As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to have an opinion voiced.
Currently most staff blatantly ignore feature requests altogether. I don’t see what the benefit in this is. They could be reading them but they do no good if there is zero confirmation even if it’s negative or positive.
I wouldn’t have an issue with this but the category right now just seems like you’re just yelling into the void. Nothing is going to be added based on my experience with the category over the past few years.
If staff become more active in this category theni think we can all benefit. More features added or at least add being reviewed. Previously this was an issue with bug reports but that was fixed thankfully, now just to have this solved (i hope)
Currently, there are 13 feature requests a week. There is no universe where Roblox is even capable of catering to this many requests.
Feature requests take time. Even the smallest requests may require some sort of discussion internally before implementation. Roblox has their own backlog of features they want to pursue, added onto ones that we request. Realistically, only one or two features developers pitch will be implemented every few months (could be more or less, I am only making a rough figure). That’s why it seems like 99% of features are ignored. It’s not laziness… it’s being realistic.
I’ve also read somewhere that feature requests usually do not get ignored. Staff read and recognize it, but they just don’t reply or never have the time to implement them.
Isn’t that the point of the voting system though? If a topic has a lot of likes it’s clear people want the feature. Being ignored isn’t good and there is no reason for the category to exist if the requests are thrown out regardless.
Also for the record our requests highly differ from Roblox’s vision. They want camera motion tracking and we want a better engine with more features.
Hey, thanks for the feedback - we hear you. We’ve been focused on DevForum Bugs, and we know there’s an opportunity to improve responsiveness on feature requests. It shouldn’t feel like you’re yelling into the void. Especially when there’s so much valuable feedback in the feature requests category. We’d love to find a way to encourage more staff participation there, and I hope it’s something we can fix in the future.
Really helps to hire from the community. I spent a fair amount of time interacting with the development community while I worked there from 2016-2019, and I got a lot of praise for it. There’s a clear pattern: the people who started off as Roblox users tended to interact with the dev community more. The people who had no idea what Roblox was before joining the team almost never do.
Honestly, it wouldn’t hurt to hire a couple people whose sole job is to be developer liaisons embedded in the engineering team. I’m sure there’s a bit more bureaucracy now than when I worked there, but I could usually get a pretty quick turnaround time implementing something that was requested here.
This is a great insight, and is something we are doing. I know a couple dozen co-workers that come from the community, some of who joined in the past year, and they are great liaisons for feedback as you call out.
I don’t think it quite scales out to solve this particular problem being discussed here, because the pool of community users who would apply for / make great internal contributors is not super large, so we definitely still also need to work on better systems for handling this feedback. On top of that we also want to make sure that the way the feedback is being handled feels consistent and isn’t dependent on someone happening to see and forward that along internally.
On that last note, I wonder how many at Roblox know of the dev forum, would it be most?
I think if new employees were given a brief list of Roblox systems (including the dev forum), that’d help. Maybe not a mandatory thing, but a reminder that communication is valuable and the devforum is that place to communicate with the community more openly.
There are internal programs at Roblox for feedback of course, which might also not be a company wide thing, but that’s not exactly publicly facing the same way as this forum.
There’s a lot that I can’t learn about because it’s not public information. I want Roblox to improve in so many ways, but that feels like an uphill battle.
I feel pretty good about that part personally, there’s about ~1100 staff accounts on the forum here, so a significant percentage of our total staff. This is in part because of the bug report improvements that music_man indicated above that we’ve been focusing on for the past couple years. Teams are now closing the loop themselves on bugs in their realm of responsibility. There is of course always a possibility for further improvement in communication, and there are definitely areas that receive more/less staff attention than others.
I have for sure noticed the significant increase in staff activity in bug reports. It’s been great to see the bug reports I file get attention and actually patched. This topic focused on feature requests because there is a clear lack of staff activity there and even trivial requests like my one to stop pausing media when the app opens has had zero recognition from staff.
