? It's hit or miss when trying to join any server these days. A frustratingly long amount of time is spent just trying to find a server that you can get into with no way of blacklisting a server from your browser so you wont accidentally try to connect to it again at some point in the future.
Maybe some day the ideal will be reached where this all works as intended, but as is it's just not working out.
Comments
The workaround is to a) open the console, b) identify the mod(s) which didn't download successfully, and c) go into Steam Workshop, find the mod(s) in question, and manually subscribe. Yeah, that's a real pain. But you only need to do it once per mod, not once per server. And since most servers run the same mods from a very small set (mostly administrative mods like ns2stats), after you've done this a few times you won't need to do it again.
I certainly understand how this would be very frustrating and annoying to someone who has no interest in playing on modded servers in the first place.