As a Roblox developer, I think it is too hard currently to hold a slot for specific players in game servers, and overall control the flow of players into individual servers. By player slot, I am referring to the amount of players that can fit into a game, each player taking up a slot.
Currently, you can pseudo-reserve a slot using a setting in your experience, but this is a soft option - It applies to all servers, always, and only tells matchmaking to avoid a server, but still allows players to join a friend - Overall, it’s not true reservation the developer can use.
If developers could, in individual servers, set a ‘Reserved Slots’ property, or similar, I think it would be much more beneficial to developers - This would work similar to the current ‘reserved slots’ experience setting, but act as a hard reservation, informing roblox’s matchmaking that it cannot put players here, and players cannot join their friends here until the slot is unreserved or the player count decreases. The benefit of this would be that Teleports coming from inside the experience, being that you are in control of those, could still bypass this reservation - This in turn gives players tremendous control over how players get put into servers, without resorting to things like Reserved Servers, which I think are not the solution here.
There are many cases when a developer might feel the need to use a ‘reserved slot’ option that can be used in individual servers, that when active can prevent players from filling up a specific server beyond a limit;
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In a Survival game, it can be vital to re-connect a player via a teleport back to the original server they were set up in - This is only realistically feasible if you can ensure that server doesn’t fill up! In this case, a dedicated lobby system isn’t as useful of a solution.
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In building games, while you can save main structures, there are many sandbox servers that have lots of unsaved, miscellaneous builds - a reserved slot lets you redirect players with ease back to a server like this should it be approaching full with a single setting and a teleport back!
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In a team-based game, a developer might want to reserve all slots when a match starts, so that players cannot be matchmade into a game during active gameplay. This would work even with a lobby system - Allowing friends to join that lobby with the ‘follow’ option, until the lobby is in an active game, without needing to code your own custom friend joining method.
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For any game, the ability to hard reserve a single slot for moderators & developers to get in is very useful - Good practices relieve this, but nothing replaces being able to join a running game to see what’s going on.
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Some games might benefit from the ability to ‘sundown’ a server, by reserving all slots you can ensure a server will, over time, perish, without having to hard shut down the game
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Many games can benefit simply from a ‘grace period’ - My game is one of those, where it is not beneficial to save all of the items and progress during the game, but that I still want players to be able to recover where they left off should they crash or lose connection.
For my own personal example, it is quite important to have a feature like this; Currently, to reserve a player’s space for Two Minutes after they disconnect, I had to devise an entire system that logs all servers as if they’re lobbies in memorystore, and teleports players who show up during this 2-minute grace period into an open server (Which roblox’s matchmaking won’t be able to optimize the choice for anymore), and if that fails I teleport them to a new reserved server. I repeat this process until the 2 minutes expire, or the player rejoins a server and gets directed back.
Some of these problems only really have, to me, the one solution - I could just make everything it’s own lobby, and handle all matchmaking myself, but in that case I’m already left with something where not only can friends not join eachother ever without extra work on my part, but that does not benefit at all from roblox’s matchmaking system, which I know does factor in various things to choose a good server.
Letting developers decide, at will, if players can or cannot join via matchmaking or friend joins - AKA, reserving a slot only to be teleported to specifically, to me seems like a very useful, multi-purpose improvement that could be as simple as a single property of ‘Game’.
- Post has been edited because it sucked before, sorry