There seems to be some sort of major outage every other Saturday when player numbers peak.
A big problem is the complete lack of transparency on Roblox’s part. When big companies have their services degraded or completely down, one of the first things they do is alert their users about this either on their site or on social media.
This transparency about downtime is vital for services where a lot of money and a lot of people are on the line. It increases the accountability of the service, because crashes and outages can’t just be swept under the rug.
What we have instead are thousands of players rushing to developers on weekends to tell them that their game is broken and that they need to fix it. Developers have no idea what’s going on either.
Roblox has the responsibility to be more reliable than it currently is. A big part of that is being transparent about outages so that it can be held accountable for downtime and take better steps to prevent it from happening.
We need a live, automatically-updated status page with in-depth statuses for every web service. When something is going wrong on Roblox’s end, developers need to be aware of it. The current status page hasn’t been updated in two months. This is not an acceptable solution. This issue is unresolved.
Something like this would be very useful. Lately I’ve been relying on downdetector.com to see wether or not I’m the only one experiencing issues. It would be nice to have an official Roblox medium for informing us of exactly what’s up.
Roblox has something against keeping people informed about this kind of thing it seems. Not many commercial services or similar platforms can have a day of downtime and when they get back up pretend it did not even happen. Take for example the majority of EU servers being down for a day where DNS wouldn’t resolve properly which wasn’t more than a year ago and never had an official explanation offered as far as I have seen since.
I beleive it’s a legit concern from my part if I say the status site is not constantly updating. Ideally we should get real-time updates (at maximum once every five minutes - I’m not sure about the scalability, but Discord can do it, so I’m 99% sure Roblox has the resources for a more frequent monitorization), not once every day.
It doesn’t matter to me how was the server 19 hours ago, I would like to know how healthy is the server RIGHT NOW.
Also, while roblox.status.io isn’t moved to status.roblox.com, will the first one be whitelisted on the filter, or can the second act as a redirect proxy to the first (which doesn’t right now)?
I think it’s safe to say it’s not live updates. I agree with you whole wholeheartedly because it puts so much stress and strain on the developers of all games when ROBLOX experiences major downtime/issues and we still can’t have a way to check live if there is an issue at that current reported incident time. With no documented history either, it’s impossible to match up incidents with ROBLOX issues.
Meaning there’s a lack of communication from everywhere from ROBLOX > Devs > Players which then results in a huge impact of both player respect and loyalty, which in turn effects hardworking developers profits as a direct result. Without compensation or accountability and this will prevent/restrict ROBLOX from being promoted/accelerated as a “job” class and at this point must be addressed as a matter of upmost urgency.
Why is there no SLA guarantee/policy for developers.
The shortest scenario I can easily recreate from past experience is.
Bob, is very loyal. Always clocks into my game daily and loves to play it. For some reason he can’t connect so then forwards this to the developer. Me the developer responds going “hec, I didn’t change anything what’s going on?” so, off goes this developer trying to find what’s going on but there’s nowhere to go (as of yet) for any information/update. Frustrated and angry the developer can’t diagnose the issue the developer may or may not respond to their player(s) at this point something like “Hey I don’t know what’s going on, everything looks okay in the game and works alright. It must be a ROBLOX issue because nothing has been changed unfortunately” Bob then angrily responds “WHAT D YOU MEAN THIS IS A ROBLOX ISSUE I PLAY UR GAME A LOT AND IM REALLY UPSET I CAN’T PLAY, MANY MANY PEOPLE CANNOT PLAY AS WELL YOURE MY FAVOURITE DEVELOPER WHY DID YOU DO THIS” this results in a heavily damaged player<>developer relationship, trust, loyalty and respect which in turns damages heavily the ROBLOX<Developer relationship.
tl;dr it affects everyone in the cycle and it’s urgent, do the thing
I feel like that’s a drastic over exaggeration of the scenario. Temporary outages are frustrating, but as soon as they are resolved your players will effectively forget about them.
I’m not saying that we shouldn’t have better resources for determining the server status, though.
Meanwhile, you can think of some small & cool update that will recompense for the wait time
There is always something you can do to “repair” the damage.
There were 970 data loading failures in my game today due to an unreported datastore outage.
970 times a player was inconvenienced to the point of likely abandoning. Players aren’t forgetting about the outage, they are leaving and forgetting about the game.
I feel like neither of us have any concrete proof to back up our claims (that people either are or are not leaving the game indefinitely), so I guess we’ll just agree that the problem needs to be fixed regardless.
berezaa is correct. If a player joins a game for the first time and it’s broken, they’re unlikely to come back because they believe it’s always broken. Seeing as berezaa extensively logs metrics for his games and has years of data, you can consider him a primary source for player reactions and trust the data he has.
Welp. Site is slowed to a complete crawl. Highly degraded performance. Status says everything was OK 20 days ago though so at least we have that going for us
The Roblox site is an indicator for when Roblox employees are unable to adjust the status site; if Roblox is being slow and the indicator is still set to ok then it’s safe to assume there’s a problem reaching the status server .
Wouldn’t you expect the status service/server to be polled every so often by the site/game/whatever service/server and the status service/server to detect that there has been no requests/updates/polls recently and therefore report an outage?
