Experience Join Improvements: Server Size, Join Queues and Social Slots Reservations

Straight up this. Roblox frequently alienates and shuts down power users by imposing limitations and black boxes or reinventing wheels (and then further making us reinvent the wheel on top of that in some cases) on the basis that we’re too stupid to know how to use them or something. It’s incredibly infuriating and disrespectful for this trend to keep up.

Roblox needs to do a better job of providing good documentation, clear warning signs and best practices docs rather than unnecessarily imposing limitations on the abilities of developers. The platform is growing up and so are its developers; it is entirely possible to cater to younger, novice developers while not leaving older, veteran developers out of the equation.

31 Likes

This. I have no objection to Roblox placing a giant red sign in settings saying I am using an non-optimal amount of reserved slots or even a confirmation prompt; but to outright remove settings we rely on is not an acceptable change.

11 Likes

How would this work if someone tries to join a user who is not friends with them, and the server is full?

5 Likes

Stop putting asinine guardrails on our ability to fine-tune settings to our personal needs. This is the exact opposite of what the platform needs.
If people are misusing the feature then the documentation needs to explain it better, rather than forcefully stopping us from tinkering.

21 Likes

Great update, however i would also love to see the ability to join friends in a universe from the games server tab. Currently, universes with a starting place and many different places do not allow for joining your friend from the game’s starting page. This disrupts the flow of the social experience imo, and although can be scripted on the back end, does not accomodate joins the way players typically expect to join their friends in an experience.

5 Likes

I share the same sentiment. I have 100-player servers with preferred players to 50 because in most cases this is the best size for gameplay, while still providing for one or two large servers for those who enjoy more chaotic gameplay or for private servers and events.

I think Roblox should reconsider their decision to modify this feature and allow developers to determine what works best for their individual games.

8 Likes

Great Update but joining optimization shall be optional and explanation clearly in words. A better platform or engine provides few limitations but more possibilities with good instructions.

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I couldn’t’ve said it better myself. One of the biggest black boxes I’ve come across courtesy of Roblox, is StreamingEnabled. I went into detail about Streaming in the hyperlinked post.
:star_struck:

4 Likes

This is absolutely great and I love to see where Roblox is going with this and most recent updates.
Having said this, I’d like to have more tools to handle how players fill up a server and how “a server” could handle how players join. This is particularly important when trying to make a matchmaking system.
So far, Teleport Options are good when making a squad when people are friends in Roblox, but what about people that are not friends that want to make a party and they might end up in a server in different teams? Or how to unable players to teleport to a server where a match is already in play?
Certainly, teleporting to a private server and reserving it seems the way to go, but then I come up to the following question: instead of creating private servers each time I need (this is, reserving a private server in order to make a match with players from a list that where already determined to become part of either team), wouldn’t it be better if the server could handle and reject players from coming in so that when the match ends, instead of shutting down a reserved server, I could wipe the existing place and rebuild the battlefield, kick the players to “a main menu” and call for new players to make a new match? I consider this approach to be more efficient in terms of how Roblox already handles servers instead of reserving a server for each match.
Perhaps this request is very specific, but I believe it to be the reason for why most Roblox experiences (almost all, for what I’ve seen) are uncapable of making a good matchmaking system (say a 5v5 pvp) because developers have a very difficult time when assigning players to a specific server, let alone allow the server to handle how players join (or not while a match is still in play) and leave after the match has ended.

3 Likes

Is Roblox Planning on improving they’re servers’ latency to improve on lag between two players for example: Racing with anyone is inaccurate because if your side by side then on the other players screen your behind even though you should be side by side? and it doesn’t matter how good your Wi-Fi is there’s still delay between players. usual around a 1 to 3 seconds.

4 Likes

I completely agree, they should reconsider this.

3 Likes

Okay, hear me out. I’m totally cool with Roblox putting up a huge red sign-in setting, letting me know I’m not using the best amount of reserved slots. They could even add a confirmation prompt, no problemo. But straight up removing settings, we depend on? That’s just not okay.

5 Likes

I actually applied for that beta and got opted in, however I never got any of the beta features?
Would love to know other features that I can apply for that I’m not aware of

4 Likes

Why are you changing server slot allocations? Just give us the 200 players that we actually want and move on. No need to cap us because a small minority can’t make informed decisions using common sense.

6 Likes

Will there be any increase for voice enabled experiences? Instead of 50, how about 100 or 200?

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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.

This sort of thing should not be your responsibility to “fix” for us. If an independent developer has an issue with their game that is a core design or matchmaking issue that could easily be resolved with settings they have access to already but just chose not to utilize in a way that the platform prefers, Roblox should not step in and force their hand by removing features for everyone.

Our game is optimized to play best with 4 active players, but has two slots reserved to support a maximum of 6. This has been extremely successful for us since we launched last month. The fact that this is considered “wrong” by these new, arguably completely arbitrary restrictions, is absolutely ridiculous. 20% would only allow us one server slot reserved and force at least five players per server fill, which screws with the intended pacing.

Why does this platform keep trying to wrestle control away from developers? What do they possibly have to gain from doing this time and time again? You take a huge chunk of our revenue in order to maintain and create the toolset needed for hosting games on the platform, at least let us keep the features we already have access to. Every other platform out there makes an effort to ensure developers have as much control over their projects as possible, but this isn’t even the first time Roblox has stripped down a feature to better line up with their vision for what experiences on the platform should be.

Is it just a case of being out of touch? Do they genuinely think we’re babies who can’t use the tools provided without sanding off all the sharp edges first? It’s entirely possible to make game development tools that are easy for anyone to get into while still providing enough depth and customization for a professional to dive deeper. The fact that it feels like the team at Roblox doesn’t even trust us to set a number anymore without encroaching on their vision for how servers should be filled (which should absolutely not be a one size fits all solution or decided by Roblox in every case, as the post seems to imply will be the end result long term) does not give me confidence that future platform features will allow for much in the way of customization or control.

Sometimes finely tuning a value is needed for a specific vision, even if an automatic solution works better in most cases. I’ve made an effort to maintain a level head about decisions like this in the past, but every single time this happens my patience wears a little thinner. It’s nice that we have time to give feedback for once, but the fact that this was even settled on internally and announced with such confidence in the first place is absolutely absurd to me.

20 Likes

We had servers crashing, the website going down, and sometimes, even the text filters started malfunctioning at times. By increasing the maximum players per server instance to 200 while limiting the amount of reserve slots to 20%, you also increase the chances of these incidents happening again. Experiences with at least 10,000 DAUs or more should be opted out of the 20% reserve slot limit once this rolls out.

1 Like

The party system used to be a fairly reliable way to get a group of people playing together. If there wasn’t a server with enough open slots available, a new server was created and everyone in the party was put in it. Are there any plans to revisit a system like that?

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As a developer, I appreciate the positive change that Roblox has implemented. While the maximum server size has not been a significant issue for me, I have instead faced more challenges in managing servers as they grow in size.

Personally, I believe that improving the in-built rendering systems would be a valuable addition to Roblox’s development tools as this would not only benefit my own development process but also enhance the overall user experience for players.

1 Like

The changes to Social Slot Reservations completely break my game Build Island, which relies on social slots to assign new public servers to players when they join the game.

In order to achieve similar functionality after this update, we will have to create a reserved server for each player who wants to make their own island, which will break players joining their friends through the following feature or joining through the Roblox app’s server list.

17 Likes