As a Roblox developer and business owner, operating a studio running in the Roblox platform, it is currently too difficult to ensure QA testing and granular play permissions for developers.
We use a separate place for each project where it’s a Private version of the development build meant to be used for QA testing. This can be with our QA testing team and/or the developers themselves.
While it might be doable to make the game public for one or two games (albeit cumbersome since this requires scripts to ensure only QA testers can play), this quickly becomes unscalable when there is a large QA team or multiple projects.
It is currently hard to give Project Managers authority to run QA testing sessions without relying on the place being made public, which exposes it to the wider audience of people checking out the groups.
The ability to add groups to the Play permission through collaborate being added would be a great addition to the Collaborate toolset and would make operating different projects easier and more straight forward.
Hey, what I did when I worked for a studio way back in summer was make the game public and add a simple script that kicks players that are not part of the QA team.
You can easily make it kick players based on weather they hold a certain rank/role in a group, are in a group, or own a specific userid.
This would require the place to be public. This is what we currently do, but the feature request here is meant to make that same behavior possible in the way of not even allowing people not supposed to join to be there in the first place.
While it may “easily be resolved with a script”, the problem is that this becomes difficult when you have multiple groups to run, each with their own Project Manager and team, which stacks up quite quickly.
It may already be possible to do, but consumes a lot of time at scale right now. This suggestion aims at speeding that up drastically.
While kicking with a script achieves the same effect, I would not call it an alternate resolution. We as developers should be allowed to actually take away the ability for players to press the green Play button on the website. Even if we are able to kick players outside of our allow lists, they can still press the green Play button on the website. I don’t like that.
Some client assets are still getting delivered to the player, including scripts that execute shortly after, while their client is disconnected from the server. You can see this happen behind the blur and the modal that shows up.
Roblox, with a currently nonfunctioning and unhelpful rating system, immediately enables ratings on the experience for clicking the button. This can often result in skewed ratings for closed access experiences - while it may not matter for everyone, it matters for some.
Real unplayability would require us to be allowed to block players from using the green Play button on the website. I’ve never seen it as good practice to make it our responsibility to write that script in our test environments over configuring a place setting. This has other implications, for example not just for testing but for ban systems that have real consequences to cheaters.
We totally hear you, and agree that this isn’t ideal. We’re in the early stages of solving this - and a bunch of similar use cases - in a better way, so your patience is much appreciated! I can’t give a timeline, but know there’s a bunch of people at Roblox who care deeply about these sorts of collaboration management issues, and are actively working to resolve them.
