Add a button to join a random server (Not join a friend), and i think most people i’ve talked to will be happy.
12 Likes
We may look into a setting you can opt into for not playing with friends. That way you can get into a random server without your friends. We may also look into a way to get into a more or less populated server.
17 Likes
It will be our next priority. Don’t want to promise anything, but we will try to get it out soon!
9 Likes
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I desperately need a way to give my moderators access to the entire server list so they can, you know, actually do their jobs, but I don’t utilize group games. My games are significantly less safe now than they were before because of this.
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The game’s page needs to make it clear that there are still people playing the game even when my friends aren’t there.
If I see this screen, my brain is going to go into autopilot and assume that the game is actually empty.
EDIT: or just go with Echo’s idea because making reactive fixes to these kinds of changes is getting really, really old
I really wish we were told about this change ahead of time so we could work through these inevitable problems before the change was actually made, it would’ve saved everyone the panic of trying to work around the removal of such a core feature.
50 Likes
Hi @Caelestene,
Thank you for making this thread. I will keep this as constructive as possible, as I don’t take staff outreach for granted – you didn’t have to do this. Summed up, I have a suggestion for improvement, and believe change is necessary because while the current change satisfies are large percentage of users, it does not satisfy a large percentage of user types.
##Why this change needs improvement:
By purely looking at % of users, we’ve diminished the value of the statistic. One piece of valuable information we’ve neglected to pay attention to is the types of users this change affects. The largest type – the largest percentage – of players is the standard kind that plays games and little else. A number of other major types (dwarfed only because of the sheer size of ROBLOX’s playerbase) have been neglected.
####Power Users:
While small in percentage, power users are a major driving factor for ROBLOX. To put this into perspective, the subset of these users that have front page games is even smaller, yet both of us would laugh at anyone who insisted that their numbers were so small that they didn’t matter. Power users are the current front page game developers, upcoming developers, and users who have enough brand loyalty that they’ve stuck around long enough to become power users – this group, while small in comparison to ROBLOX’s overwhelming playerbase, is responsible for attracting revenue from the largest group of players and providing a veteran community that can help teach new users.
This update is problematic for power users because this group of users has complex needs and may need to take advantage of more features to meet those needs. For instance, a power user may opt to play a building game with more people instead of a smaller server that’s closer to their region, as socialization is more important than ping for this genre. A power user may also decide to join a smaller server at the end of the list to ensure they join a new version of the game instead of an older, more-broken version that hasn’t phased out yet. Perhaps the most important of all is joining a game an acquaintance or friend of a friend is playing. I’m not friends with everyone in the Discord servers I’m in, but if they say “Anyone want to play X?”, I may decide to join in, and if they have their follow settings set to friends-only, I need to find them in the server list.
####Users in small, but dedicated, communities:
There are some niches that aren’t too large, but the users who do like that niche are amazingly passionate. As such, while the games they play may not amount to a large percentage of players, these games are still heavily utilized.
This update is problematic for small, dedicated communities because of the small amount of servers they have. For instance, if I play Survival 303 and land in a server with a toxic user who is ruining the experience for me, I’d want to join another server. If there are only two servers, and no one is my friend in the other server, I have to rely on matchmaking and a 50% chance of not landing in the same server again. This is even worse if one of my friends is in the toxic server, as ROBLOX will force me into that server to play with my friend.
####Users in groups:
I’m not sure how large the group community is, but I would imagine it would have to be pretty big. In addition to that, users in groups have very strong ties to their community and by extent to ROBLOX. To add onto that, half of the ads I see are for groups, so they have to be a large revenue source. This user type is probably almost as impactful as power users.
I believe the concerns for this group are known because of your comment on adding a permission, but this still does not alleviate all the needs of groups. Something @Polymorphic forgot was that it’s not only group members who use group places – in country, war, and miscellaneous roleplay groups, there is usually some form of allies/enemies (so much so that groups officially support these). These groups’ members may not be in the owning group and will not have permissions to view servers.
####All users:
I’m unsure if this would make an impact on the PM botting problem even. If I were a botter, I’d have my legion of bots friend as many people as possible, so if I had a meager 1000 friends (which is very small in comparision to ROBLOX’s total playerbase) across these bot accounts, I could PM bot 1000 servers. The bots would likely target users on the forums, groups, and the users in their friends lists to still have plenty of people to PM bot and plenty of people to send friend requests to in order to grow their contact network like that “Shared with Google Drive” worm that started off small and then went on to affect people worldwide by recursively sending itself to its victims’ contacts.
##How this change could be improved:
I think there are better ways of approaching this issue. Individually patching the issues with per-game permissions and an option to join a game without a friend aren’t a good approach because you’re just duct-taping hole after hole at that point on a sinking ship. The feature’s core should be designed well enough that multiple use cases don’t need to be patched in.
