Automatically reconnect to experiences during updates

[tareyza]

[Update] March 6, 2024

@tareyza

Thanks for your feedback around deprecating the “shut down all servers” functionality. We’ve heard your feedback and we will bring back the button. Both this post and Creator Hub are updated to reflect this.

I want to understand more about the specifics of the use cases you have in using “shut down all servers.” If those of you who’ve commented about bringing back this functionality can dive more into why this functionality is valuable to you, this will help tremendously in making sure we can address the specifics of your needs.

We’re also looking into showing you the impact your update might have on your player base and a progress indicator so you have greater confidence that your update is proceeding quickly.

Thanks.

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Hello Creators,

We are happy to announce a significant improvement when you update your experiences! Starting today, players will automatically reconnect to your experience when you update them! Previously, players would be kicked out of the experience and have to manually rejoin.

This has been one of the most highly requested features surrounding experience updates, so we are thrilled to be rolling this out! Your players in old versions of a place will be teleported back into an updated server without having to ever leave your experience.

How it works

For every server of a place running any version other than the latest, we start a new server running the latest version of that place. The old server will be marked for closure and no longer accept new players. Once that server is ready for players, we teleport all the players from the old server together into the new one.

Once all the players have teleported into the new server, the old one will shut down within 30 seconds. For large experiences, this teleport process will be spaced out over up to 6 minutes.

When you use this new update functionality, players do not have to take any action to be updated - it will be as if they were kicked. Players will experience a single teleport. This teleport takes them to the updated version of your experience’s root place, which will contain the same set of players as they were previously playing with where possible. They will no longer exit the experience or be required to manually rejoin after the update.

Update by Experience or by Place

You will have the option to update a singular place or your entire experience at once. Updating your experience will cause all places in your experience to update. Please note that updating a place will update all servers that are running a version of that place that is behind the latest version.

Non-Public & Non-Root Servers

Players who are in reserved servers of a place undergoing an update will not be teleported back into an updated reserved server of that place. Instead, players in such servers will be teleported to an updated public server of the root place. This is to respect possible custom logic you might have that makes directly rejoining the reserved server undesirable. Similarly, players in non-root servers will be taken into the root place instead of the same non-root server they were previously playing in.

Players who are in private servers will be teleported back into their private server.

How to use it

No change to how you update your experiences is necessary to take advantage of this functionality. Simply update your experience in Creator Hub as you have been before.

Update all places in your entire experience

1. Navigate to create.roblox.com
2. In the dropdown for your experience, click Restart servers for updates.

Update one specific place

1. Select the experience the place you want to update is a part of.
2. Under the Configure menu, select Places.
3. In the dropdown for the place you want to update, click Restart servers for updates.

As we are releasing a new feature, we hope that this will allow updating your experiences to go more smoothly than it does today. We welcome any feedback, suggestions, or comments you may have.

Thank you.

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FAQ

I no longer see the “Shut Down All Servers” option anymore. Where is it?

• As announced previously, we plan to deprecate Shut Down All Servers with this release. Our hope is that a single way to update your experience makes this process clearer and simpler. Please note that in the case of game-breaking bugs, you can continue to make your experience private, which shuts down servers just as fast and additionally prevents new players from joining immediately afterwards.

UPDATE: We’ve heard your feedback around this and have restored the functionality on Creator Hub, you can continue to use this option on Creator Hub.

I don’t see any changes in the Creator Hub UI, how do I know I am using this feature?

• We don’t want to confuse you by changing the names of existing features. In this case, auto-reconnect is an upgrade to how we facilitate updates to experiences. You can continue using Restart servers for updates as this functionality will now use the auto-reconnect functionality automatically whenever you use this button.

[RaterixRGL (Raterix)]

Truthfully, removing “Shut down all servers” is not desirable. In the event there is a serious data issue, lets say the latest update has a problem, how can we force a migration as fast as possible? “Shut down all servers” does exactly that.

You also have to account for soft updating systems, systems that use the InsertService or Packages to update assets cleanly. The feature proposed here will not update those servers, forever keeping them on old builds. You have not provided any API that we can hook into what so ever.

