While trying to sort out an issue where players were unauthorized to teleport to specific place in my game, I figured there might have been a bug having to due with the place being private so I toggled the settings from public to private on a single place within the universe for a couple seconds only for the entire universe to be shut down and all VIP servers permanently disabled
Why on EARTH is this option in the individual place settings and not in the game settings page! I just permanently lost thousands of dollars of VIP servers over this. This is incredibly confusing and frustrating and I hope there is a way that this can be fixed.
There was a warning that changing the settings would disable VIP servers for the place, but VIP servers are ALSO IN THE INDIVIDUAL PLACE SETTINGS, NOT IN THE GAME SETTINGS! I assumed, like any sane person would, that VIP servers were per-place and not per-game. There was no warning popup or anything else when I switched that individual place over.
tl;dr: the issues:
Game privacy is in the individual place settings, leading the developer to believe that it only affects a single place, not all places within a game
There is no warning, popup or any other information that suggests changing the privacy of a single place affects the entire game
VIP servers are also in the individual place settings, creating confusion
These two glaring design issues combined led to the instant and irreversible destruction of thousands of paid VIP servers with no refund or recourse for the players who bought them.
The web page in general is just a very confusing mess with different functionalities spread across different sections. Something like this isn’t to be taken lightly when revenue from VIP servers amounts for hundreds of dollars.
We’re used to it, but it’s so bizarre how this all works when you step back to think about it.
To check developer stats, you go to the games detail page and click on the 3 dots.
But to run an ad, you go to the develop/create page, then find which game you are trying to advertise, if it’s a group game, it’s yet another click
To check how many VIP servers you currently have you go to games detail page, Configure place, then click the Access tab. LIKE WAT!?
Then to toggle a place’s access, instead of going to the access tab (like you go to see vip servers) you go to the develop/create tab and make the entire game public or private.
I think this bug is just the end game of a very messy implementation of features throughout the years with no look back and no reorganizing
The entire developer website experience is a confusing mess and feels like it was put together in one go with no afterthought.
The entire behavior of removing VIP servers when a game is taken down probably only exists because some web engineer couldn’t be bothered to write a special case for it.
If it were up to me, I’d seriously reconsider the organization of the entire web team.
I’m actually saying this semi seriously, because if there’s one thing Roblox’s proven, market competition produces higher quality end products for consumers.
I don’t know how it’d work, so back to reality
We would all like to see the web-team interact more with the developer forums, there are good suggestions to improve the website that a lot of developers agree with, and there is hardly any Roblox interaction with them.
We are extremely sorry about this. It is confusing that the game privacy option is shown on the place configure page so we will be removing it from that page immediately.
I agree that the entire experience of configuring your places & games is a mess. To address this, we have been designing a brand new game settings page which will solve these issues. I cannot give a timeline for when we will start implementing this page but know that we are working towards a solution.
oh man that absolutely sucks, well what roblox should have done is make places and the universe page 1 have sections so it easy and have a description what can happen if you turn something on or off. For example warn you before you Permanently disable all your vip servers!