Personal Server



Personal Servers was a feature used on Roblox that allowed players to usually build whatever they want in-game and have it save on its own. Lots of players were able to join and help build with the owner of the game. Some restrictions though were applied such as who can visit, who can build, and who is banned. Often times, personal servers were made mostly of terrain, with few non-terrain blocks rarely used for anything other than functionality. Users must have been subscribed to a Builders Club membership tier before making a Personal Server. However, all players were able to join a personal server. When the place owner's Builders Club expires, the server is still kept, but another server cannot be made and if the place is changed into a regular game, it cannot be made a Personal Server until the owner got Builders Club again.

Personal servers were discontinued on June 8, 2016, according to a message from ROBLOX.

History
Personal servers were first introduced by Njay,, and at the 2011 ROBLOX Rally. The feature was fully released on November 2, 2011. On May 26, 2016, it was discontinued to be replaced with Team Create.

Features
ROBLOX describes a personal server as "a game that never closes." Unlike a regular game place, when a server closes when all players have left, a personal server never closes. Therefore, the personal server never reverts to the way it was before users started playing it; this creates the opportunity for personal servers to be used as collaborative building projects. Personal servers can be changed back to a game place and vice versa.

The following is a chart explaining the differences between a personal server and a game place:

Access Levels

 * 1) The owner and administrators can assign access levels to specific users via clicking the player's name on the leaderboard. These access levels dictate what permissions that player has and what he can and cannot do within the personal server.

The following is a chart explaining the certain permissions various access levels have within a personal server:
 * Except promotion/demotion of administrators

It is advised to use caution when promoting players. Any changes they make to the server, whether constructive or destructive, will be automatically saved, unless the place's version has been changed to another non-destructed version.

Personal Servers within Groups
Personal Servers can be associated with particular groups. A feature of personal servers allows membership and admin can be awarded to members of a group with a certain rank or above. Like associating a place with a group, associating a personal server with a group makes that personal server appear on the group's page.

Personal Servers and the unique gameplay culture
In many Personal Servers, communities would form which would create a roblox group to further assign and divide the permissions of players. External tools like F3X or a special custom build tool which were easily added by inserting them into game studio posed as alternatives to the traditional build tools, which were clunky and slow. These groups would make cities and active hubs to chat and play together with friends and create a social hierarchy, found nowhere else in all of Roblox. Since a large amount of people could get together in one server, it would often cause a tiny online city which was inhabited by active members. This experiment could be compared to online phenomena such as Reddit's /r/place or garry's mod DarkRP servers.

Criticisms and Issues
A big issue with Personal Servers were griefers. Almost every build place that was created would get griefed by players often creating huge bodies of water or land, completely rendering any previous progress useless. Measures were made to try and alleviate griefers, such as not allowing tools to newcomers by default and having the owner entrust the player with tools, but how they got tools would vary. Oftentimes, the griefer just had to ask for tools or take a tour of the server, acting innocent until they got tools, then flood the server. Since there was no way to fix the grief besides to reset the server entirely, many build servers either got shut down or were just left to rot, turning them into griefing paradises.

Personal Servers were often touted as a useless feature since anything you could do in a Personal Server, you could do in a normal place. Quiz games, RP games, and minigame places existed, but they had to be maintained by admins and were often slow-paced. By scripting your own regular place without the need to set everything up manually, you could have a better place that could run on its own.

You couldn't go into Roblox Studio if the place was a Personal Server, so if you had to put something in via Studio, you had to shut down the place and change it to a regular place, then do your changes, then put it back as a Personal Server.

Team Create
Main Article: Roblox Studio Team Create works just like Personal Servers, except players build in ROBLOX Studio instead of in-game and players can invite others to build with them. Team Create was first announced in a blog post on April 13, 2016, while it was in Beta. It is released. Here are several images of Team Create:

Differences between Personal Servers and Team Create

 * On Personal Servers, players could only build with the stamp tool, while on team create players can build with every brick and material.
 * Personal Servers had access levels restricted to different players, but team create does not.
 * Team Create lets players build in ROBLOX Studio instead of Personal Servers in-game.
 * Personal Servers had an extra megaphone-like tool that would create thumbnails, like a camera, but this feature isn't available on Team Create.
 * While every player can join a Personal Server (except players who are banned from the server), players can't join a team if it's already full.