I am sure many developers have had to face the challenge of not being able to keep people out of your games. In fact, I know for a fact that Roblox has had this problem during the egg hunts throughout the years. The problem is that we have no effective way to test our games without allowing any player to join them.
There are several unofficial solutions that people have made up, so I’ll explain their flaws to make my point:
Setting the game to friends/group members only: an effective strategy, if you have no friends at all or a completely empty group. Of course, if you’re like me, and have a group with tens of thousands of members, as well as near 100 friends, this method is quite ineffective.
Making the place inactive when you’re not testing it: alright, I suppose this works. That is, if you’re not so popular that people might join it when you’re testing it. Or if you’re simply annoyed by the idea of having to continually switch between active and inactive whenever you want to play the game.
Adding a script that kicks players when they join: This used to work, but now we have problems with users growing angry and then thumbs-downing the game. And no, they don’t understand, even if there’s a disclaimer
Making the game paid access at an extortionately high price: A bold strategy, or perhaps a backup to the previous strategy. Who would be dumb enough to pay 1,000 to play a game that is clearly marked as unfinished? The answer: more than you think. Even before I had ever made a popular game I had a few people buying my early-WIP games for 1,000R$, just to see what’s inside. And like before, they will become angry even though you’ve made a clear disclaimer that it’s not ready, and rate your game poorly.
The solution to this problem seems pretty simple and easy to implement. Furthermore, there are many options to fix this. You could make a general blacklist that prevents anyone without edit privileges from joining the game, which seems like it’d literally take a few minutes to add considering the Friend’s Only feature that already exists. Preferably, you could add a whitelist option that allows us (like in vip servers) to add usernames of allowed visitors of the game.
It’s not a major feature, but it would make a big impact for those of us that like to keep our work private until it’s time to be released.
