[Critical problem solved] Related issues still exist. More info in my reply. Original post below: Reproduction Steps https://www.roblox.com/games/7117492592/Realistic-Hand-RP-Without-VR-Beta-V1-1#!/game-instances
The game went from 8500 players to 4000 in a matter of about one minute or two, at the same time that I saw one server was filling to 300+ players, all of whom said they didn’t follow anyone to get there.
My game randomly gets 70+ players (recently 300) in one server, even though my limit is set to 17 per server. I have 700 player servers enabled, but 17 is how many can join without following players. Yet, when I join these large servers, no one there says they followed anyone and I actively see people pour in and they’re confused as to what is happening. Usually I have only seen a couple 60 player servers, but recently a couple minutes ago, I saw 300 in one server which is outlandish and I’ve never seen this before, and everyone inside says they didn’t follow anyone. And this is when my player count suddenly plummeted by 4000 within minutes and is still dying. For some reason my game has a few servers that keep bringing in people past what the limit was meant to be without their consent and I think it’s caused a huge problem now. Please let me know if there is anything I can do to avoid something like this in the future and I’m not too sure if it has resolved on it’s own yet or if my player count is still plummeting, it’s looking really bad.
Expected Behavior
I expect the player count to function normally if the bug weren’t happening
Actual Behavior
The player count isn’t functioning normally
Workaround
I do not have a work around
Issue Area: Engine Issue Type: Connectivity Impact: Critical Frequency: Sometimes Date First Experienced: 2022-04-04 00:04:00 (-07:00)
Are you sure that’s 17 players per server or 17 reserved slots per server? If it’s the latter, that means Roblox will fill up every server to 683 players.
I made sure it was right yes. I have had thousands of players on this game for a couple weeks now and it’s clear 99% of servers are at 17 players. Also I’ve made another post that has been awaiting approval that describes the issue better
I have figured out what may likely have been the cause to my players dropping. This is still a very big issue, but I think there is an ok chance that I have found out how to stop it from happening further. That doesn’t undo the damage that was done though and I will explain how the damage was done now: I use two accounts to work on the game and test it. Both have access to editing the game. On one account: Vurse, I have beta privilege to change server size to 700. On my alternate account, I do not. I changed the thumbnail of my game using this unprivileged account, and when I pressed Save, Roblox understood that this account did not have permission to use 700 players, so it automatically sets max player count to 1. So, I’m pretty sure that’s what happened. So warning to anyone who ever wants to try using 700 players, make sure never to use an account that doesn’t have access to that beta, to save anything on the game’s page, no thumbnails, no description, nothing, because as far as I can tell, the site will take the opportunity to set your max to 1 by default, without you realizing it. This could be fixed by not adjusting that number unless someone clicks it, or by making the default atleast the highest number available for that account… instead of 1. I do hope this was the problem and that I can now avoid it. Sorry for the big deal, but it is kinda a big deal! Now I know, and I hope other people can know too. Thanks. However, this doesn’t explain the longtime behavior of servers filling up more than they should, but that hasn’t affected me very much until now - the point in time where the servers became maxxed out to 1. That was what was happening apparently that caused the insane drop. Hopefully.
It’s great that you found this out. You should double-check that this was the issue on a separate test game, and if so, make sure to report this separately as a bug report so that Roblox can track and resolve this.
Right now, it’s unlikely Roblox’s bug triagers will pick this up since the first post doesn’t describe this issue (in title, mainly) and the thread is marked as solved.