We are constantly exploring ways to bring people together on our platform and we are happy to share a few recent updates we have rolled out and one change we are making.
Increased Maximum Server Size to 200
We have allowed up to 700 player servers in beta for a while, and we intend to keep pushing the limit on server size on Roblox. From the beta, we learned that some devs have built larger experiences so we are making a change that will allow everyone to create experiences with 200-player servers. We are excited to see what the community builds with larger player servers. There may be some performance issues with such larger server sizes. If you notice any impacts, please send us your feedback on how we can improve performance and stability for those experiences.
Join Queue Improvements
We have seen 10% of attempts to follow a friend into a server fail due to the server being full while successful joins could have unpredictable wait times. To tackle this problem and give players a reliable way to join their friends, we recently released a Join Queue feature - an ordered first-come first-serve approach for joining a full-server. With the launch of this feature in March, we have seen a reduction of failed join attempts by 3% and expect to improve this further with UX enhancements.
Changes to Social Slot Reservations [ON HOLD]
We provide a feature to reserve spots in a server for friends of players to increase the chances of them playing together. While we previously provided full control over this setting, we have observed that some experiences have set this reservation to a very high value, intending to ensure people could always play together with their friends. But, this results in empty servers, negatively impacting player experience.
Long term, we are working on enhancing the default Roblox Optimize option to consider both occupancy and friend spots. However, to address this issue in the short term, we will be limiting the customizable value to 20% to take advantage of the larger server sizes. In the future, we believe that features like Join Queue and more will make playing with friends easier on the platform without the need for these hardcoded settings.
We will be updating the maximum number of customizable server slots to 20% (rounded down) of the Max Player count of the place. If your place is <5 players we will allow a maximum of 1 slot. Places with a higher customized value will be reduced to the 20% maximum.
Weād love to hear any feedback or questions about these updates in the comments below.
MeepCity has had 200-player servers for years, but reserved ~160 of the slots to keep their game around their preferred player count. This change will make it so they can only reserve 40 slots, meaning there will be 160 players in every server if they want to keep their game at 200 player servers. I donāt think limiting devs is a good idea just because a few donāt know how to use this feature properly.
So if we have a 100 player max server size, we will be forced to let all of these servers be filled to at least 80% capacity?
I currently have a 100-player place which serves as a main hub for players. Iāve set the preferred players to 40 as I donāt want every server to be overcrowded/laggy, though I allow the maximum server size to be 100 in case of players wanting to gather on one particular server for an event, hosting a private server, etc.
I donāt understand why Roblox is placing an arbitrary restriction on how many players we, the developers, wish to allow into our servers. That should be our choice to make, not Robloxās.
currently Roblox has an issue where there are available servers but it creates a new one anyway resulting in 1 player servers for a 10 max players game. this behavior has been a huge issue for games that require a lot of players to start playing and more importantly to eventually become extremely fun to play with more players.
While none of these changes particularly impact me, Iād like to ask a related question. On the topic of server player slots, are there any plans to allow developers / game staff to forcibly join servers that are full without kicking a player? We have a game with 50 player slots (with 5 reserved for friends), so itās not uncommon for servers to be filled up to the brim.
Should something bad happen, whether it be a bug or a player breaking rules, our staff are unable to join the game as itās full. Iād love for some attention to be given to this issue, whether itās a new parameter to TeleportService that ignores max players (up to a reasonable limit), or a new group role permission that allows people to join regardless of max players.
Will joining queues be applied to teleports at some point too? At the moment teleporting to a full server gives an error prompt instead of waiting to join, which is a bit annoying when trying to join a friend and the game attempts to teleport said player due to how the game works.
For example, joining a friend on PLS DONATE who is in a VC server will cause this problem as the game tries to teleport the player from the non-VC server to the VC one.
I understand that the join queue might not always be wanted though when teleporting (such as quick matchmaking), so maybe it could be a boolean in TeleportOptions.
In my personal opinion, player-experience should be entirely given to developers, if a developer intentionally wants players to be allowed with friends while being fine with empty servers (some games do not need high player counts to be fun), the developer should be allowed to do this. Player-experience should never be hand-held by Roblox, allow developers to use their own instinct, if they notice low player-retention due to the setting being set to a high value, allow the developer to correct their mistake or allow the developer to retain their settings. Forcing settings only leads to less customisability which is often criticised by developers.
While we previously provided full control over this setting, we have observed that some experiences have set this reservation to a very high value, intending to ensure people could always play together with their friends. But, this results in empty servers
Please give us more control over how players join servers and when new servers are made.
