My community is currently melting down confused that their data is gone (I have failsafes in place that don’t allow data to be overwritten if it can’t be loaded) due to a roblox outage with datastores.
Would be nice if Roblox communicated critical services experiencing issues to players at an easy-to-read location on their app/website
Would be really nice because then players don’t get the wrong idea that I messed with their data and that it’s gone and end up causing mass hysteria for me and my community. Just a thought.
Adding on to this, there should be an API for detecting when critical services are down to warn players about any on going issues. An example could be game:GetService("BackendStatusService").
I’d rather it be automated. If I wish to distance myself from work, then I should be able to without taking on the burden of explaining to players what is infact roblox’s fault and not mine.
I also agree with this, if not a website then a little pop-up on all experiences page and in-game that says “Roblox is currently having problems with datastores, some data my not show or may be inaccurate”.
Hi All. This sounds like a great idea. I will work with other teams at Roblox to build such a system or site for notifying about the status of key services. I work on Data Stores so we can start there. I want to clarify that “data is gone” is a bit of a vague term. Most likely, the problem is that the data is not accessible rather than that it is actually deleted or missing.
I don’t think this is the solution this post is looking for; many developers are probably aware of this, but I doubt it’s the same for most players. It appears Roblox had a banner on the main website that would notify you if things weren’t working as expected, but I’m not sure what became of it.
Thanks for writing on this. I agree that ‘data is gone’ is not an accurate term but it is the average player that assumes as they don’t really have the same developer knowledge that we do, so being able to clear that up with a games player base automatically would make both the player’s and developer’s lives so much easier.
I think this would probably be the best solution. Most users will not understand what exactly a ‘Datastore’ or a ‘TeleportService’ is or what it implies, and a more generic message could lead to users assuming no games on Roblox will work and leaving the platform when in reality only a small minority may be unplayable.
Roblox servers also aren’t always equal. Sometimes some services may fail in some regions and not others but within Roblox a user can be in any region depending on arbitrary factors such as what servers your friends are in. How would the website convey information that sometimes when you click the play button you may end up in a server that might not work properly? Shutting down a region completely because of a single service failing would be drastic and could cause much bigger problems with things like load balancing.
Developers would be able to determine which services their games rely on and what they should prompt the user with and a BackendStatusService would be able to return data that is specific and accurate to the region that your game server is running on so you can convey accurate information to the user that is relevant to your game.
There are a lot of thoughts and ideas proposed on this forum post so I want to clarify a little better the overall consensus.
1. Developer Notification of Roblox Incidents:
Some developers are asking for a mechanism for developers (rather than gamers) to find out if the Roblox platform has operational problems with details on specific services. As a couple developers pointed out, there is the site: https://status.roblox.com
It sounds like some of you weren’t familiar with this page, so hopefully this new knowledge helps.
Some feedback on the page was a concern about it being slow and updated manually. My understanding is that because of nuances of what @TheMightyScript described that services can fail in different ways, that failures can be partial, and that a service issue may not actually cause player visible problems, the decision was made to update the status manually to have a human translate the monitoring and alerting signals into an intelligent assessment about the high level impact on players and experiences.
2. Request for APIs to Detect Service Incidents
It sounds like some of you are requesting an API for querying about service failures in a programmatic way rather than going to a website. I can ask internally and see what that status of such an initiative is. I’m sure it has been discussed.
3. Player Visible Roblox Platform Status
A third point was a request for a method of notifying players directly of a Roblox platform issue so that Developers don’t get slammed with questions about an experience or get blamed for what is actually a platform issue rather than an experience issue. @Relukn suggested this used to exist on the main website but is now likely deprecated. I will check on what happened to this feature. It sounds like ideally this shows up “in-game” as well as on the homepage so that players can easily see this warning, is that correct?
I find that the major issue with the site is not that the status is updated manually but rather that it doesn’t flag the actual issue, generally upon an outage all the “Components” and “Locations” are switched to “Major Outage” rather than only the actually effected endpoints, the message attached to the incident is also too vague.
There used to be a banner on the roblox website and probably the app too, but nothing within an experience which can lead to the hysteria we gotta deal with sometimes.
Honestly what Fili suggested seems like a good workaround for now, particularly with Data Stores going down, but I recognise that this is only for a very specific use-case.
To be able to add this to an experience in the most transparent way possible would be best both roblox-dev and staff-dev related.
Perhaps if these services could be pinged for responses in advance and a prompt could show up before a player enters said game or upon entering, using the same prompt systems as a purchase or getting kicked, just so the player is aware. I think that would be a really neat way of doing things for experience-related outages like Data Stores or Avatars going down etc.
To give the information when the player is most paying attention, that will help others communicate with one another ingame if they just blindly click ‘I Understand’ on the dialog box.
