The Problem
As a developer, it has been really frustrating these past few years for game breaking updates to be happening on what feels like a monthly basis. The latest issue that hit hard was the change that broke LinkedSources and pretty much paralyzed numerous games.
In addition to the recent LinkedSource update, the PlayerScript update felt like it was handled poorly as well. While time was given for developers to update and adjust to the changes, it wasn’t really enough to catch all the bugs as shown. The pre-release of the new PlayerScripts was also quite restricted relative to the size of Roblox. A solution for this is detailed in a further section
The Solution
Roblox should slow down their update process and allow more time for testing. Instead of enabling and disabling feature flags constantly, updates should be put behind a developer toggle first before rolling out to the greater Roblox community.
For example, the latest PlayerScripts update. Roblox could’ve exposed some sort of config either on the game configuration page or within the game itself that would allow a developer to toggle the new PlayerScripts. This would, of course, come attached with a “This is pre-release tech, are you sure you want to enable this?” warning. Then, the developer could then easily test the new PlayerScripts and report bugs.
A key part of the solution is provided a centralized and easily assessable way for all developers to test out new features. This would enable everyone, not just a small minority of DevForum members to test and report bugs on features.
A big part of solving this problem is giving time for devs to test features. Under this new system, a feature would go through all the usual testing and code reviews within Roblox, then be released through the new console for enabling/disabling new features for testing how they run in an individual developers game. Roblox then gains feedback and fixed bugs. Once it looks like the feature is stable, the feature can be rolled out the greated Roblox platform.
Roblox is a massive platform that has become many people’s livelihoods. Slowing down the pace of updates would significantly help us all sleep better at night knowing everything will probably be working when we wake up.