Shutting Down Servers Does Not Inform Users

When shutting down a server, users of the server do not receive a message letting them know the game was shutdown.

To remedy this, we try reaching out via Discord & Twitter to let users know they’ll experience a shutdown and to rejoin.

The symptoms of a shutdown are as follows:

  • camera stops moving
  • you may hear endless footstep sounds (new sound script may have fixed)
  • players will stand in place with their animations looped
  • players will sometimes lose data even if you’re doing everything by the book. DataStores are especially unreliable on a server that has been shutdown (do the calls even go through?)

Here is an example of a server that has been shut down for 30s on mobile. The same issue appears on PC. You’ll notice it looks like an alive server, except my controls are broken.

Game link in case it is game-specific:

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I have also been experiencing this. I initially thought it was linked to my soft shutdown script, but once I removed that, the issue persisted.

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So Roblox no longer says “This game has shutdown”? Does it show it in other instances, besides when you manually shut down servers, or not?

Also, until this bug gets fixed, you could manually tell players a server is about to shut down. I personally like taking that route better because I get more control over the messages.

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Correct - no pop up (previously red banner?) like you’d get when you idle for 20 minutes etc.

We do disable the topbar, chat, playerlist etc and reimplement our own which might be affecting the parent of the shutdown frame?

This issue is especially annoying since we receive an influx of bug reports regarding broken camera & UI after doing a shutdown, which we just have to assume is due to shutdowns breaking the game.

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This issue is still present as of September 9th, 2021.

It looks like some attempts were made over a year ago to fix this but nothing has happened to my knowledge since. Shutting down servers has gotten buggier since.

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Bumping this to link my newer report from 2021.

We’re almost > 3 years of not being able to shut down servers properly. This has to be addressed, it’s a really bad look that this sort of thing will stay broken until a developer pushes to get it fixed.

There has to be a mentality change about maintaining the platform, it feels like it’s the developer’s job to fight for bugs to get fixed

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Hey Alex,

I followed the repro steps in your other post, but ended up getting a proper message. Is there any way I can repro what you’re seeing more accurately? Here’s what I did

  1. create place Main place Mortal Coil - pentominos - Roblox
  2. create secondary place Second place - Roblox
  3. publish both
  4. join root place and hit purple square
  5. it teleports me to 2nd place, stay in there
  6. web: go to 2nd place game details page (you can tell from the URL, although the image used on game details is the root place’s thumbnail)
  7. hamburger menu | shutdown all servers
  8. receive correct disconnected message as expected

image

1 Like

I was able to reproduce it in World Zero’s dev game. When I try to shut down the server, you’ll see that other players can still chat with me and move around. However:

  • None of my local scripts work (can’t dismount, equip items, open any UI, etc)
  • Corescripts seem to be still running (camera, humanoid)
  • Notice the animations stay playing what they were last playing, since we use a custom Animate script that gets stopped
  • After 30s, the shutdown message did appear (happened a few seconds after video ended)

The 30s makes me think about Roblox’s BindToClose APIs that I believe also use a 30 second timer interally. Is it possible these are holding things up or running in the wrong order?

2 Likes

Yeah I remember that old semi-disconnected state too. Are you on mac/PC/mobile? Is anything about my test different than yours? For me in a non-root place, shutting down via game details for secondary place immediately results in my PC client receiving the message. I know your case is real, just can’t repro for an investigation.

I’m on PC for this test.

The only difference is that we have our entire game running (of course), which is doing datastore calls in a BindToClose that we make sure runs for 30s. But this should be on the server, not yielding clients from disconnecting. But that sounds like a good place to look?

Hi, following up on this issue. Is assistance still needed? Thanks

Just wondering if new shut down message change forever (from error code 274 to 288), or can be reversed?
And also when game gets taken down (error code 282), it says “please reconnect” when game is under review and it doesn’t make sense, so it needs other kick message. (I’m not sure if it has changed yet)
I’m just asking to make some kick messages clear, if possible. Thanks.

Yes, this issue is still a thing. Shutting down servers doesn’t always display a message, or will take ~20-30 seconds after the player has lost connection