Yes, we should only use a tag when it meets the requirements. That’s why I’m advocating changing said requirements.
ROBLOXCRITICAL is a tool, to be used strictly when a situation requires not only immediate attention, but a rapid response to prevent further impact in the platform. The point is that we need the ability not just to notify Roblox engineers when we are experiencing massive player losses, but before we do so.
Roblox certainly cares a lot about addressing exploiters, but this isn’t as easy as some people make it out to be. We’ve come a very long way as a platform since the times of non-Filtering Enabled.
That being said, squashing people sharing exploits on the internet is hardly a solution. The fact is, they will keep popping up as long as they are able to exist from a technical standpoint. The broader solution lies in long-term planning to create a more secure development platform.
"I don’t think it’s worth distracting engineers by making it equal to the entirety of Roblox being unplayable.
You are right.
However, this IS making some games unplayable.
People like targeting specific games, and we can’t do anything about it.
ROBLOXCRITICAL should definitely be warranted in situations where unpatchble exploits are crashing servers.
The fact that it can’t be classed as critical until someone pulls it off on a larger scale is inviting exactly that to happen. It’s a backwards way of triaging issues because they’re (in a way) encouraging it to have a wider effect on the platform before they’ll give it any special attention.
Even if “ROBLOXCRITICAL” is not the correct tag, there should be some additional triage that means this is dealt with as an extremely severe and time sensitive issue, with some appreciation for the pain and loss of revenue this is going to cause developers if it isn’t identified and patched.
This definitely needs addressing ASAP, i’ve had to close my game to group only because of this and it’s only going to spread in the coming hours as word goes around about the exploit.
As for whether this is worth ROBLOXCRITICAL being changed, i’m not sure. I think the issue is moreso communication related than anything else, and some sort of pinned acknowledgement that Roblox engineers are aware of this issue would be more helpful. Then again - isn’t that what ROBLOXCRITIAL accomplishes anyway?
The group @Exploit_Reports exists for reporting exploits. Exploits are not meant to be reported anyways, at least not with reproduction steps.
Though I do agree that there is some grey area and there are some things that should be considered robloxcritical but can’t be because we need to be bound to the definition of robloxcritical.
For instance what if all premium subscriptions randomly cancelled and all robux got wiped due to roblox error? There is nothing even close to the example scenario and thus can’t be posted. The guidelines are too specific and should be generalized a little more.
It does not crash or throw fatal errors, it does not halt all meaningful functionality in Studio or in game or on the website.
It does not cause player data loss through data stores nor purchase failures.
It does not prevent successful connections to games.
The user didn’t report an exploit, they reported that their game was being crashed. They had no idea why that was until knowledgable users in the field contributed to the discussion.
I wasn’t meaning to respond to that post in particular. Was more of a broad statement. But yeah.
The fact that this was a new exploit, with devastating effects, could be used in any game, and has the potential to become widespread, all seem to say that it is ROBLOXCRITICAL to me.
It has the capability to hit a “significant amount of players / games”
Agreed. ROBLOXCRITICAL is a tag that is used for essentially when Roblox is unplayable or a major service is down. An exploit like this was making Roblox unplayable at a growing rate. The more exploiters who saw the post with how to execute it, the more unplayable Roblox got. This is something I’d definitely classify as ROBLOXCRITICAL.
Yes, it is not critical cause it does not currently affect most games, well obviously a game like adopt me with over 500,000 players isn’t going to be affected by someone shutting down a few of their servers. But games with smaller player bases are suffering. I’m not too bothered about my test server as it is just a test server, but it usually has around 70 players and recently it isn’t surpassing 15 because of this shutdown exploit. Sure, this isn’t ROBLOXCRITICAL but something needs to be done pretty quickly.
Exploiters can’t be easily dealt with but they’re not harshly treated enough by moderation in my opinion.
It’s already been said, but it sounds ROBLOXCRITICAL to the utmost when some 300 Current player games’s activity can be entirely annihilated with just a single man having the smart decision to see it gone.
Instant shutting down isn’t a major issue ? you kidding ? do we really need to see someone take down a top game in the 5 digits players count to correctly evaluate the danger ?
Hey yeah, thanks for that. I just lost $2800 in the span of just 12 hours because of this. And a lot of my developer friends report the same thing, either their games were totally annihilated, or they were lucky and maybe had about 100 players still able to play.
My games lost over 1500 players and I lost over 1,000,000 Robux.
But hey, I get it. On the grand scale of things, minor developers like me who only bring in a fraction of revenue for Roblox aren’t worth prioritizing. It can wait.
Just because Adopt Me isn’t getting destroyed does not mean that it’s not a critical issue. Hey, a ship is about to explode but there is a 70% chance it won’t explode. Let’s not call the engineers before necessary, don’t want to bother them or anything like that.
I really suggest you stop talking about topics that you clearly have no insight or knowledge of. If you ever ran a game of any sort you’d know that having your entire player base obliterated is pretty critical.
Engineers already read the Platform Feedback category. Having Robloxcritical in the title of a topic will not make engineers aware of the problem any faster (in fact they probably already know there’s a problem by the time they’re checking the forum), nor will it help them fix the issue any faster. Tagging your topics with Robloxcritical is for the most part completely inconsequential.
Arguing about whether or not an issue is “critical” is pointless. Posting a bug report with a clear and descriptive title is just as effective at getting engineer attention (which is what already happened, the topic is just unlisted because people forget why the Exploit Reports group on the forum exists).
Let’s try to keep the bigger picture in mind.
I think the panic is the main fuel behind the robloxcritical controversy here. Sure, if there was a fix that developers could implement in the meantime while Roblox sorts this particular exploit out it would be okay. But since there’s no known fix or patch to keep the exploiters at bay before a formal fix is deployed, smaller game communities are forced to sit back and watch their games get destroyed.
Personally, I do take a neutral stance in regards to this situation as I do believe engineers read bug reports, but I feel as though this particular exploit is nasty as there’s no way to prevent or mitigate the damage it does as a developer like you could with weld spam (before it was patched) or chat spam.
(P.S. I do know that engineers are actively looking into this, but this is just what I think of the situation)
Just leaving this here for posterity / perspective: looks like the problem is already patched and it didn’t require a ROBLOXCRITICAL tag on the post to have it patched within a few hours of them being aware of it (and assuming most of those few hours was engineering time, they likely noticed within 5 minutes of posting the bug report).
To me this indicates that expanding the purpose of the tag is not necessary. They see all bug reports anyway.
I’m glad the issue was fixed & in such a short time period, thumbs up from me!
My personal issue with the situation that I think is also shared by many would be the communication about such things, an earlier acknowledgement that the issue is known about & being looked into would save a lot of undue stress and potentially even anger for a lot of developers when situations like this arise, even if they aren’t quite worthy of a ROBLOXCRITICAL tag.
Currently there’s a lot of guessing whether or not the topic has been seen by the relevant teams. I think community uncertainty is likely a major contributor to the uproar that surrounds these events, especially given the fact that livelihoods & actual money are put at risk.
Perhaps Roblox could add a “Seen” tag to posts which they have seen are are working on? That might help a lot.
It’s because it was an exploit report – they’re meant to be sent via @Exploit_Reports and not in Platform Feedback / elsewhere, especially if they have clear repro steps.