ROBLOX should have a proper server status page that lets us know which services are down (at least for developers). So in the case of ROBLOX servers have issues we should at least be able to see what’s down. It would also help with making fail-safes and stuff. Even a stickied forum post would do.
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Speaking of which, ROBLOX games seem really laggy at the moment.
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Can confirm, we’ve been testing a game all evening and data store requests will easily yield for up to a minute.
This happens quite often and usually fixes itself after a minute or two. If your game breaks because web requests (datastore calls) are failing you’re clearly doing something wrong.
Yes, clearly I was doing something wrong; I just explained specifically what that was.
Cool. I was just aiming at “My game broke and I didn’t know why” resulting in “Would’ve been way less stressful if ROBLOX notified us”.
A status page would be a nice addition and if properly implemented help with analysing what might be going wrong. On the other hand though, web requests failing has become such a common thing and when properly programmed won’t cause issues. It just sucks that we have to tell players “Oh hey, you might just lose all your progress and bought stuff here because we can’t push your stats to the ROBLOX servers and there’s no way we can hold it until those services are back up. Hope you don’t mind, bye”
I don’t know, Its just interesting to see my old games running Data Persistance are more reliable than the new ones running Data Store’s…
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Right. I can only agree, although the problem with inexperienced developers creating games that blow up overnight goes further than some inconsistenties in ROBLOX’ API or services that aren’t rock-solid with no assembly required. If the data storage service were to be fail-proof (which it should!), there will still be the issue where no inexperienced developer knows how to properly handle dev product receipts or other things, resulting in a lot of games scamming players (because honestly that is what it is, even though it is caused by inexperience). Should ROBLOX provide rock-solid easy to use API’s or modules for all these purposes? Ideally they should, realistically it won’t solve a lot of the other issues caused by inexperienced developers having access to monetization and other features…
That Pokemon Go tycoon is an excellent example of this, last night you could kick anyone from the game due to a bug/oversight which made them lose all their purchases. Who are you going to punish for that? It can’t be the creators fault due to the nature of ROBLOX, right?
So with such a page Roblox will tell me “Hey, X server is down”. And then? It’s not going to tell me how to fix my code, it will just let me know “these things are down”. If I didn’t code my DataStore properly, my game suddenly breaks and I go to that page only to see a big lists of services from which some are down, how will I…
A) Figure out which server is causing the problem?
B) Know how to edit my code in order to fix the problem?
The console it basically doing the same thing at the moment. Stuff breaks, I join a server, the output spams certain errors and I use those errors to fix my code. A page like you’re suggesting isn’t good enough to help me fix the problems. Errors in the F9 console provide me much more information than a big page with all sorts of data which I have to navigate through.
I’m not against your suggestion, but the argument you’re providing is in my opinion too weak to justify the development of such a web page and I rather see time spent somewhere else for now.
An error in the console will basically tell you the same thing.
That doesn’t matter if your code breaks. Either…
A) It breaks your game, your code stops and the latest server error will the one you’re looking for (unless you have other code which spams the console with prints and covers the error but that wouldn’t be good practice)
or…
B) The error will always appear at a certain point in the game because certain code is triggered at specific timing so the error you’re looking for will always appear somewhere on the console.
Also, doesn’t the console support up to like 1000 lines right now? I think that should be plenty.
(Your initial suggestion was a dedicated page…)
A stickied post also wouldn’t be that great btw. If I wake up at 11 in the morning on a Sunday it will be like 2 o’clock in the night at the Roblox office. If some server goes down at that moment I don’t think there will be employees online and ready to edit the post for the next 8 hours. It might even mislead people in like Australia who are at that moment spending their evening making games. They’ll notice something is wrong with their game and check to forum to see what exactly is wrong. They might see the not up-to-date page and get confused because the page is saying other things.
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I don’t see why you would have to update your game with a different version to deal with downtime of services, you can just make your code work in both situations then? (You obviously have code for both situations already, otherwise you wouldn’t suggest that you want to know so you can upload emergency fixes)
I’m not necessarily against the idea, I just think it is a bit trivial information since your code should just handle it directly without your involvement (load default data where necessary, don’t save when default data is loaded, disable certain in-game features when services are down temporarily, etc)
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Couldn’t you kinda monitor Amazon’s Server status?
Yes, but that doesn’t help with specific features.
The entirety of ROBLOX’s asset service could be hosted on S3, but their main site assets could too be hosted on S3. If the main site stops loading assets, the cause could be unrelated to S3.
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