Mid Februrary 2026 - Health report on lobby.wz2100.net

[johan-boule]

This is a general purpose discussion about what's been going on with lobby.wz2100.net for a couple days.
If anyone has information, please share. It drives me crazy to try to make any sense of what's happening, so I won't even bother explaining it. If you saw what I saw, you know what I'm talking about!

[johan-boule]

@Subsentient Hi, were you able to get more info about how deeply the rules governing the lobby access were changed ?
On my side, every game is permanently showing zero players... except if it's running on the Autohoster machine!
Moreover, I do see the spectator counts being updated so the updates are actually performed, but the player count fields are kept at zero. This makes me worry that some really nasty thing is going to be uncovered.

[Subsentient]

I was not. I hear that the minimum poll time is now 10 seconds, which is a problem for me as my WZBlue lobby monitor has a minimum refresh of 5 seconds, but that's about the only useful information I've been told. As far as the 0 players forever issue you're describing, I haven't personally seen it.

[johan-boule]

I asked several people about it and indeed, they don't witness the phenomena.
I just came out of a struggle to get around a permanent ban of my usual IP that's never been resolved after two weeks, and for which I got zero comment on the GitHub issue I opened. Even my pull request to avoid WZ hammering the lobby in a loop got ignored. I had to start paying a monthly fee for an additional IP just to get back access to the lobby.
And now, there's this new problem which looks like the lobby is refusing to show correct information depending on who connects. As much as I hate having these kinds of bad thoughts, I do have past experiences that lead me to believe it's a possibility.

[johan-boule]

For illustration, all the games except the ones on the Autohost machine look like this:

[johan-boule]

And here you can see that the Spectator count does get updated (look at the dumbyhost with 3 spectators), and also that games on the Autohost machine aren't affected, it shows some nonzero player count:

[johan-boule]

I could show countless examples...

[johan-boule]

And again, for that example above, the spectator count is correctly updated:

[Subsentient]

They should really just let me update Warzone 2100 Legacy's C lobby and use that instead of whatever insane python patchwork they're currently using. The WZ lobby server code has been terrible and sometimes not FOSS for as long as I can remember. Here's a somewhat out-of-date but trivially upgradeable version of that. Hopefully devs see this. https://github.com/Subsentient/wz2100legacy/blob/microwave/extras/legacylobby.c

[johan-boule]

Thanks for the link! I asked for the lobby server source code a hundred times and a hundred times my request was ignored like I didn't even say anything.
I think a decentralised model would better suit an opensource project like WZ. I started a prototype of a "confederated" lobby server that allows multiple servers to exchange game lists between each others.
Sorry, it's not beautiful C but ugly python :-) Details there: http://warzone2100.retropaganda.info/#Lobby%20server

[johan-boule]

So, at this time of the night, it got magically repaired.... Something happened at around 1:40 ~ 1:45 AM UTC. What was it?

[johan-boule]

Today the lobby is still showing totally random numbers and numbers that are different depending on who connects.
I'm in a game where the players oscillate between 9 and 10 and the lobby oscillates between 5 and 6.
When the host goes to check his own game in the lobby, he sees 11/10.

[johan-boule]

I expect no explanation is ever going to come from the author of the lobby server running at lobby.wz2100.net.
Unsubscribing and closing.