I love to see content creators play Roblox on live stream, especially if they’re not familiar with it. They usually enjoy the experiences they find. However, like most multiplayer games people stream such as Fortnite, there are ‘stream snipers’ that join their game and purposefully disrupt their experience. This happens commonly when notable creators livestream Roblox, and it usually discourages them to play it more on stream.
For example, popular streamer Myth played multiple games on a livestream in 2020 and noted that Reeblox would be more fun if people didn’t follow him all the time (4:25 to hear what he said). Throughout this video which is clips of the stream, you can see people joining his servers trying to block his view, target him (even on the same team), and bypass the filter.
I think a big step in increasing Roblox’s growing popularity is making it more accessible for content creators to play on livestreams. Games with massive audiences do this by adding a “Streamer/Anonymous mode” into the game, which blocks out/replaces players’ names in-game.
A big way that stream snipers are able to join a streamer’s Roblox server is by using a browser plugin like RoSearcher, which allows the user to find the server another user is in and join it despite the other user’s privacy settings. Roblox content creators have dealt with the problems these plugins creates for years. Livestreamers are easier to target with this because they can’t use an alt account as it’ll likely show their name on stream anyway.
Another way stream snipers do this is by finding the profiles of players in the same server as the streamer and joining them. This can be done without a plugin if the other players have open privacy settings.
By adding a Streamer/Anonymous setting to the website, Roblox could fix these problems their content creators face and encourage more people to livestream their platform. This has been needed for years and will benefit Roblox’s growth in popularity.
Here are my suggestions for how the Streamer/Anonymous mode could work:
Privacy Settings that allows for users to customize how they restrict others from seeing them.
Settings that allow you to hide your username from others in game along with hiding your profile or online status would help deter people from joining a streamer’s server. Other players’ usernames would be replaced with a default username like “Player 5920” or whatever. Seemingly this can work in games with custom leaderboards without additional work from developers (although it’d be nice for developers to have tools to help with this aswell).
