Some servers last days I’m pretty sure.
If you’re updating a new game constantly that is getting a lot of attention, perhaps each update change the max player count. As long as your game doesn’t rely on a specific amount for a full game to be played properly, you could note which max players equal what update. And shutdown old ones if you notice a bug in the X max player servers.
Edit: I agree more control over our servers would be good
Changing max players shuts down all servers, innit?
I don’t see anything warning me, so I would assume no (my real max players is 40). At least, a few years ago it did not.
As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to test a new feature or bug fix with a full server of actual players without shutting down all game servers to force the game to update. There have been MANY times that I’ve wished this existed, but most recently was when I had a pretty inefficient data saving system in my game and decided to write and implement a new one. The older one isn’t game-breaking, and I’m not sure if the one I’ve just written is fool-proof. In other words, I need it stress-tested. Something I can’t do very well with one person or even 5-6 people. So, I don’t want to shut down the game and kick all of my players just to have them join and cause data loss because the new system is flawed.
Instead, I propose that Roblox adds a feature that will “close” any existing (out of date) servers, preventing anyone from joining unless they join that specific server from the server list or follow a friend into the game, as well as add a timestamp visible to the game creator of when the server was created. This way, we can (stress) test our new updates in a much more isolated and less impactful way if the new update breaks anything.
So why can’t I just test in a VIP server or local test server? Well, I’m sure that any of you who have created a game know that you could bug test your game as much as you want with yourself, a friend, or even an entire team. But, when the game actually releases, there will likely be bugs that you had never even thought of in things that you wouldn’t even think to test.
If there is already a feature request for this, or if the feature already exists somewhere, or if you’d like to add on to anything I’ve said please reply.
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As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to update game servers without shutting down the game or “soft shutdown” which essentially leads to problems with roblox servers in general as seen from the Adopt Me shutting down with 1.6m players.
If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my development experience because I wouldn’t have to shutdown the game for the players to join NEW servers, what I’m suggesting is when a player presses “Play” and the game has been updated then either create a new server or join a new existing server.
That way developers that want to “soft” shutdown for no reason at all other than “I want my players to play new servers” will not create unnecessary servers and then reteleport the players instantly (which imo is very bad anyways and just stupid to do unless ALL the players need updated servers because of a huge bug or HUGE update).
I’m tired of roblox having to make a new post about why the servers are down with “seems like our servers are down and our engineers are working on fixing them” because of games just doing regular updates every saturday or so.
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