As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to get players engaged in a new play session in games that benefit significantly from chat.
The new chat system does not retain all previous chat history, so when a player joins, chat is often empty for them. Sometimes some old chat is retained, but I haven’t pinned down a pattern for it yet. The old Lua chat retained chat history for users who were still in the server when you joined. It’s hard to tell if this behavior has changed, but it feels like it’s culling more than it did before.
This makes the server feel empty and lonely when you first join, especially in large worlds, and also makes it impossible for the player to engage in ongoing conversations, understand ongoing in-game events, and jump into roleplay. They have to wait for other users to continue chatting, and even then they will often have to ask for more context. The first few seconds a player spends in-game for the first time are often the most important, as they’re the seconds that determine whether they stay or leave.
If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve engagement and retention in my game for new-joining players.