As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to provide players with good support, especially when you get hundreds of messages each day.
Support it very important, as it affects how players view both individual games and Roblox as a whole.
Although you can direct players to social media or other messaging platforms, most users still tend to just use the Roblox messaging system which is far from ideal.
These are some of the issues I’ve encountered so far:
Contact details
It’s currently difficult for players to contact the developer of a game, as it requires the user to first find the developer’s profile and then click the Message button. For group games, this process is even more complicated.
Something like a Contact the Developer, Support or Help-button directly on the game page would make this much easier.
Message history
Users often have the checkbox unchecked, which makes it very hard to properly reply in longer conversations.
When you receive hundreds of unique messages a day, it’s impossible to remember individual users and their questions/issues. This means that I have to ask players the same questions several times, which often leads to frustration and confusion.
It’s also problematic that players can spoof the message history by manually writing text in the same format, and leaving the box unchecked.
Unable to reply to messages
Some users enable the Who can message me? setting to send a message and then disable it again. This means that I will receive messages that I can’t reply to at all.
Despite me not being able to reply, the user will most likely think that I ignored the message and get frustrated, possibly contacting Customer Service instead.
As a developer it’s also annoying to write replies to people with no indication whether they can receive the message before actually sending it.
Message redirecting/forwarding
Related to Ability to forward PMs to email and reply via email.
I’m currently receiving a lot of messages daily and keeping up with all of them in a timely manner will get harder and harder as my player base and the number of messages increase.
It’s currently not possible to allow others to help with this without giving away full access to my account.
A way to redirect/forward messages to another user or perhaps email could be super helpful.
Spam time limit
Related to Loosen/remove message send throttle for trusted developers
I have preset responses for a lot of the common messages I get, which means that I’m often able to reply to a lot of messages in quick succession.
Unfortunately the built-in spam prevention timeout often kicks in after only a few messages, which means I have to wait a while before continuing. This can sometime really affect efficiency.
Purchase Validation
As a developer there’s currently no official way to check whether a user has made a specific purchase in my game. I’ve already implemented custom logs but these rely on DataStore-availability and could possibly fail.
Players can claim to have done something and if it doesn’t show up in my logs I have no way of actually verifying it. This puts both the player and me in a very undesirable situation.
The above mentioned approach only works for developer products though. Gamepasses can be bought from the website, which means there is no way for me to track these myself. I’ve had players claiming that they’ve bought gamepasses and not received them in their Roblox inventory or that they’ve somehow bought a single gamepass multiple times, but in such situations there is nothing I can do other than redirecting them to Customer Service.
Something like a searchbar would be super helpful.
Purchase Status
Even with custom logs, it’s hard to properly check whether a purchase has been successfully granted, is awaiting processing or has been refunded. It would be great if developers were able to see the status of individual purchases.