Chat filtering causing tremendous gameplay issues

Hello devforum,

Today I come to you seeking to report a situation, I’m not entirely sure if it’s a “bug”. My games are roleplay-oriented so chatting is basically the main way to play them, and as a result players generally chat a lot of text and very rapidly. The problem is that for whatever reason, lately the chat filter has struggled to keep up at certain intervals. It seems to be random, the the chat filtering functions just lag a lot. It can go on for a minute or two and we must ask players to ‘stop chatting’ for a moment to give the chat time to catch its breath. Needless to say, but this really breaks the flow of my games. I’ve heard other games are having similar issues but I was unable to find much on the topic on the devforum.

What exactly is going on here?

The issue in action
96f381ae2931ddf2b2366d89f8fccc63

A video depicting how fast a full server 60 of players generally chat in the game

25 Likes

This is indeed a major issue and I would like to see it addressed.

6 Likes

Can confirm. The filter is very slow in any game I created. I also noticed times when the chat just doesn’t work at all in populated servers until some players leave or the server is restarted/shut down.

4 Likes

Can confirm even on smaller games, normally on weekdays. I’ve noticed that most of the lag happens between 2pm-7pm EST, not sure if this is related to high traffic in most English-speaking areas? I’d think so, but then most of the lag is on weekdays, a slower time even with no school (this issue was occurring when school was in session however).

3 Likes

This has been happening for 2 months or so and needs addressed at some point. Sometimes it’s just 1000 ms of latency and sometimes its 30,000 ms of latency, which is totally unacceptable. Players of our game have been complaining about features taking forever to use because of the filtering and it makes the overall experience of roleplay games unbearably slow and annoying.

3 Likes

This was just happening to me in a small game with a stable ping, let’s hope for a fix soon.

1 Like

I can confirm this is happening with 70 players in a server. Occasionally, the chat filter slows down and most things stop functioning except for player movements. Once the chat filter catches up, the server is back to normal with everything functioning as intended.

It’s much worst with over 100 concurrent players. The duration is longer in that situation.

3 Likes

This is happened to me a lot of times in servers of my own games and other people’s games. Can confirm this issue of yours is not a singled out case.

2 Likes

This issue seems to be worsening as time goes on. A few months back this was a rare occurrence, but now it’s almost daily.

This is probably because the platform is growing, and Roblox’s system can’t keep up.

Happens in my game too, and it’s super frustrating, especially when there’s an interesting conversation going on. I’ve also noticed it in a lot of other games, so it doesn’t look like it’s a game specific issue.

Also, I’m pretty sure this also affects any in game non chat filtering that uses Roblox’s system. I don’t have any evidence but I remember things taking a while to filter in my game while this issue was happening once.

2 Likes

I’m pretty sure the filtering is outsourced to Community Sift which has issues quite often.

edit:

Unfortunately I don’t think anything can be done about this on the developer’s end it’s an issue with Roblox’s API for chat which has freak outs every now and then

I was planning on making my own topic about this since most of these topics ended up dying after numerous replies just suggested it was an internet issue or didn’t understand it has nothing to do with device performance in general. I found this and although there wasn’t too many “solutions” or sure answers, it does seem to align with what I am dealing with.

This has become a big issue with my game in particular, and similar to OPs issue with the problem hindering on the game’s functionality, I run a game that is admin command based. This means not only is there an excess of prompts needing to be filtered in comparison to a typical game, but since these prompts NEED to be filtered in order to execute a command, some admin commands cannot be run at all when the filtering system is not available. I’ve even gotten messages about people being mad at me for banning certain commands, when in reality the command just wasn’t firing properly due to the filter being unresponsive.

I think the weird part about what I’ve witnessed personally is, my servers are capped at 10 players. Even so, I’ve witnessed chat filtering come to a standstill with only 2 players in the server, not even firing any commands at all. This has been a problem that is persistent and is also one of those issues that I think “well it’ll get fixed eventually, after all it is on ROBLOX’s end and chat filtering a critical system to making sure roblox games can function,” but nothing has ever changed and if anything it has gotten worse over the time I’ve been dealing with this.

One thing I am curious about, is whether exploits may exist that overload the filtering system and cause it to lag (on a server-by-server basis). It’s really frustrating to me because out of all the problems people come to me with about my game, this is one I am always just lost on.

4 Likes

Can confirm. It is still going on to this day. I wonder when Roblox will finally fix this.

Can confirm, it happens to my game which have only 3 actively chatting users, i have no idea how will my game be playable when it gets more players ;-;
Also this problem is -probably- due to roblox servers unable to handle many users trying use it, that’s why you found this error very frequent on weekends: cuz many people are sending requests to the server which makes it act slow… I think we have to wait till roblox upgrades its servers (which takes alot of money)

It’s been happening to me too for a while now,games like bad business are harder to play with friends because of this, I haven’t seen anything new on this from roblox and only discovered this bug report today, I hope they do something about it soon, it REALLY impacts my gameplay.

I can confirm. This is a huge issues, not only does this appear on my games but also a lot of other games I play.

Laggy servers seem to cause this much more often. High LuaHeap memory usage could have something to do with this, at least I’ve observed that.

1 Like

Sorry for the necro, but I wanted to circle back here - is this still an issue?