Seems like a Band-Aid solution to me. It won’t be long before people find work-arounds to continue botting users with unwanted activity (messages, friend requests, comments, etc).
The update certainly promotes the ideal that ROBLOX is a socializing platform (yes, I’m aware there’s also other components like development and such) and that you should get with your friends in-game. Sometimes I have trouble following my friends into games without the party feature (don’t ask why I don’t use it) but now servers are narrowed down so hooray?
Downside to this is some games that have moderation or “intelligence” role play systems rely on being able to see who’s on servers publically and this update puts a wrench in that. In addition to this, the server list is often used since ROBLOX seems to have a tendency to create blank servers or new servers without filling up servers to the preferred or maximum player count set by the developer (earlier today on a game I help maintain and develop, there were 18 total players online with 3 running servers, while the game had a 35 preferred player count and 50 maximum player count).
and yeah everyone already mentioned my other approvals and complaints
Overall though, I mean there’s still the message settings, but I like to keep my messages public so people can message me from groups and such without forcing them to follow me; and I’d like to play a game without having to archive 1-2 pages afterward.
Suggestion that they would make it so groups could hand out group uniforms for 1 robux. Never happened.
If you add the group permission, make it added to Guests as well that should fix group-crossing battles/activities (Members not in the group can still view full server list of group games, if the permission is enabled.)
I feel like my idea about friends being at the top of the server list was implemented in a totally backwards way. Again as people have previously suggested this just won’t work and it really restricts the social aspect of games and being able to pick the best server the player wants.
It restricts in-game moderation and makes it harder to enforce said rules and policies (for example I know @TwentyTwoPilots driving games don’t like people breaking the filter to swear explicit or play stupidly loud music) there’s a dedicated team of people jumping around in the servers like mad to ensure a good experience throughout the game.
“As the game developer you are responsible for the game content, including what you allow players to submit.”
So if a Nazi or adult image does slip by, you’ll be the one getting moderated of course. We’ve already saw that happening (see below threads if you do a search there is a few more)
So I would imagine it be similar to the floating FE policy, it only exists when your game is on front page and starts getting abuse. The developer will be penalised with downtime or the game pulled and for some cases, moderation.
This is what happens to my game because my players can’t join a populated server.
Normally everyone just joins the server that has the most players in it. Now they are alone, and they leave because they are alone. (refer back to this this post)
Honestly. Is it possible to just get the server player amount. This would fix some problems people had with the update while… meeting ROBLOX halfway to preventing bots.
I was joking about this before
But now I'm serious.
Obviously not exactly like this. It would be nice just to have images of the accounts without linking to their account?? Or maybe just saying 24/24 or 23/24
Another issue I thought of last night was those free robux places, I’m sure lots of users are tricked by their misleading yet accurate-looking leaderboards, and it was pretty easy to debunk when you realize that you are in a server alone. Now its harder to do that.
One of my main issues is that the group I develop at requires the ability to see all servers so that they can shut down empty ones to prevent people from joining empty servers created randomly without other servers being full and so that people can hit the “Join” button on a server so they won’t end up in a new server and all go into the place they should be at.
Posted this in a different forum thread but here’s my suggestion at the moment:
My proposal for this update is that if this update is urgently needed to prevent the spam/phishing bots, then they should at least make it so only verified (and/or at least 1+ week old or so) accounts can view servers that non-friends are in. That will cut down on a lot of the phishing bots, especially due to the fact a lot of them aren’t even verified, I’m assuming. To remove the non-friends server list overall from the whole roblox population though, is quite absurd/unnecessary.
I generally used the server list to allow people to join specific servers from my website. I allowed this for various things, for example, my site allows players in-game to communicate directly with “Server-Mods” (Other people that were given access to moderate the game by the game owner). If needed that server mod could join that server to continue assisting the user.
Is this still possible? If not how could I get around this? Possibly using the follow player endPoint?
In that case you probably know the JobId, so you could just TeleportToPlaceInstance (or even use GetPlayerPlaceInstanceAsync to get the JobId), as you already kind of know the server you want.
obviously won’t work if you don’t know the (exact) name of the caller or the server JobId it came from
This update was not meant to stop botting. It was because the server list was straining ROBLOX’s backend. Would have been nice to improve the feature so it didn’t instead of removing it for all but a select few, but oh well.
Publicly-facing maybe, but through private discussion that doesn’t appear to be the case. You can put together the pieces with just what’s been said in this thread even, which is why I’m comfortable mentioning it (e.g. dodging of both the remarks that this doesn’t really help botting and the suggestions which improve upon the effectiveness against botting but reinstate the server list (bringing back the resource problem))
Please remember this post is in the public section of the Developer Forum. Do not post ways users can bot on the Roblox website since this knowledge can be used maliciously. Instead please message the ways you found to @Caelestene directly or post in the Private Bugs and Exploit Reports section of the Developer Forum… Thank you everyone for expressing your thoughts on this matter and please remember to follow our rules. If you have any questions or concerns feel free to message us directly.
I’m curious how this is better for the backend. Now when someone asks for the server list, not only do they have to go request all servers, now they also need to check if you have a friend in them. Surely that should be a much bigger strain than before? The only performance increase I can think of is not having to send 20 servers over the internet, but more like an average of one (depending on #friends, #servers, …) but I doubt that would matter that much.
With it being friends only, they can probably store the current server a user is in by UserId, and then all you have to do is loop through friends and return the servers they’re in. But you’re right – I’m curious how this is substantially better than just loading 10 servers every time someone manually navigates to the game’s server tab. I’ve been curious as to whether this is a resource problem through normal usage of the API or because bots were using it so heavily (in which case #friends is a lot better than the bots spam-requesting them)
That being said, I can’t accurately answer either of these (why w/ friends is less straining and whether resource problem is b/c normal usage or botted usage) – you’d have to ask @Caelestene.
I had to guess at most of the data, but it’d seem that basically the new system does reduce the amount of network traffic for requesting servers - unless you have a lot of friend and they’re all online playing the exact same game you want to play… Then it starts suffering…
Just to clarify, I ran my UserID (2469556) through a Text-to-Binary converter, and it came out with 7 bytes (8 bits == 1 byte),
As for the server cost, I have no information as to what cost there is to requesting server information, so it’s just a guess.
The Average friend count is based off the max limit for friends set months ago (I haven’t been online in a long while - so it may have been changed).
In purple you can see the calculation for both equations - they’re both super simple, and are probably missing out a lot of information, but it does seem the new system is cost effective.
I tried to keep the averages as generic as possible, and just to note - this is suppose to be the cost of One user gong to a game page, requesting the server list.
