As a Roblox player it is impossible to return to the experience and server I was in before it teleported me somewhere else.
A consequence of this is that it is impossible for developers to create experience portals and teleports that their players can return from without the cooperation of developers of other experiences.
This means that networking experiences together into one large metaverse on Roblox with a web of teleports is impossible. Players will always need to use the website or the app to switch between experiences, which is a sharp interruption to exploration and immersion, and introduces a big obstacle for players to keep playing and keep discovering new things to explore. They must manually go through pages of experiences and manually choose one. Myself personally, I am not interested in doing that, the majority of the experiences page does not interest me and/or I get choice paralysis and instead just give up, but if I was able to join an experience through an ingame portal from a much smaller selection when I get bored, I would spend much more time simply exploring and trying things that I otherwise would not have manually chosen from the website.
Roblox has spoken about plans to introduce in-experience advertisements and portals, and this feature also sounds extremely necessary as part of that endeavor. I want to be able to easily go back to the game I was playing if an advertisement portal turns out to not interest me, otherwise I will never engage with these portals.
I liken this a little bit to the “skywalks” my city has downtown. In the winter, I can walk almost anywhere through a series of bridges between buildings. I can go to work, get lunch, visit the library, find a department store, and then easily get to a bus stop without ever going outside. Being able to do this on Roblox would be extremely cool and open a lot of doors.
To add a use case that applies specifically to me: I want to add portals to my game that you can dial various addresses with. Players will be able to discover codes and dial them on one of these portals to go to special places and discover secrets in my game or unlock special things, and I want to add an additional function where if they dial in a particular way, they can even access external games on Roblox. The downside to this though is that I am sending my own playerbase away without a way for them to return, which is harmful despite how cool it is.
Further, I also want to have spin-off games in my game’s same universe (my game includes many custom characters, so I want spin-offs that feature your custom character in different games). To do this without this feature, I need to manually make sure every one of my games includes the code necessary to let players return to where they came from, which is extra effort on my part.
When a teleport is initiated, it should be possible to specify that it can be returned from. Players returning should be put back into their source server, or a new server if that one is full.
A history stack should be maintained for some N games through teleport hops so players can jump back to where they came from within a reasonable travel distance. This could be surfaced to players through the ESC menu as a list of recently visited places they came from with returning enabled that they can directly teleport back to.
Having this be optional is important so as not to break experiences that e.g. teleport players between lobby and gameplay places.