So V2 uses Steamworks for its matchmaking. The Near/Medium/Far/World ranges in the Lobby Browser are managed by Steamworks, and are judged by the Download Region you have selected in your Download Settings in Steam.
So, for example, if your Download Region in Steam is set to US-Phoenix, then when you hit Quickplay, it will first try to match you to a “Near” Lobby, which means another lobby from a player who has the US-Phoenix setting in Steam (whether they are actually IN Phoenix is irrelevant, all that matters is that they have this setting). The “Near” distance is ONLY other games in the same Region as you have set in Steam.
If there are no open lobbies in US-Phoenix, or whatever your region is, then the search will expand to “Medium”, which has Steam return lobbies in “Nearby Regions”.
These “Nearby Regions” are defined by Steam relative to each Region from which a search is made. So, for US-Phoenix, Steam may define as “nearby regions” US-Houston and US-LosAngeles and maybe some others, lobbies it returns when searching for “Medium”. While Germany-Munich may recognize all the other Germany regions and maybe some others in Europe too as all counting as “nearby regions”. (Again, it only checks to see whether the player has their Steam Download Setting set to this region, not whether they are actually physically present in this region)
If there are no open lobbies in “Medium”/“Nearby Regions”, then Quickplay gives up searching and forces you to host. There may be loads of open lobbies in “Far/World” that wouldn’t give you any lag, but Quickplay won’t connect you to them, since it doesn’t search that far.
Players in regions with many “nearby regions”, like Germany, may have no problems with Quickplay. But for other players, Quickplay won’t be quick at all, and they’d be better off using lobby browser, even if they have to join games that only show up under the Far or even World search distance setting.
The reason that Quickplay is no longer functioning “quickly” for a lot of players may be that Steam redefined for many regions what they recognize as a “Nearby Region”, it may have excluded some regions that it recognized before as “nearby”, and Steam may not have documented this change. That, or the game simply may no longer have enough active concurrent players to support the current design of Quickplay: as players are split across Modded and Official Realms, split across Four Difficulties, and, if they are doing Okri’s Challenges or Character-specific dailies, and have the V2 Network setting “Suggest Other Heroes” set to OFF, then there just won’t be many matches available in Near/Medium, and Quickplay will take forever to connect them, as it will end up making a lot of people who hit quickplay be hosts and so we end up with a lot of lobbies with only 1 or 2 players.
If you go into the Lobby browser and select Far/World you will see lots of games. But it caps at 50 displayed in the browser. And it seems that Steam has a system so that it returns the first 50 it thinks are the best (this system isn’t perfect, but it certainly isn’t returning RANDOM games from all over the world). So if you are in America, then the 50 lobbies that Steam returns when you select “World” in the browser will all likely be games in America, it won’t display games in India or China for you.
Even games that only show up under “World” in the lobby browser may have perfectly fine connections with no lag, games you would be satisfied being connected to in Quickplay. But Quickplay will never match you to these games as they are outside the Regions Steam has defined for searching in Near/Medium FOR YOUR REGION.
What you need to do Fatshark:
Simply change Quickplay to expand to at least “Far” before giving up and forcing the player to host. That or simply disable Quickplay and require everyone to use the Lobby Browser or manually host a match to start a game.
There doesn’t seem to be a bug in Vermintide 2 at all the is causing Quickplay delays. The problem is caused either by Steam redefining what counts as “nearby regions” or V2 just doesn’t have enough players anymore, split in so many ways, to support the old design of Quickplay.