Hi friends, I recently implemented an AFK Zone into my game similar to many popular games hoping to be able to reward players for just being there. Before implementing the AFK Zone the average session time was roughly about ~6.4 minutes.
This is leaving me scratching my head because I know for a fact that there is a decent percentage of players that stay in the AFK Zone for a good while, some even for many hours/overnight. There was virtually no other change, no drop in performance, no increase in errors or anything, so I think it’s safe to assume that the decrease in session time is directly attributed to the AFK Zone. In the image below, you could see the session time before vs after the AFK Zone update; there aren’t really any peaks/dips/outliers…
I guess my question is is there something I’m missing/not seeing here? I am doing the AFK Zone through teleporting players to a reserved server, which I was led to believe that it wouldn’t be an issue since it’s a place within the same experience & players aren’t being teleported out of the experience, but the teleport system counting each session before a teleport as an individual session is the only hypothesis I have that makes sense…
I reverted the AFK Zone update which seemed to have recovered the avg session time back to normalcy (6.4 mins). Will dig into this a bit further and update this thread on findings since there’s surprisingly virtually no threads in the past relating to AFK Zones.
Interesting thing I noticed: it seemed to have counted 0 visits from Premium Players during the three days that the AFK Zone was active. I could confirm that this is absolutely inaccurate. The number of daily players didn’t change one bit, and I highly doubt that it would’ve gone from a few hundred/thousands of premium visits everyday to 0 just to jump back out of nowhere. Something weird is happening and I’ll try to figure out exactly what it is.
There’s no way to prove it immediately since I can’t find any documentation. I believe Roblox tracks session time and premium payouts by how much the player interacts with your game (engagement time). By doing an AFK area, there’s now an opportunity for the players to do nothing (not interact with the game). I guess Roblox doesn’t want to encourage it, so they don’t consider AFK time as session time?
There is a way to prove it. You can create your own session time tracker using Custom Events. It should take 2-3 lines of code.
To prove that Roblox tracks session time/premium payout using engagement time as opposed to how long you stay in the game (raw time). The custom events should show longer times than the current session average (proving that AFK systems keep players longer), while session time should drop, as you saw (proving Roblox tracks by engagement time rather than raw time playing).
*Update: actually, you don’t even need to enable the AFK system and risk it again. You can just enable Custom Event logging. Players naturally AFK in games anyway, regardless of an AFK spot or not. You should still see a difference between Roblox’s reported Session Time vs. Custom Event’s Session Time.
Please let me know how it turns out! I’m curious to see too.
I mean I agree but it’s not like 100% of Premium Players would’ve suddenly all decided to stay in just the AFK Zone vs playing the game which would be the only way for premium to drop to 0 in that vase. Looks like the AFK Zone may have had somewhat of even a subtractive effect lol
Gonna track the analytics of session time when a player joins a game, and when they leave - sending analytics of their session time in that individual server, and their cumulative session time. Will update this thread for future devs :3
You’re right. I did not catch it, sorry about that.
I pulled up analytics for my games and have the same issue as you. Two of my games dropped to 0 premium visits between March 22 and 24. Maybe some bug on Roblox’s end that wasn’t related to the AFK system?
Oh wow, that’s actually pretty interesting lol - could I ask what does the session time look like on your end for those dates? Not the session times listed in Engagement, the ones from “Realtime” like the screenshots in my first image
I’m still interested in seeing how the in-game session time tracking compares to Roblox’s session time, especially for a game with AFK elements. I’ll do the same on my end, and we can follow up through the DevForm inbox. Let me know how it goes!