As I posted here, ROBLOX could serve the list of servers without account PII. It would provide a rbxcdn headshot without username/userId, which couldn’t be traced back to the user, as well as the complete list of servers so the existing benefits of the server list are preserved. The only existing functionality we’d lose is mouseover names (though would still be able to identify acquaintances), but this could be remedied by allowing mouseovers on servers friends are in and highlighting their portaits with green so it’s obvious why mouseover works on some but not others, in addition to providing nice functionality. This only requires a single change to the core of the approach, instead of multiple reactive fixes. Even if there are some problems with this (e.g. would use up to many web requests to find users’ friends), this core idea should go to show that it’s reasonably possible to design a better solution.
103 Likes
Would it be possible to show the images of the players in the servers still but without giving people the ability to see or click on their names?
This allows for nearly everything the old version had except you now cannot click on random players to see their accounts, which no one really did besides maybe at Trade Hangout.
Looking at games now just looks so empty.
21 Likes
The simplest middle ground I think is just to not include username/userid in the data, and only show the avatar icons. Bots won’t be able to do anything with that information, and usually nobody really cares who specifically is playing in each server. If they do care then they can probably recognize their avatar anyway.
33 Likes
I would use servers a lot whenever I wanted to play a game that requires a lot of people in it, like apoc or phantom forces or other team based games for ex.
The other reason why we removed the list is because our matchmaking tries to optimise your gaming experience by choosing the best server for you e.g. closest server / lowest ping. The risk with selecting a random server from the list is that the random server may have high ping, and we won’t be able to provide a good gameplay experience. If there are any issues with selecting a good server, I think we should improve our overall matchmaking. I’ll add this into the FAQ!
In terms of a solution, I’m thinking we could try to provide a way for users to choose a smaller or larger server.
3 Likes
Not a good reason. Just show ping on the server list if you are concerned about this and let the user decide like every other game with servers. It’s standard, people will know what to do.
33 Likes
How many individual patches for all the various use cases are we going to develop? You’re already at 3 (picking larger/smaller, avoiding friends, group permissions) and can only go up from there. I would imagine it would be more appropriate to change the core design (as suggested in post #13) so it addresses all/most of the issues and requires minimal changes (makes the website less complicated for its target audience, and less work for the web team).
22 Likes
Hello everyone,
Our main goal is to provide all users with an overall better experience when playing Roblox games. We understand there are multiple ways to continue on expanding these options and in order to do this, we have decided to create this thread to open a discussion with all of our developers to see how we can benefit everyone in our community when we release future updates. Please make sure to keep it civil and keep your posts professional since this thread has been moved to the public section of the Developer Forum.
Thank you,
Developer Relations Team
2 Likes
Your efforts would better be invested in other means of detecting bots than taking away useful tools. There are many other ways that bots can scrape user information (e.g. forums, popular groups, iterating over user id’s, etc.)
I understand that this update came from a good place, but I’m not sure it’s really going to accomplish anything. This reminds me of the old phrase “security through obscurity”-- You aren’t fixing the actual problem, you’re just hiding information.
I think you should revert this change instead of wasting development hours adding in alternatives to something we already had. At the very least, just remove the link to profiles and only show the avatar, like how the Steam Marketplace works, and as 1waffle1 suggested.
31 Likes
I strongly detest being restricted to relying on what a computer thinks is best for my experience, I’d take having the freedom to wander into whatever server I choose over a barely noticeable change in performance. The only legitimate problem that needed to be solved was the botting problem and Echo basically just solved that with his proposal, any bandage fix besides that is going to waste time, frustrate innumerable users, and solidify the degradation in usability that this change has wrought.
23 Likes
After discussing this with various members of my own group and of other groups, and as well as after reading @EchoReaper’s response, is that although popular games may not be impacted by this change, more niche games will be severely impacted.
For example, without custom server listing, games such as Territory Conquest may suffer due to their long rounds. Risky Strats gets hit by this as well. Any sort of round based game where players tend to hop from server to server looking for new matches are now unable to do this easily. Simply organizing the match maker to do this by assigning them to more full/empty servers won’t fix this, because more empty servers tend to be the ones that are ongoing rounds while full servers are likely rounds that just began.
A more personal example is with war groups, where now it is difficult to coordinate inter-group events.
I think EchoReaper’s solution to the problem is likely the only real solution that will respect more niche games and communities.
As @evaera has suggested, you will be patching a lot of problems this solution has caused than you would fixing the real problem (bots). They will invent crawlers that will scrape information off of more places rich with data, and we’ll be right back at square one.
14 Likes
The data required to get a list of all running games with Players and their IDs can be found in a publicly accessible JSON file for each game. This solution solves nothing and adds at-most 10 lines of code to a PM bot.
11 Likes
It seems like the recent trend in updates is that it is easier to remove a feature, rather than to add one. Revoking a tool Roblox users have had since near the beginning of the site’s inception is, in my opinion, a very misguided approach at combating malicious users.
I understand that this update has good intention, and that the bot problem is no laughing matter, but will this honestly help at all? The problem may be resolved for a week, but sooner or later a new big data-scraping method will come along, and we’ll be right back where we started, only without a beloved feature.
I believe @EchoReaper’s solution to the problem may be a better fit for the community.
25 Likes
They’re removing that soon.
Why can’t you do what numerous people have suggested? Highlight friends with green outlines and just have your profile pic; but no link back to your profile and no name hover.
13 Likes