Website Player/Server Spectate

Feature Requests Engine Features
#1

Option to allow users on the website to spectate players or server gameplay through the ROBLOX client or maybe through the website if more convenient.

Basically an internal, official ROBLOX streaming service.

Similar to PSN in-game streaming. PlayStation®Plus | Hundreds of games to download and play, PlayStation classics, game trials and more

Advantages:

  • Allows users to have easy access to watching friends play
  • Allows easy access for users to watch gameplay if they can’t join because of a full server. This would be great for big events where admins and other more famous players are playing and their fans would like to join in on the fun.
  • Users that don’t understand gameplay or want to improve their gameplay on a certain game can spectate players they know are good at the game. How will they know they are good at the game? ROBLOX could show the amount of spectators and also add a rating system to spectate.
  • Rewards players that are good at playing games to get more attention rather than seeing their scores just on leaderboards, other players could experience how they play. This will also encourage players to play their favourite games more as they have the chance of gaining a following of spectators.
  • Option to disable spectate if developers don’t want spectators knowing what players are doing as they could send information to other players in the game. This could be overcome with adding latency but I feel that would negatively effect performance?
  • You might argue that there are already streaming services out there. Well, streamers have to go through a lot of steps before streaming as well as letting all their fans know they are streaming. Having it internally in ROBLOX would be a massive step-up from using external services and 1000’s more people would use it if it were internal.

Updating followers feature:

  • At the moment ROBLOX has a followers feature but it’s hardly used because of the lack of purpose. To highly increase the use of the followers feature you could incorporate it with streaming. All of your followers would be notified of when you have streaming activated so they can watch your gameplay.

Followers should be notified when:

  • is streaming
  • updates game
  • liked game, favourited game
  • Posts status
  • Achieves ROBLOX badge

Disadvantages:

  • As it may be best if ran through the client it would require ROBLOX to have more powerful servers.
  • Could cause performance issues for those in-game if run on the client?
  • PSN requires users to pay a subscripton cost to run this service. I believe ROBLOX could incorporate this into Builder’s Club or OBC because of the higher cost of servers?

Questions:

  • What would be the alternative of running the spectate on the client?
  • If it ran on the website the gameplay would have to be recorded? That would cause more performance issues?
  • Should ROBLOX only make this a paid service through BC or OBC? That way they would have more money to pay for the servers?

Poll:

  • For: Roblox should work towards this!
  • Against: Write below

0 voters

1 Like
#2

Against - resource + management reasons:

Better alternative would be to somehow make a contract deal with twitch.TV (if they even need to), and integrate direct streaming from the client and display it on the ROBLOX website. Even still, doubt it.

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#3

Wouldn’t this make it possible to exploit servers while not being in game, making the exploiter impossible to find? I mean, it’s just a possibility, and of course there are other ways to make “spectate” rather than entering the server, but then you can’t choose what to spectate.

#4

The problem with that is streamers will still have to download external software in order to stream as well as people being able to stream anything and say it’s streaming a Roblox game when it isn’t. The only way for ROBLOX to monitor what is being streamed would be through moderation.

#5

That’s why I stated to have it integrated. An great example is Minecraft, you can connect your Minecraft application to twitch, and stream directly from the Minecraft app itself (at least i think that’s how it works. Never used it before). ROBLOX could provide the same integration without having to adjust their server infrastructure. (Unless you allow embedded streaming on the ROBLOX website itself, then maybe)

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#6

Steam has a very similar system like this. (I think this is where youre getting it from) You can pretty much broadcast any game to anyone. All your friends have to do is go to your profile and request to view the broadcast.

The streaming is built into the steam client, so you don’t have to download any external programs.

#7

No. It would need to be implemented in a way where you stream the rendered client from another user. If you could stream directly from a game server, that would put more stress on that server. (It would be like connecting more players)

Even if that second method was done, there’s no way they would be allowed to make requests to change anything.

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#8

Against. Our ping rates are high enough as it is. There’s no way to release this feature without having more data sent in/out.

#9

GTA V does this which is pretty neat

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