An update on recent outages, slow site speed and loss of functionality in light of Roblox API changes late last year.
I wanted to provide an update on the issues caused by changes made to the Roblox API endpoint last year.
On the 3rd November 2022, Roblox altered their API endpoint, which initially shortened the response of games returned by the games.roblox.com/v1/games/list endpoint to just 100. During this same change the pagination parameter was also broken, which resulted in major disruption to the RTrack backend and required a full rewrite of some of our services. In retrospect, I could’ve done more to reduce reliance on a single endpoint and improve resilience of the RTrack Backend. Lessons have been learnt from this.
While the number of games returned was later increased to 1000 in December, this change only provided a partial improvement. As a result, some services such as the platform concurrent, favourites, player count milestones, and some Falcon data are either only partially functional or not tracked at all.
Due to rewrites and changes I’ve been making over the past few weeks, likes, dislikes, plays, and visits for all games are now being tracked, at better or equivalent frequency as before the change.
Below is a graph representing a statistic that closely tracks how well our coverage of the whole Roblox platform has been. A lower value means more games are being tracked.
I am currently working on fully assessing the other areas that need attention and addressing them. In terms of game dashboards and core data, the only place there may be issues is on newly created games, as I am working on a new method for game discovery after the API change.
Services not affected include:
- Enterprise Services
- Embeds
- Tracking for the top 100 games, and the top 1000 for the past month.
I want to apologize for the inconvenience these issues have caused and assure you that we are working diligently to improve the RTrack experience for all users. If you have any questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us at support@rtrack.live or join the RTrack discord at https://discord.com/invite/2ghPmYB.
Thank you for your understanding and patience.
Outlook on Roblox and the space RTrack is in, in general
This is a later addition to the post, but I also wanted to discuss Roblox as a platform.
We are in an increasingly turbulent economic situation, and that has caused a lot of cost-cutting across industries and companies. This has had an indirect effect on RTrack as a company in some ways – membership cancellations have increased. However, I don’t believe that the overall situation has or will have a negative impact on Roblox as a platform, which ultimately decides whether this product is worth continuing to work on.
We track a lot of data on Roblox, including special tooling for Enterprise Users that specifically tracks the health and growth of the platform. All the data I have to look at indicates that Roblox is doing better than ever and growing faster than ever. It is great to be riding this wave. I just hope that, with RTrack and my other projects, I can add as much value as possible and make the most of the fortunate opportunity I’ve had since joining the platform as a kid in 2011.
I hope that many of the developers who currently use RTrack will stick around and see what I have planned, because I think it will be great.
I recently celebrated the 3-year anniversary of founding RTrack. So much has been achieved in this time, including building a sustainable company from scratch and entirely bootstrapping it the entire time. We have also innovated with hundreds of new features never before available to Roblox developers. Our sub-sites, which showcase the trove of data we’ve collected over the years, have had over 15 million sessions, and combined, all of our sites have had millions of unique visitors. Sign-ups across these sites are also in the tens of thousands. RTrack is used by thousands of developers every single month and has been since its inception. Considering the small size of the Roblox Development community, I am extremely proud of this. Here’s to another great 3 years!
Sincerely,
Luke Shadwell
Twitter: @2Steady4U
LinkedIn: Luke Shadwell
