Updates to Invites: Joining Friends Just Got Easier

Updates Announcements
#1

Hey Creators,

Today, we’re releasing improvements to invites, aimed at eliminating the challenge of joining friends.

Earlier this year, we revamped Player Invite Prompts, and we’re thrilled to see that over 8,000 active experiences have already implemented them. The vast majority of invites on Roblox are sent through Player Invite Prompts, so we encourage you to add them to your experiences. Together with these improvements to invites, we aim to make co-experiencing on Roblox a seamless and enjoyable journey.

What’s New?

Send invites in one cohesive way.

We’ve redesigned the invite flow for a consistent look and feel, whether accessed from the in-experience menu or the experience details page. Additionally, online and closest friends are now shown at the top, an improvement to our previous alphabetical order arrangement. To send an invite, search for friends using their alias, display name, or username. Invited friends will receive notifications.

Never miss an invitation.

Stay connected with real-time invitation toast notifications. When Roblox is open, you can now receive and respond to immediate on-site toast notifications for friend invites, available on mobile with desktop and console soon to follow. Mobile users can also opt-in to invite push notifications. And as a backup, all invites go to the notification stream in case you miss them.

Always join the same server as the person who invites you.

Before, invites would sporadically land users in a different server than their friend because they would go through matchmaking. Now, joining from a friend’s invitation bypasses matchmaking, guaranteeing that you and your friend will be in the same server. If the server your friend is in is full, users will now see a join queue instead of being kicked out.

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Know when you’ve joined your friends successfully.

“The server is busy, the experience is massive. I don’t know if my friend is here.” We’ve all been there. We’ve fixed this problem with a new set of banners informing whether you successfully joined your friends. And if you get matched with a friend, we’ll also notify you about that.

Easily reunite with friends if they are absent.

Joining an experience where friends are no longer present used to result in a loading screen deadlock. Now, you’ll always land in the experience, and if your friend has moved on, a prompt will ask if you want to follow them. And if they’re offline, you can invite them back.

ExpHop_DevForum

Let us know if you have any feedback and share below how you’ve used invites in your experiences! Thank you.

200 Likes
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#2

This topic was automatically opened after 11 minutes.

#3

Cool!
Is there a way to reduce the delay on the ‘you joined a friend’ and ‘your friend joined’ notifications?
I’ve noticed they’re usually a couple seconds late (sometimes up to 10s).
Minor improvement, but would be nice for QoL.

27 Likes
#4

Finally! A notification of friend no longer being present on your server upon joining is way better than what we have right now.

14 Likes
#5

Great Update, love to see what’s next!

9 Likes
#6

Neat feature that’ll do wonders to bringing awareness to game invites.

I do wonder, does everyone receive a standard message or does this system also make use of our experiences their setting notification options for player invite prompts?
i.e the custom prompt message or invite message id?

11 Likes
#7

I was going to add this functionality into my own social framework. Glad I don’t need to anymore!

8 Likes
#8

Could you guys add a “invisible” feature that lets me hide all my profile activity from people, I think I’m not alone in really wanting something like this.

24 Likes
#9

Can we implement “Notification Strings” to customize the messaging for our invitations outside of our game? Our approach within our games has been to personalize invites based on distinct events. For example, when a player gifts another, the invitation is customized to display: “Player X wants to gift you in Game Y.”

It would be highly beneficial to further individualize these invite messages. This would not only enhance the uniqueness of our gaming experience but also seamlessly convey the context and intent behind each invitation.

14 Likes
#10

Is there a way to disable these notifications in our experiences? From the looks of things, they can be quite repetitive, immersion-breaking, and completely unnecessary at times.

12 Likes
#11

Thank you for driving these core user experience improvements! These are things we can’t do as creators.

11 Likes
#12

I’ve been wanting updates that show Roblox notifications in-game and this is a great first step. Maybe we can add a pop-up notification for when a friend joins you instead of having it in chat?

Edit: This already exists. I didn’t fully read the post.

10 Likes
#13

This is such a nice change, I hope in the future we get the ability to join a game (that a friend might be playing) and not be forced into their server. (Also the new banner looks so clean!!)

8 Likes
#14

Tell me if I’m wrong but, this feature:

Does NOT mean people will be able to void main place? Imagine someone is in a server after having been teleported, that doesn’t allow their friends to join that server (upon invitation) right?

10 Likes
#15

Hey @apenzijncoolenleuk1 - thanks for the feedback. We added a standardized delay to show this message to account for different experiences that might have loading screens, intro sequences, popups, etc. This reduces the odds of conflicting with creators’ own UIs. But as a follow-on improvement, we plan on reducing the delay and making this banner more context-aware!

13 Likes
#16

That’s great for my friends and me, who never met in real life before!
I like the concept of making it possible for so much inviting to get players from one experience to another quicker and even to play with your friends! I wasn’t using inviting in the past much since I was expecting my friend never to see it in the notifications, but that really carries out! Thank you Roblox!!

7 Likes
#17

Hey @Mullets_Gavin - I’m glad you asked. Currently, you can customize the invite notifications that users send each other when you set Notification Options in Player Invite Prompts. You create a Notification String in Creator Hub, which auto generates an assetID that you can use to reference the string when calling the function.

Additionally, for your use case, you may want to consider our upcoming Experience Notifications API, which we recently added to the Creator Roadmap under “Grow and Engage Your Audience.” These are new OpenCloud and Lua APIs that you can use to automatically initiate notifications to specific users based on server activity, which perfectly suits the case of friends gifting one another, player milestones, and more.

These APIs will launch early next year. We will share more news on this very soon!

9 Likes
#18

Cool features but will consoles also get this update where you get a notification when a friend joins your or you join their server? It would be really useful since we cant view chat.

6 Likes
#19

Will we be able to directly join users easily through a link, in the future? What if they aren’t on my friends list?

6 Likes
#20

This looks great! Are there any plans to allow turning off these messages or stopping as many getting posted to us?

9 Likes