Player Affinity

Player Affinity

Player affinity makes lobby changes feel less random by preferring the healthy lobby a player used recently. It is useful when short-lived lobby state, friends, or cached data make returning to the same server desirable.

Configuration

[routing.affinity]
enabled = true
stickiness = 0.7

stickiness is a value from 0.0 to 1.0:

Value	Behaviour
0.0	Always use normal routing
0.7	Prefer the recent lobby about 70% of the time
1.0	Always return when that lobby is still eligible

The remembered lobby must still be registered, healthy, below capacity, and allowed by the current routing context. If it is unavailable, VelocityNavigator simply chooses another candidate.

How long it lasts

Affinity records expire after ten minutes. Unexpired records are saved in plugins/velocitynavigator/affinity-store.json, so a normal proxy restart does not immediately forget everyone.

With Redis enabled, affinity updates are shared between Velocity proxies. See Redis and Multi-Proxy for the network setup.

Consistent hashing

The consistent_hash routing mode already maps a player's UUID to a stable server, so the separate affinity preference is skipped in that mode.

For most networks, power_of_two with stickiness = 0.7 is a good balance between familiar routing and even load.