As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to provide incentives against cheating using third party software and exploits. In my own experience I’ve estimated 1 out of every 200 unique roblox users are utilizing cheat software in several games. The issue has gotten so bad, it’s become commonplace to put time and effort into anti-cheat and votekicking systems. Developers have gotten very good at this, so we can reliably detect cheaters and kick them from the server.
This is all well and good, but I think it would EXTREMELY beneficial to include a rate-limited API that allows us to file cheat reports on users from a server script. This way, not only is the user kicked from the game, but reports are automatically filed and the user can be properly reprimanded and even removed from the platform.
If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my development experience because it would make the scourge of exploiters significantly easier to manage. If users are reliably getting banned from using third-party software they are less likely to return. Currently kicking them from the specific server solves ultimately nothing, and banning them from the game doesn’t really fix the problem at the source.
7 Likes
Then what’s the point of this whole feature? If you can 100% verify that a player is exploiting, why not just ban that player from the server? It’s not like reporting will be any different, in fact, reporting will take longer.
Additionally, Roblox is not really for this kind of control at a developer’s level. If they did support it, we would already have a Player:Ban() or Player:IpBan feature, but we don’t because these can be abused or can lead to massive issues with false-positives. Also, there is such thing as Players:ReportAbuse(), but it’s only accessible by Roblox Core Scripts because again, it can be abused.
2 Likes
Well I propose from an abuse standpoint just a really long timeout to limit how many times it can be called. Also banning user from the game only makes them hop onto a different account and try again, we need to start actually getting rid of all their extra accounts before we can start fixing the problem.
Side note; evidently tracking and banning IPs is against the law in several places, I’ve heard roblox bans by hardware ID, but exploit software already has bypasses for that.
3 Likes
This is already done in some games with DataStores or HttpService. Stylis has a hall of shame channel on their Discord server that lists all kicks and bans and it is not rare for it to reach a few dozens a day. You can also constantly send behavior data with remotes to check on the client’s side and export important events somewhere.
I don’t think this feature would be of much use as it won’t simplify anything. Unless you are willing to go through hundreds of logs which probably wouldn’t even sorted by anything but date.
I think you missed the point of my request, it’s not to ban or kick users from the game. We can already do that, and it’s pretty ineffective since every exploiter has access to multiple accounts.
I’m proposing allowing us to file actual abuse reports on users who we detect are using cheats. Developers in particular can detect this reliably because we know for certain if say flying is possible in the game we create, if it’s not possible through our code, and someone is flying, that’s 100% exploiting.
By allowing us to file abuse reports through our anti-cheat systems we can get their account removed from the platform, cutting down on all the extra accounts exploiters have at their disposal, and also providing additional incentive against exploiting. Clearly Roblox is having issues detecting these cheaters, so I think it’s high time they allow developers to assist them.
3 Likes
How would you provide any proof though? Someone could advertise a baseplate which reports every player that joins, or someone could get access to a badly coded client to server network and send those reports manually.
1 Like