Transparency towards the community

[Batimius]

Roblox is not a very transparent company, and we are fully aware of that. Recently, I was discussing with someone some issues regarding certain features and how Roblox has failed to inform us on how these features are coming along, while always giving the response of “soon.” After this discussion, I realized how Roblox has little to no transparency and how this, in turn, frustrates the developer community as they are all tired of hearing the same response while getting no response.

The two things that drove me into writing this “request for transparency” were the “Soon TM” reply of a Roblox staff member after being asked about when the Regular promotions are coming back and the famous Developer Awards: Phase 2, which we have heard no news from. That being said, having heard no news and never seeing any results leads me to believe that the Roblox team has completely abandoned their efforts into these two issues. The Regular promotion issue has been an ongoing issue for a year and a half now, and we have yet to hear any news from it apart from the “Soon TM” reply. As for the Developer Awards: Phase 2, no news have been heard from that spectrum except from the fact that the program has been suspended.

I do understand that coming up with a release date is something that might not be possible, and that is not what I am asking for. What I ask for is that Roblox increases their transparency with their community and keep us updated on stuff we ask rather than giving everyone the same reply. If a timeline isn’t possible, which is understandable, I would like to hear about the progress being made. Something like, “We are actively working on the issue and trying to find a solution. We have brainstormed the idea and have engaged a team into implementing it, although we have come across a bunch of errors. The main framework has been finished and a little bit of tweaking is left before release,” is much better than “The feature will be released soon.” Of course, Roblox would not write a message like that, but something along those lines that has just enough information gives us, the community, reassurance that the specified issue is actively being worked on. As of right now, a “soon” reply gives no information whatsoever apart from the fact that it is acknowledged as an issue and that it will be fixed sometime in the future.

So, to wrap things up, what I request for is more transparency. If I ask about the Regular promotions issue, I do not want to hear that it will “soon” be fixed, I want to hear where the issue is currently standing (specifics are not needed of course), and how much progress has been done. This way, when another developer asks the same question in the future, we will be able to see that it is actively being worked on. I do not ask for specific details such as what script is being worked on or what line of code the developers are on, I am just asking for a bit more transparency on the progress of stuff when the community asks. This way, not only does the person asking get a satisfactory answer, but the community increases their trust towards the corporation as it engages more with its audiences. Please, be a little more transparent and I am certain that the community will be much more appreciative of the work being done.

[ValiantWind (Val)]

We’ve been asking for this since the beginning of time.

[OneEDM (EDM)]

I agree, Roblox is terrible with communication and delivering quality updates in a timely manner. The worst part is they aren’t transparent about it at all.

Here is my world famous response when Roblox tells me something is coming soon (I used it here):

When Roblox says “in the future” this usually means months if not years (Or sometimes never lol).

[peraldon (Jed)]

Hey!

Thanks so much for spending the time to write this thread, we really appreciate it. Communication with our Creators is super vital at Roblox, particularly for the teams working on the tools and resources that you use every day. Having open areas for feedback is critical for us to work together and continue to build the best platform.

I wanted to highlight the bug report & feature request aspect specifically because this is something that’s particularly close to my heart.

The reason we have these feedback mechanisms is to create an opportunity for Creators to proactively send feedback, which is quite different from all the other mechanisms we use to get thoughts from the community (surveys, research groups, etc), where we are the ones being proactive.

This is very important because it alerts us to things that we hadn’t necessarily noticed or considered up to that point. As such, we want as much of this feedback as possible, from as many Creators as possible. Whenever we receive feedback, it requires internal triaging to the right team, prioritizing, and more - today, this is a very manual process. The fact that it’s so manual limits our ability to receive feedback at scale because too much of it would just immediately overwhelm the internal teams, and therefore we would struggle to act on any of it.

This is, today, why we do not have a route up to the required Trust Level to give feedback.

However, we also want to enable all Creators to be able to give meaningful feedback. This is a focus for the team I’m on, and we’re currently in the process of automating the internal processes for how we handle feedback. The more automation, the faster we can open access to all Creators.

I’m not going to give a timeframe, but we’re definitely working on it, and I hope this insight was helpful to understand what’s going on behind the scenes (tl;dr - lots!).

Thanks!

[ValiantWind (Val)]

That’s great! Thanks a lot for replying to this thread. I’m sure lots of people will appreciate this

[AbuMuA]

Thank you lots for that quick & quite dedicated response, but there’s just one thing.

People who have the Trust Level of Member are unable to post those suggestions for the website and whatnot. And it’s unobtainable, so it’s harder for our feedback to be heard.

On the bugs department, you guys do better. You have a response team that’s open for everybody on the platform, and that’s decent.

[ValiantWind (Val)]

If Members suddenly have access to #feature-requests it would be an absolute NIGHTMARE. I completely understand why DevRel won’t open up #bug-reports and #feature-requests to members because it will cause too problems to list.

[AbuMuA]

I’m aware of that,

I’m only suggesting to no longer restrict Regular. Because currently it’s not possible to obtain, unless in very special rare occasions.

[CookiesAndCream3861 (CookieCraft)]

Thank you for the insight, as a temporary solution to this ‘Feature Request’ issue for users without the ‘Regular’ trust level, perhaps a Feature Request group here on the Developer Forums could be instated?

This would use a similar purpose as @Bug-Support, where users ranked Member on the Developer Forums would message with their Feature Request. I understand users can email Roblox Support but I feel many people feel their suggestion(s) are heard more.

[Dev_Ryan]

The part that worries me the most is not so much the transparency issues, but rather changes being made without a decent poll from the developer community first or more of a heads up with room to adjust. And especially updates that haven’t been fully tested as I remember a few cases where they had to rollback some changes because it caused some negative situations to occur.

Some updates in the past feel like they were forced on us without our thoughts taken into consideration, and that upsets us as developers especially if that feature has a large impact on our projects that we didn’t ask for. While I welcome new features to improve the platform, and I do understand Roblox tries to give us options to opt-in or opt-out, but sometimes that choice can’t be made and we just have to deal with whatever that gets thrown at us. Hopefully this is something that is also being improved.

[Batimius]

I thank you so much for the reply to my message. A reply such as this is exactly what I was asking for, having just enough information for the community to understand what is going on with the right amount of transparency. This reply reassured me that Roblox is still working on these issues and that they haven’t put them aside.

If I may ask though, when it comes to question like these where we are asking for an answer (such as the DevForum ranking system, Developer Awards: Phase 2, etc), where exactly is the proper place to ask them? #forum-help:forum-questions seems to be filled with repetitive questions, so should we avoid posting there for updates and rather contact Roblox staff another way, or is that proper usage? I am asking for future usage as I do have a few questions which I would love to ask, but of course, asking them here would not really be appropriate as they are not on-topic with this thread.

All in all, thank you so much for taking your time and giving both me and the fellow developers here a response like this one. You have earned not only mine, but the respect of all of the developers’ in this topic by giving us such a response. Again, thank you so much for the transparency, it is truly appreciated!

[OneEDM (EDM)]

Thanks! I can already imagine a world where every bug report is reviewed by staff and fixed, oh that would be amazing! Thanks for not saying soon too, we all know it won’t be. But take your time, we are willing to wait if it turns out like it sounds!

@peraldon I appreciate you, I see you follow up on lots of bug reports and that makes me happy . Employees like you restore my hope in Roblox’s future!