When a player leaves the game and multiple attempts to save their file to DataStore fail, they can and very frequently do lose the last few minutes (or more) of their save file.
Spikes in DataStore failures and partial outages have been a problem for a long time. This incident was particularly nasty because it was total data loss, but partial loss occurs very frequently, and there is only so much developers can do to prevent it when requests start failing left right and center.
I get that is is hard to track down what is causing these issues. But when you have so many devs recording fail rates from DataStores, and you have devs of top games like Welcome to Bloxburg and Royale High voicing their concerns about overall reliability, it is incredibly frustrating that this longstanding issue is being met with resistance and deflection.
Didn’t change anything about my code and sometime last night when I was asleep players started losing all their data in mass. This is rather unfortunate.
At this point it’s looking more necessary to use a third party database. With bugs like these, given the current DataStore system it’s too difficult to keep backups (with a bug like this it’s not reliable) or issue rollbacks. It’s great that Roblox offers a service like this for free and it’s mostly been reliable in the past for me, but I’ve always felt a lack of control with DataStores.
I feel like with the growth of Roblox’s playerbase, it’s time they look into upgrading DataStores & increasing the DataStore limits, rather than keep us on something that may or may not have been around back in 2012 / 2013, when the playerbase was arguably much smaller. Force-stopping a few kilobytes of data seems like artificial hindrance to me.