As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to implement new updates quickly without disrupting the player’s gameplay experience. Many players after being kicked will simply leave as they don’t want to rejoin. Unfortunately, letting the servers filter out into updated ones can take quite some time, which makes it very inefficient to just “wait” for the update. And, a lot of the time they don’t understand that it was because of an update.
My suggestion would be an option to prevent players from joining old servers. The play button would only let them join new servers, and if a player attempts to join a friend in an old server it could give them a message that the server is outdated and to find a new one.
This could be implemented similarly to the migrate to newest update button. It could even be called a “soft migrate to newest update”, or something along those lines.
If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my development experience because I would no longer have to worry about implementing updates lowering the player count drastically, but I would be happy knowing that my update is still being implemented quickly.
Hi sloomingbla, thanks for your message. I want to better understand your ask. It sounds like when deciding between the do nothing and migrate to latest update options we provide, you find that do nothing updates too slowly, whereas the migrate option results in player drops - and that neither option is great for you. Instead you want an option that doesn’t force players to leave old servers but does prevent new players from joining, is that correct?
I also want to ask about your overall preferences here. Am I correct in saying that your two goals with regards to game updates are that (1) the update happens quickly (i.e. all game instances are of the new version) and (2) that it doesn’t result in player drops?
Let’s say an update isn’t backwards compatible - currently, we need to shut down all our servers and ruin our players’ experience.
In some games, like where there’s boss fights, being interrupted with a shutdown while in the middle of a boss is terrible user experience. I’ve worked around this by adding a warning system so people can prepare for the imminent shutdown.
My desire is for game updates to not ruin the user experience of people currently playing, and that people can get into the newest version of the game easily.
If this was implemented, I would only use the shutdown/migration feature when there are game-breaking bugs.
You are correct in assuming those two goals, although I would add that it’s also about having more flexibility when approaching a game update.
There are times when I would want to hurry and get the next update out from a large bug, or a time-sensitive update, but the majority of the time the potential impact on player count can be enough to warrant waiting. The problem is that when I don’t shut down the old servers, the newest update can take weeks to fully filter through at times… so there’s not much wiggle room here.
This change would let players join the updated servers at their own pace, without being interrupted, while still making sure the update is implemented quickly.