Elemental Fracture Mod 3.25.1 – Patch Notes

Relaunch your launcher and let it grab Mod 3.25.1. The game’s still on 6.4.5.

New + Fixes

• Automatic region. The region picker, both in the EF Controller and on the in-game Account Management screen, has a new first option: Automatic. Pick it and the matchmaker queues you wherever your ping is lowest, and it can drop your lobby into another region when that gets everybody in it a better match without blowing anyone’s ping. Picking a named region still locks you to it, same as always.
• Region dropdown. The in-game Region list opens again. Adding the Show Clan Tag row had been rebuilding the rows underneath it, and the dropdown didn’t survive that. It now gets slotted in without touching anything around it.

How it’s done: the Automatic region

It’s one more line in a dropdown, but “Automatic” is doing a lot of work, so here’s what’s actually going on.

The problem with four regions

We run game servers in North America, Europe, and Brazil, with Japan on the list. Each one is its own little world. You pick a region, you queue in that region, and you only ever meet people who picked the same one. For a community our size, that costs us. At any given hour there might be enough people queued across all three to fill a lobby, split three ways into lobbies that never fill. Somebody in Brazil at 2 am is waiting alone and playing bots while two Americans and a guy in France are each doing the exact same thing in their own queues.

The obvious fix sounds like “just put everyone in one queue.” The real version is more careful than that, and it’s what shipped.

What can’t change: a match is one server

A match runs on exactly one game server, in one place. Everybody in that match is talking to that one machine, so everybody shares its location. There’s no way to put a Brazilian and a German in the same match where each of them plays on a server close to home. Any system that promises you that is lying to you.

So the thing we can unify is the queue, not the server. One queue per mode across every region, and every time a lobby forms, a decision: which region’s servers get it, based on who’s in it and how far each of them is from each region.

Step one: measure, don’t guess

To make that call you need numbers, not whatever region somebody clicked. Since 3.25.0 the game’s been quietly measuring your round trip to each region’s front door. Every five minutes it sends four tiny packets to each region’s router and times the echo. That’s a few hundred bytes a minute. You won’t notice it. The numbers ride along with your queue request.

Those numbers already told me something I didn’t expect: a good number of players who pick North America are measuring 100 to 150 ms to it, and some of them are 50 ms from Europe. The region they picked isn’t the region that’s closest to them. Picking by hand is a guess. The probe is a measurement.

Step two: Automatic moves, a named region doesn’t

Here’s the rule, and it’s the whole feature.

If you pick a named region, you’re locked to it. You queue there, you play there, and nothing in the new system will ever move you, no matter how long you wait. The dropdown is the override, and it means what it says.

If you pick Automatic, your home is whichever region you measured the lowest ping to. For the first chunk of your wait you’ll only take that region, exactly like you’d picked it yourself. The longer you wait, the wider the net: after a bit, a lobby forming somewhere you measured under about 60 ms can take you, then under about 110, and so on up a short ladder. Every party also carries its own cap, the worst ping it’ll put up with, and the ladder never goes past it. A party is a party: the worst-connected member’s numbers count for the whole group, so a squad never gets split up or dragged somewhere one of them can’t play.

When a lobby’s ready to go, the matchmaker looks at every region it could land in, counts how many of the waiting parties each one can take inside their budgets, and picks the one that takes the most. Ties go to the lowest worst ping in the lobby, then to whichever region’s servers have the most room.

Step three: only wait for company when there’s company

A unified queue has a trap in it. If a lone player fires off into a match after eight seconds, the way the per-region queues always have, the global queue never gets a chance to find them anybody. But if every lobby sits around waiting to fill, that lone player at 2 am waits a minute for nobody.

The answer is the same one the match countdowns already use. The matchmaker knows how many people are in a mode right now, in matches and in queues, across every region. When the mode’s quiet, lobbies fire on the normal timer, because there’s nobody to wait for. When it’s busy, a small lobby gets to hang on a little longer so the widening net has time to find it some company before it starts short-handed. Full lobbies fire immediately either way.

How it got tested: in the dark, on real traffic

I didn’t flip this on and hope. The new placement ran for a while in shadow: the old per-region queues kept doing the real work, and right alongside them the global placement figured out what it would’ve done with the same players and wrote it to a log. Every lobby, every change. “Live put one player in NA; the global queue would’ve held them.” “Live fired a lobby of two in NA; the global queue would’ve fired the same two in NA.” Line after line, against real evenings, before anybody got moved an inch.

That’s also how the quiet-hours rule got found. The first night of shadow showed the global queue holding every lone solo player for most of a minute, which was correct by the rules I’d written and wrong for the game. The rule changed, the log changed with it, and only then did the feature make it into a dropdown.

What this isn’t

It isn’t a faster Brazil server, and it isn’t a way to play on a server near you with people far from you. The server is where it is. What Automatic buys you is a shot at a fuller lobby, placed wherever the people in it measure best, instead of a quieter one placed wherever you happened to click.

And if you like your region, keep it. Nothing about yours changed.

See you in the Hollow Lands.