Alter the default process for fetching player avatar appearances

Feature Requests Engine Features
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#1

The Problem

On August 28th, 2022, there was a 2-4 hour period where player avatars often failed to load their appearances.

Simultaneously, player character spawning + respawning could take as long as three minutes.

I assume these two things are connected - that this delay was due to trying to fetch an avatar’s appearance. If not, then this thread probably is irrelevant, but that’s my guess.

I received 100+ bug reports about this relatively gamebreaking issue that I could not solve. This affected my game’s metrics negatively (concurrent count, likes/dislikes, retention, etc.). The bug reports subsided once Roblox put up the website banner.

The Ask

  • Instead of retrying to get a player’s appearance for a reaaaaaaaaaally long period of time, default to the blank default avatar faster (and then perhaps try to load their appearance later)
  • Notify the user why their avatar didn’t load
  • Automate a system to put up the website banner faster (unsure if this one is actually realistic)
22 Likes
Avatar Not Loading With Assets And Long Respawn Time
#2

Why not cache the previously loaded characters and then load that in if its taking so long to fetch new character appearance info

4 Likes
Avatar Not Loading With Assets And Long Respawn Time
#3

Another outage with the exact same symptoms on 09/03/22. Some form of failsafe would be really nice.

2 Likes
#4

The outage on August 28th nearly resulted in me having to cancel a community event I was hosting due to a critical system which relied on avatars being broken, as well continuing to give me major problems throughout.

While I understand that is the result of very poor timing, I would prefer if this didn’t happen in the first place, at least to the degree that it did before.

1 Like