When someone buys a VIP server, they are spending Robux in return for a product that will last one month.
For a developer, changing the settings of a place is like a minefield. And when a mistake is made, thousands of users are out of their product and out of their Robux.
The thing is, it makes absolutely no sense to delete VIP servers from a game under any circumstance. It really just seems like this behavior was added just so that an engineer wouldn’t have to write any special cases.
If a game is taken down, don’t instantly wipe tens of thousands of Robux purchases! Instead, when it is time for a VIP server to renew, check if the game is up, and if it is not then do not renew.
I changed the privacy of a single place within my game for one minute, and now thousands of users just lost what they paid for AND their money. I have no way of refunding them, or even knowing who was affected.
I believe this was just a simple fix to a problem that came up on the planning board
What about when the dev takes down the game?
Eh, just cancel all the subscriptions.
I don’t think it was given much thought. I generally propose easy to shoot down ideas, so feel free to shoot this one down, but I don’t see a problem with freezing subscriptions in time while a game is down. This makes for happy customers as they know they get their money’s worth.
The other edge case where VIP servers wipe is when the price is changed. When it comes time to renew, there should be a notification sent to the user with options to keep subscribed or cancel subscription. By default put the subscription on “hold” / functionality as cancelled. If the user goes to the games detail page with the VIP server in question, make a popup similar to when you are buying a catalog item (it matches web desgin that way)
We have decided to remove the functionality where all VIP servers are automatically cancelled when making a game private. There are legitimate reasons for making a game private, e.g. your game has a bug which is causing players to lose data, and you shouldn’t have to choose between losing money and losing player data.
Just to follow up on this thread – making a game private no longer cancels VIP servers. We will be updating the confirmation dialog in Studio to reflect this.