Roblox ad running is turning into a guessing game to run ads or not, and that’s not fun. We need some more stability.
If too many don’t run ads on a weekend because they expect another outage, others will go in instead and then might experience the seemingly inevitable outage, repeat that cycle making more unhappy developers weekly. Not a winning strategy
I don’t see Roblox implementing a refund system though. Complications: someone at Roblox has to decide how long the site was gone / not functional, and then some system has to refunds developers based on what? (Percentage of day out of total Robux spent sure) But ads running aren’t worth the same Robux throughout the entire day because certain times of day has more likelihood for purchases (depending on game demographics) it would never be perfect, someone would always complain
Sure, you have a good point, what about doing extra running of the ad for the amount of time that the site was running very slowly or not at all? This way there’s no actual money refunds, instead developers don’t even have to do anything, their ads will simply over-run to provide the extra time.
Rather than reimburse those people who bought ads during an outage Roblox could just stop running ads during such a situation. They could make a warning appear when trying to buy one when the website is slow:
The Site Is Experiencing Issues Right Now. Advertising is Temporarily Down.
If an ad is already running and Roblox is slow, you could stop showing all ads until the outage is fixed. Then resume them when it’s over.
I’d imagine it wouldn’t even be hard to implement this. You could probably even have this system set up automatically so nobody has to manually decide if the site is slow or not.
I know this has been a topic in the past however, I feel that it should be maybe discussed again to get an opinion on it.
I feel that there should be some option that developers can opt in to get some of their advertisement or sponsorship campaign funds back when the site is not operating properly. The advertisements just go to waste along with the robux. They serve no benefit especially with connectivity issues.
I believe this will help the smaller developers of our community who actually depend on that robux to generate ads for their games and groups. Getting a percentage of the funds back could help majorly.
I agree with this. I have wasted almost all of my advertisement money multiple times when the site was experiencing issues, and it has messed with my player count and how the game goes. I think if we’re spending money on advertisements, it should be a given that we shouldn’t have to waste money while the site is experiencing issues.
If its within a couple hours before the site experiences issues, the percentage should be easily 100% refundable.
However, I believe that the entire amount of robux spent on Sponsors can’t be fully recovered if was running for over 6 hours, but it should still grant the smaller developers a good chunk of their funds back.
Information:
Yesterday there was an issue where a lot of the Roblox servers were failing, causing Roblox to have some downtime. I noticed this due to the fact that my player count was dropping drastically even though I had sponsored, so I checked the DevForums to see if anything had happened, and conveniently found this highly viewed topic: Roblox Servers Failing [ROBLOXCRITICAL].
The plausible problem:
Even though I had been saving up for quite a while to sponsor, it was unfortunate enough for Roblox to be down for almost 8 hours, and inconveniently, my sponsor was placed in the time frame to end exactly when Roblox had started to get their servers back and running. Let’s say an example for other cases, that developers had spent over hundreds of thousands of Robux, just to run sponsors or advertisements for 24 hours, for 8 of those hours to only be viewed to a really low player density due to servers having some downtime, that would be a complete waste of time and value that they had spent unless initially, the servers had been running normal. Now I’m NOT saying it’s Roblox’s fault that their servers had some downtime, they were investigating a serious issue that happened to their servers yesterday and they worked hard to get it back to normal as soon as they can. I just feel like there should be some compensation for developers like me, to have solutions for this downtime because saving up Robux for sponsoring or advertising takes work, time and effort.
Possible Solutions:
So I talked to Roblox’s customer relations team about some compensation and explained the downtime issue, but they responded that they were investigating the downtime issue and ended my support ticket there without even talking about or responding to the message about compensation. I feel like there should be a change in customer service policy to give some sort of compensation to developers who had sponsors and advertisements running through the downtime. A fair choice would be to either give the remaining Robux back for the time left to run when Roblox goes down, or to run their sponsors and advertisements for the timeframe of the downtime. Another solution could be an implementation to the website where they could automatically pause the time remaining frame of the advertisements, when there is detected downtime, then resuming after they had solve the downtime issue. This would be very helpful to me as a developer, because I had spent so much time and effort saving up to sponsor my game, and not getting back the adequate results that I had expected therefore wasting Robux.
I just released a game and put money into ads, and then Roblox started having issues shortly after.
They need to either refund our ad money or extend the ad duration by the length of the downtime.
It’s ridiculous. It’s robbery. I paid for a service and didn’t get it.
Edit: The biggest issue is that they know this is an issue but they’ve ignored us for years.
While I can understand glitches popping up every once in a while, or some occasional bugs during times of high volume, when the issues get to the point where I feel like shutting down my game while I have ads running is better UX than players joining a broken game, something isn’t working right.
I spent 90,000 robux on advertisements and sponsors and about five hours worth of that (including peak hours) are going to complete waste because my game is in an unplayable state.
We can’t control when the website meltdowns, and some players are spending robux on ads that are equivalent to hundreds of dollars.
It’s a shame how everything on the website fails, besides the advertisement system. If there’s an internal error, there needs to be a halt to the advertisement/sponsor system (or at least a reimbursement). Developers lose way too much for something they can’t even control.
It might have been a year since last reply and three years since this request but this issue repeats itself time and time again.
It’s been over 16 hours of downtime today, 2/3 of a Friday sponsors and advertising money gone. For many developers this is money that could had been spent on developers, DevEx or anything on the platform. All gone.
I deeply understand the challenges of outages but I don’t think it should take 3 years of repeated outages for Roblox to fix this critical problem. For many developers, they have just lost the start of their new launch. For others, it’s can become the difference between gaining new players.
Roblox is just keeping that money, where I’m forced to close my work to not deeply harm the UX for my players. Lost income, lost productivity, lost advertising space. I don’t believe it’s fair and I want it changed to where I get that at the very least the advertising money back.
I also agree with this. I ran a weeks worth of sponsors, and it is R$20K (10K/d) down the drain, not one single person seeing them in the last 48 hours. Luckily it could’ve been much much worse for my case, but I’m sure it’s worse for some others who might’ve put loads more in on one day or those who actually spend real hard-earned money, just for it to all go to waste.
The platform goes down often, and I understand the issues present, all I’m asking is for us to not have sponsors be an immediate void of robux that could be put to better use when the website is down.
There should be an automated system that reimburses developers when Roblox fails to serve ads as promised.
It is hard on developers who not only lose the money paid for advertising, but also do not get any income from their game while Roblox is down.
Since the downtime, Roblox has provided a refund to those affected during the weekend outage as per this Bloxy News Tweet.
While this is a great step forward, to see an official position on how ad refunds will work in the future as a public policy. To see an official answer from Roblox would be greatly appreciated given over 100 developers has shown their wish for this.
The Site Is Experiencing Issues Right Now. Advertising is Temporarily Down. 