From what i’ve heard there seems to be a growing increase of developers moving their storage of game data to external sources such as their own servers instead of using ROBLOX’s own DataStores. As someone who currently has a VPS sitting around mostly gathering virtual dust, this has intrigued me.
Why are developers suddenly beginning to store their data offsite when there’s methods such as Datastore2 to reliably store stuff? If going offsite is better, then what’s the best solution for storage? MongoDB, SQL, or something else entirely?
The only reason people move it offsite is because it’s easier to manipulate. There isn’t really a clear difference(apart from the amount of data you store) if you store it offsite. Being able to manipulate the data outside of studio is not what Roblox provides, so that’s why people use offsite storage.
@DoctorNO2106 Not technically, offsite storage can still fail, and data loss rarely happens on Roblox, normally it’s because of a power outage or a crash. Although it does happen a bit more frequently.
How does this fair under Roblox’s privacy policy though? With datastores it’d be covered since it’s still under their control. I’m assuming it would be completely covered somewhere or is it a grey area?
I don’t know much about the rules but I can agree it’s probably a grey area. Roblox does allow third party sites but generally speaking having an external Datastore might make some players worry about their privacy because Roblox can’t do anything about that (Not certain so don’t quote me on this).
You’re not supposed to be collecting information that Roblox doesn’t allow you to anyway, and if you mean stuff like GDPR, Roblox will still message you about it to clear anything that can identify a user, not just data stores.
Are there any metrics apart from the issues Roblox has been having recently that prove going offsite is more reliable? Considering offsite would have to go through more hoops to get the data back and forth (and if something like CloudFlare goes out your entire game essentially grinds to a halt)
There are some instances in which offsite storage is better for your project.
Take World of magic for example, they’re creating a player ran auction system that’s cross server. Obviously this is possible with datastore, but only assuming there’s always at-least one server to run it, and if for some reason all servers are shut down it can be unpredictable what will happen to the data and when.
Likewise it can be difficult to keep persistent when it has to communicate with every other server before it can be processed.
The solution? Create your own offsite server that can be used as a primary storage, keep it running all the time and regardless of what happens to roblox, the auction house is stable and fine.