When a player joins my game, they either have data, or don’t (because they might be a first time player).
If they have data, great, no issues.
But what if they don’t? How would I know if they’re a first time player or not?
Because say they have been playing a lot, have a lot of time in the game, but one day they join, and some internet issue happened, where the pcall function returned error. Then the player is basically starting from 0, which is very unfair and frustrating. How could I prevent this? Thanks!
You can’t prevent this. Unless you give them some sort of special temporary data instead of 0. Why do you care if the player has no data when there’s a failure? Unless your data is completely resetting after the internet issue there shouldn’t be any problems. It sounds like a temporary issue not permanent
When the player first joins, I give them starter items. As they progress, they improve their starter items.
Should I add a button at the bottom that says “retry loading data” or something similar?
I don’t think it’s necessary at all I mean going off of what you described if they have any issue loading if anything a rejoin script that allows them to rejoin the exact server they were in could be very nice. This is just my humble opinion though anyone could disagree with me but yeah I do think rejoining can help otherwise I really don’t see the need to retry loading player data because if the player has a problem with their data the chances of a button actually reloading it are minimal. Roblox itself would be behind the issue and you as the dev don’t have much control over that.