Factorio Forums

Was part of a large group (20+) and experienced a server-wide desync. While everyone was reconnecting, my normally fast connection was slowed to a crawl, and then when it finished with the new non-pausing system, I was treated to 2+ minutes of super-fast replay catch up.

While this was amusing, it just seemed that with the extra step of catching up would increase the traffic the server would need to handle at a given time.

Would it make sense to limit the number of connecting players to 2 or 3 at a time, and give the others waiting an "In queue position x/x", so we limit the amount of traffic dedicated to "catching up"?

Nice idea but this needs a little more to be effective:
In your proposed state a server that has more upload capacity than 3 clients have combined download capacity would artificially limit the speed.
The server needs to somehow know the upload capacity and limit the simultaneous attemts accordingly.
Searching for the error that caused desync could also be a lot faster than redownloading the whole map.

It could be a server configurable option to have the owner set the max number of simultaneous map downloads, I just threw 3 out there because it seemed reasonable. If there's an easy way to implement detection of capacity than that would make sense.

I think if desync causes were easily apparent it would be a great improvement on multiplayer as a whole, but not specific to this suggestion.