The solutions provided by Roblox saying to private the game is harmful. Privating the game removes all private server subscriptions.

This is a reckless change with no forethought given.

[hyde12345678]

This is great! I noticed that when developers have to restart their servers for bugs, theres a huge dunk in players which isn’t really the best for gameplay. Thanks for solving this issue

Developers no longer have to have “update waiting areas” (like in DOORS) or having to script it out

[TheReal4Cedar123 (Cedar)]

THIS IS HUGE!!!

Thank you so much for adding this! Long live the days of soft-shutdown systems!!!

Are there any plans to do the same for player disconnections? It would bring back players if the game cuts out for a variety of reasons, such as Wi-Fi cutouts?

[rbxg3d (G3D)]

I’m so glad that this is finally implemented. Less about shutting down and more about restarting servers for an update. Maybe more features for like planned updates/restarts?

[Cleetaros (Goon)]

Amazing update, been hoping this would happen for a long time!

[HealthyKarl]

What will happen first though, DataStore or the reconnecting?

[xChris_vC (Chris)]

This is a very welcome feature! We’ve been trying to tackle this with SoftShutdown but this is much more intuitive. I’m sure players will appreciate this a lot!

Is it possible to have an event triggered before the teleporting happens? We don’t want to have to kick the player in the destination place because the data’s still saving.

[VoidedBlades (Plushie)]

Is there plans on potential APIs to hook into this? as a dev i often wish to notify my players a shutdown is about to happen for whatever reason. Next to this im kind of on the fence of utilizing it. I personally prefer a more sandbox approach where we, as developers, can determine our own timeframe for shutdown, announcement type, etc.

Really hope either an open cloud API comes available with desired parameters or an in game one to hook into providing the time until shutdown at the very least.

[Nicant02 (Nicant)]

Awesome update! Would there ever be an option in the future for us to send players to a specific sub place in the same universe and keep them there until the new updated server is up? We have our own game updating system that teleported each server to a special “game is updating” place for a bit until the new updated server was ready.

[AlienDai (Alien)]

Ditto. I’d like to be able to pass along TeleportData with this as well, so for example when the players reconnect they can be placed at the Positions they left off at.

[ChasingSpace (Chasing)]

If there’s something this severe occurring, you can make the game private and then public once you’ve deployed a fix. This will immediately boot everyone out and reduce frequency of the problem until it’s resolved.

[TomPlays63 (Tom)]

exactly, imagine if there was a big issue with the games datastore and we had to make sure all players data was safe by shutting down the servers.

[Reditect]

@tareyza could you add a video of this in action to the OP?

I assume it wouldn’t have any UI involved like in the example @TheReal4Cedar123 showed in this thread. And, on that note, maybe Roblox could better communicate about an updating server like the UI in the example does. Or, I guess the question would be about the soft-shutdown systems people have been using: are they impacted by this change? If so, how?

[epic_tank]

This is amazing! Just wondering if this will change BindToClose or how this will reflect on it!

[lnfinity_Stones (Stones)]

Roblox staff saved the day from data loss in the soft shutdown scripts

[tareyza]

@ChasingSpace

If there’s something this severe occurring, you can make the game private and then public once you’ve deployed a fix. This will immediately boot everyone out and reduce frequency of the problem until it’s resolved.

Totally understand the concern with potential serious data issues potentially occurring and will second Chasing’s comment here - making the experience private kicks players out just as quickly and has the added benefit of keeping new players from joining that “shut down all servers” does not do.

[Life_Blox]

Will BindToClose still keep the server open until execution has finished?

[AbstractAlex]

Removing “Shutdown All Servers” is a terrible idea. I don’t understand Roblox’s drive to take this control away from devs.

Trust me - we don’t want to shutdown our servers either. We do it as little as possible. But removing the option and telling us to use a hacky workaround is just intentionally torpedoing developers.

Not to mention, our games use dozens of subplaces. We don’t update each of these at the same time (or at all), but we need them to shutdown together. If roblox ever makes packages “auto-update”, this will not be compatible either.

Please stop trying to kill bigger games by restricting the tools and features we have available.