Roblox’s mission is to make it easy for everyone to play together. As part of that effort, we are working on increasing the number of players in a single server through engine performance improvements.
Recently, we have been testing with 700(!) players in a single server and we’re excited to now make it available to those enrolled in the Roblox Beta program!
Please Note: This is a Beta feature. Depending on the characteristics of your game, you will get different performance results at higher player counts and your game may not perform well.
We will be releasing some major performance improvements going forward, and plan to continue increasing the max player count in the future to push the boundaries of the platform even further!
How well will this work not only in terms of performance for the lower-end users, but also the chat filter. I’ve seen the filter gets overloaded with <50 players, so how is it going to handle hundreds of messages trying to pass every second? Even if it can handle, how can someone follow a conversation when everything just gets bumped up with that many messages being sent? Is there going to be/is there a “slow mode” feature like how YouTube streams and Discord does it? If so, this just makes communication 2x more difficult to do.
This brings me to my next point: how many games need 100+ players? Apart from roleplay and open-explore games, which there are only so many, it wouldn’t be necessary to have this amount.
If these game genres use 700 players:
FPS games would be a nightmare in terms of performance with thousands of bullets flying past every second.
Obbies would be difficult to complete due to everyone being the way.
In simulators, you wouldn’t even be able to see the coins (their areas are quite small).
Let’s not even talk about games who rely heavily on part physics, user-made explosions, etc.
This just means that it’s a feature that only 1% or so will use, which is quite low for all the resources spent into making it possible.
I’m not saying that I’m ungrateful for this feature, but I just think this is another reminder of needing to prioritize the features that people want the most (like improvements in the current UI creation system). I like options and giving us more breathing room, but that should be done when other features are perfected.
I’m still hyped for this,
Keep it up, Roblox!
Post edits
T+15m: Just grammar fixing. And adding this.
T+20h: Fixed a spelling mistake.
This is a great update, but I’m not sure who will need 700 players in a server. It seems kind of… unnecessary. I personally cannot think of any ways I would need it.
This is insane just imagining joining a roblox game with 700 other players around me, but roblox can barely handle even 100 player servers right now so “major performance improvements” should be an understatement.
How will this perform on lower end devices?
What kind of “performance improvements” do you plan on making to be able to handle 700 player servers?
Will this be available for all users in the future? Also, there was a game with over 7 million players in 1 server on an admin account, I don’t remember what game it was but will this also be the future of Roblox?
This is definitely a great step up for Roblox’s technology advancements, but I feel like 700 players is a bit outrageous for literally any game on the platform right now. Surprised we even jumped from 200 to 700 in the span of a few months, but doesn’t that seem a bit too much of a jump?
Again, this is still a good change. I just don’t see that many advantages compared to disadvantages in terms of low-end or even medium-performance devices. Even on a somewhat-high end computer, it started heating up in a matter of minutes in a 400 player game.
Last note: I think I remember hearing something about 1,000 player servers at RDC. Are we really going to be having that? It’s quite outrageous considering the limits of most devices.
Have there been any recent Humanoid optimizations in preparation for this? If I’m remembering right, Humanoids were among the main bottlenecks keeping most games even reaching 200 before this, so I’m surprised to see the limit increased again.
Will increasing the Max Player Count cause better servers to be assigned to a game, also improving general performance?
Logically that should be the case, so the server could withstand that many players.
Handling hundreds of accessories and replicating to a lot of players would also have a huge impact, what optimizations are in place for that?
I certainly agree with your statement, a polish-up on the current Roblox humanoid system would definitely help with performance in the long run when Roblox wants to support servers with more than 700 players!
Its cool and all that you can now fit 700 players in one server, but one thing which would be even cooler is fixing the latency issues, oh or even fix team create. I haven’t played a game on Roblox in the past few years where I have had sub 100ms ping, and in team create I get kicked every 10 minutes. Roblox is focusing too much energy and time into entirely the wrong area.
This is definitely amazing, but even baseplate games lag when there are around 150 players. Also 700 players would be a bit unnecessary as most players play on mobile/laptops and certainly cannot handle this many players in a server. My old laptop heats up if I play an FPS game in a 20 player server, so unless the servers got upgraded or something, most developers won’t increase the limit to above 200.
And then you have Roblox’s goals to have hyperrealistic lighting, mesh deformation, and even 1,000 player servers. Honestly, if outdated systems like this aren’t significantly optimized before these recent changes things could get really out of hand considering how poorly the servers have seemed to perform in the past few months. 100% agree with your statement and rachjumper’s.
Thank you Roblox Team for this very interesting feature.
Imagine that If you have 200 active friends that wants to join you in a server, but can’t join you at times, just because the same old reason keeps popping up your loading screen ‘server is full’, now this won’t be something that we’ll be expecting to see that much in a 700 user server, as this would allow more users to join in-game, without having the problem of full servers.
It’s interesting to note that if they already implemented such a great feature, how sooner will they greatly improve developers’ experience when they create or develop games, by implementing more features that we thought to be impossible in the present, but possible in the future? This would be a blast!
