As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to open places that have packages with AutoUpdate enabled. I’d like to open an older version of my place, but this becomes very tedious when all packages in your game automatically get updated to the latest version, not the version that existed when you published the version (e.g. archiving, reverting).
While this is what AutoUpdate is generally for, I do wish there was some way to open a place but disable AutoUpdate instantly, as the reasons of how tedious this can be is shown below. This also can cause a lag spike when loading the place, as every package will try to update at once.
This affects…
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Loading historical versions of a place through Version History as-is
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Making changes to a package in a test copy of the game, but wanting to update the current game without overriding those changes to a possibly dangerous copy.
For example, I’ve been working on a huge update for my game, and I made changes to these packages and published them in a test place. When I open the main place, all of these changes suddenly auto-update, and break the experience. Reverting their versions is incredibly tedious, so tedious, that I accidentally published an event, and reverted to the wrong version of a folder which houses player data, which caused a few players to lose a special event item.
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Opening place files that you want preserved with their existing content, like official updates.
If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my development experience because reverting back to previous versions of a place that utilizes packages would be much more frictionless. I use AutoUpdate in my experiences to make working with multiple places easier, since there’s no “Update All Packages in Current Place” option.