I’ve encountered a strange bug where first time players do not see certain meshes. After analyzing player behavior, we noticed an awfully high amount of confusion; which was odd for such easily laid out gameplay. It turns out that in our game Blox Adventures, first time players will not be able to see pillars, certain walls, and other important pieces of the game that you would otherwise interact with. They can, however, still interact with these assets. If the player rejoins, all meshes are visible and everything loads fine (this issue doesn’t happen a second time, only for first time players). The problem with this is that new players who join our game fail to complete the obstacle courses that are made with meshes they can’t see (and thus we lose a lot of users who quit and down-vote the game).
Details - Example images
Here’s a few images to explain what this looks like:
This image was taken with an alt account. Here you can see the arrows showing where the player is supposed to go. This is what new players see when they first join; the course looks impossible (and almost is) because these meshes are in-game but not visible to the player.
This is what every player should be seeing. As you can see by comparing the images, many of these meshes are a crucial part of the gameplay. However, some meshes load for everyone (like the tree meshes, for example)
(Taken with the alt account)
(What the player should see)
Even if players somehow complete the tutorial without seeing important meshes, this problem continues when they teleport to the lobby. As you can see when comparing these images, many meshes are still not visible for the player (benches, signs, etc.)
We’ve analyzed the developer console but there was nothing found related to the problem. There are no failed network requests on the client. We’re wondering if this is a Roblox bug, and decided to post this in case other developers were struggling with the same phenomenon.