In one of my small games, Iāve seen three servers going on a game with MaxPlayers of 50, when my weekly peak might be 20 concurrent players. I donāt need 3 servers for <20 players, a single server will do.
This is especially an issue for this game of mine. Itās a game big enough to work with a lobby system(players group up to teleport/launch a new match game), but small enough that I can always have just one big server to cater to my whole playerbase at any given point. When I originally implemented this lobby, I had issues because I would have one server with the majority of the players, at ~30/100 capacity, and then I would have one or two other servers with a 1-3 players in them, a major issue for my lobby design.
I had to devise a whole system to force all players in brand new servers to teleport to the biggest lobby server, and thatās just ugly and shouldnāt be necessary.
I theorize these new servers are being created for players of different regions. That feature makes sense for large games with dozen or hundreds of players from any region, but it causes issues for games like mine.
Let use have a real option to fill up servers to X amount before a new server is created, āsocial slotsā doesnāt help with this.
edit: Just caught an example from my small game:
If multiple players was vital for this particular game, I would be losing players because a new server is being created for 1 or 2 players when another exists.
Iāve had too many times experienced specific games easily have a lot of low player count servers. I do think Roblox should limit how much you can do, but I also agree that 20% could be too little for many experiences.
One of the games Iām developing has a massive 2D followingā¦ which I want to recreate (game type) partly into the 3D versionā¦ and the following has several thousand on the English servers aloneā¦ and there are easily the same amount of players on the other 10-20 countries around the world.
Roblox is very limitingā¦ player wiseā¦ and pretty understandable on the strains on servers for the 3D models.
I found it a pain having max 50-100 playersā¦ and applied for the Beta ā700ā abilityā¦ after a yearā¦ many of us are STILL waiting.
Itās not an issue right nowā¦ having still so much to doā¦ but with designing the gameā¦ it would be nice to know what the end result will beā¦ as we design according to limitations.
So to get around thisā¦ I have to design many experiences/placesā¦ for players to be able to go toā¦ to get āaroundā a certain place being full.
My game has many different maps and fighting styles/functionsā¦ so this is not an issue to create different places to play them.
Itās my only work aroundā¦ but now with the new ā200ā (/160) player limitā¦ it will help alleviate the problem somewhatā¦ so it IS WELCOMED - Thank You.
Howeverā¦ to Help with the Main Lobby ā¦ Game Entrance problemsā¦ it would be nice to have that 700 player abilityā¦ and they dart off to their zones from there.
There will be very little action or strain on a server (i believe) ā¦ but it would be nice to have it readyā¦ for when I release the game.
The worst thing is to have the numbers on releaseā¦ but very little can get in at the same timeā¦ especially Friends ā¦ then Town matesā¦ and lastlyā¦ Alliances/Countries.
I look forward to more player allowance in the coming weeks/months.
Why limit the control the developer has over this? It would make much more sense to just give the developer a little warning when adding a lot of spare slots but still allow them to go ahead with it if they have a good reason thatās specific to their game.
This is straight up false, it depends on the game. On the other hand, not being able to join your friends is always a negative player experience.
Iāve also seen a bunch of sandbox games where the first player that joins is the owner of the server, and all other slots are reserved. This approach works well by the way; itās like private servers but by default and without setup. The new (pointless) limitation would greatly impact the player experience in these games.
Yeah Iāve been really disliking how Roblox doesnāt trust developers to make their own informed decisions regarding their game. I understand providing a warning, but Roblox outright forcing something because they think it will be ābetterā for us just shows how little trust they have in us.
I thought Roblox promised to listen to feedback before making changes such as this?
Awful change. This completely ruins the ability to make co-op gameplay.
I want to support 2 friends playing together, 8 friends playing together, 8 strangers playing together, one person playing solo. I canāt do that anymore.
I thought backwards compatibility was a big Roblox value. This will break all of my experiences.
How am I supposed to situationally allow for co-op in public and closed environments? Do I seriously have to create my own server browser and different places with varying server slots for something that has been officially supported for years??
This has been a common theme on this platform for years. This is nothing new. I think that a proper explanation for these changes is better than just forcing us to abide. I do think that thereās a particular reason behind this and I am open to hearing that out before I decide whether or not this applies to me.
Will those with more than 200 player servers (from the beta) be able to keep their server size, or will the beta be closed? If the beta is ending, will servers set above 200 be lowered to 200?
