1. Navigate to the Creator Dashboard: https://create.roblox.com/creations
2. Navigate to the Experience Overview Page by clicking on an Experience
3. Navigate to the Places page of that specific Experience
4. Select the drop-down menu in the corner of the icon of any place
5. Click “Shutdown all servers”
Expected Behavior
All servers in that specific place of that experience should be shutdown
Actual Behavior
All servers in the entire experience are shutdown
This is a serious issue as you may accidentally shutdown all of your live place servers without intention. Not only this, but the only way to shutdown a specific server at current is to navigate through a maze of legacy webpages to eventually land on the Roblox page for a specific place and shutdown from there.
In fact, it may seem that the description is in fact correct, but the button placement is misleading. I tried to shutdown a testing place of ours today and everyone in all of our live places got kicked too, so this is actually much much worse.
Why can’t you shutdown servers in a singular place in a universe??? Makes no sense. One of our places in our universe had a unique bug to that place only, so it makes no sense to shut down the other places.
Yeah it’s actually really annoying because the only way I can think of doing it is to navigate to the experience page on Roblox, click Configure Experience, navigate to the Places page, open the place in a new tab and shutdown for that place’s page.
Since Roblox has completely transitioned over to the Create Portal, I can’t see any other way of getting to that page to shutdown that place. This seriously needs to be addressed, especially as the button’s placement strongly suggests you’re shutting down a singular place’s servers.
Now this feature has been entirely removed. Now it’s impossible to shutdown the servers in non-starting places. This was an important feature that I relied on to update my servers and fix critical bugs. What is the status on this website issue for shutting down places?
Omg, they removed that without even telling us and I had to find out the hard way when trying to figure out how to shutdown places so I could update our game.
I really wish Roblox would give us at least some kind of warning before making significant changes. I can’t count the number of times stuff like this has happened.
I do really hope we can get some kind of resolution to this. In the meantime, if you want to shutdown each place individually, you need to go through all of your active places in the experience, get the ID of the place, then navigate to a Roblox game page, replace the game id in the url with each of your place IDs, which will then open up that place page. From there you can shutdown the place using the dropdown.
Sorry for the confusion. Previously, you had the option to ‘shut down servers’ when looking at a place, which performed a universe-level shut down. We’ve now replaced this with a feature called ‘Restart servers for updates’. This new feature is accessible at the place level and allows you to upgrade your servers to their latest versions, if available.
During the update process, any players that are currently in servers running outdated versions will be kicked during the restart, which will take about 1-6 minutes.
However the original ‘shut down servers’ feature is still available at the universe level, which is found by following his path: Creator Dashboard > Creations > Drop-down menu > Shutdown all servers.
Thank you! I believe at the time of my latest reply it was still noted as Migrate to Update, which I believe had a different functionality to shutdown all servers; namely one took time and one was instant, relatively speaking.
Is this new feature more akin to migrate to latest update? If so, how does this affect games that relied upon the instant-shutdown feature to avoid incompatibility issues?
We are currently working on the language to make it more clear what is happening behind the scenes. This is more akin to the Migrate to Latest Update, but we changed the wording to make it more clear what is going on. The functionality is slightly different than shutdown all servers and you are correct that this is done over a period of time but we are working to improve the timing here. This is to ensure a safe restart of the servers, with other benefits such as keeping players together through the restart. We’ll have a post soon regarding our plans moving forward and the differences between the shutdown all servers feature and the migrate to latest update feature.
Currently, the Shutdown all servers button still exists. We haven’t changed the functionality of that, so that should not affect games that relied on that feature. However, we don’t have a place-level shutdown all servers feature on Creator Dashboard at the time.
Would you be able to provide some more context on games that rely on the instant-shutdown feature? In what cases is this needed and what are the limitations of using something like Migrate to Latest Update in this case?
I just want to say, I didn’t notice until just now, but brilliant username lol.
Currently, the game I’m working on Ghost Simulator uses a custom update system which relies upon Instant Shutdown.
To be more specific, when we release an update to our game, we shutdown every server instance in all the places which triggers the game servers to notify our players of an update with a countdown. At this point, the server teleports all the players in it into a server of a temporary place before sending them all back to the world they were in.
The migrate to update feature, because it isn’t instantaneous will provide extra complexity to updates which involve a layer of incompatibility. If there is a chance that the player can still join a server running an older version of the game, it is possible for bugs to occur, especially those bugs that are related to datastores as those could also persist in newer servers.
While I’m sure that a lot of this could be prevented with better programming, older games may still rely on specific methods to perform properly.
If the migrate to latest update feature introduced a server lock or something, such that a player cannot join an older version of the game once they left it, that would solve any issues mentioned.
The tldr is that the potential for players to join older versions after joining newer versions could present bugs.
when we release an update to our game, we shutdown every server instance in all the places which triggers the game servers to notify our players of an update with a countdown.
How do you do a countdown when the shutdown is instantaneous? Do you instantly teleport them to the holding place and the countdown takes place over there?
If there is a chance that the player can still join a server running an older version of the game
There is a chance, yes, but not by clicking the Play button. All matchmade joins will only consider servers running the latest version once you hit Migrate. Joins to specific instances (e.g. server browser, joining a game from your friend’s profile, teleport to a specific instance, etc) are still allowed
There’s another problem that I’m curious how you handle: the moment you click Publish on the new version in Studio, game instances can exist on both the new version and old version. How do you deal with the two versions here?
While our system is pretty neat, it certainly is janky; one of the reasons I’m excited to see work being done on this new migrate system.
When we shutdown a place’s servers, we have a function connected to BindToClose which counts down from 10, reserves a server and teleports all the players in that server to the server of the other place.
This “solution” is rather janky, but we mitigate this problem by shutting down place servers directly after publishing.
It definitely isn’t fool proof, and generally speaking, incompatible update changes won’t affect a player’s experience beyond trivial visual bugs (if any), but as you can imagine, the longer two versions of the same game are running, the more likely there will be issues.
Imo, it just creates extra complexity to pushing updates to a game. I could be wrong, but I believe it to be quite unusual for triple A games to not apply a new update to all of their servers at once.
Thanks for the questions, I hope I could shed some light!
Thanks for the extra details! One thing we’re working on right now is making Migrate faster, especially for games that don’t have a lot of instances. Our target is for most games to migrate in <30 sec
Another followup - why teleport them to a holding place? If your goal is to guarantee that they won’t get teleported to an instance running the old version that’s unnecessary. As soon as you click Migrate we will no longer send them to an old version via matchmaking. Some more details on that here
The online AAA games I’ve played typically take their servers offline for maintenance once a week. If you want to do that you can mark your experience as private (which kicks everyone), publish your update, and make your experience public again. I’m not sure I would recommend that though - players may not return after the update. Alternatively, I’ve seen some which ensure their changes are backwards compatible (at least for 1 version), which you’ve also noted as an option
I must admit, I didn’t create the original system of teleporting the player to a holding place so I don’t actually know why we don’t just teleport the players to a new server. The system was created back in 2019 by the original programmer, so I’d have to ask them about it.
The fact that matchmaking is guaranteed to not put players into an old version once one migrates to the latest update is good enough for me; I didn’t know that.
This is amazing to hear!
Thanks for the support and clarity on this issue & plans for the future of the system!
