Calculate playtime across places

Feature Requests Website Features
#1

As a roblox developer, I am currently extremely apprehensive to use teleport service due to fear of being discriminated against due to how playtime is tracked on the platform.

Our game Blox royale relies on regularly teleporting players into matches which last ~3 minutes before teleporting them back to the lobby, and due to messaging service limitations there is no way we can optimise our game to use any less teleport service calls then It is currently using.

As a result of this we fear we are being disadvantaged in three ways:

  1. Promotion algorithms - While obviously this can never been entirely fact based, there have been several investigations from other developers into what causes Roblox’s promotion algorithms to favour some games over others and many of these investigations result in the discover that playtime is used as a key indicator. Therefor by our game teleporting players regularly, leaving our lobby playtime at ~1.5 minutes and our battle place playtime at ~2.5 minutes on paper we are performing 4-6x worse then the majority of games.

  2. Premium payouts - Premium payouts is calculated by the time that premium players are spending on your game, so once against naturally by having playtime 4-6x lower then the roblox average I feel we will be disadvantaged with unreliable and volatile premium playtime scores due to the way playtime is currently tracked.

  3. Analytics - One of the largest annoyances of the way playtime is currently tracked is we have no accurate way of grasping how players are responding to new updates and if it is causing them to play for longer / shorter periods of time since with all updates our playtime will stay more or less the same and we don’t necessarily want our lobby playtime to be higher since we want players to be battling not matchmaking.

All of these factors I feel significantly hinder our development experience on roblox and discourage many developers from building larger, more innovative immersive experiences using teleport service.

To fix this issue, I believe playtime should not be calculated per place but per game tracking player’s playtime across teleports.

40 Likes
#2

Thank you for bringing this up @LuaBearyGood! I’ll raise this internally and follow up with you for any questions :smiley:

18 Likes
#3

We are working on improvements of analytics, and play time will be based on the whole game, rather than per place. If you have already enrolled in PlayFab, the feature will be available to you soon. Otherwise, we will gradually roll it out to all devs later this year.

20 Likes
#4

Thank you for answering my final point, we are indeed in playfab and will find this feature incredibly useful!

In relation to the other points however, will roblox use this new metric in their internal calculations?

7 Likes
#5

I also have a concern for this issue as well.

I’m currently developing a game which has a main lobby and game place in which players will be teleported back and forth very frequently and I think it will have a disadvantage provided by the Game sort algorithm, Premium payouts and Analytics.

I think we all deserve to know more information on this so we can plan accordingly otherwise we’d be shooting blind

5 Likes
#6

Hey @LuaBearyGood - just wanted to follow up and confirm that for the first 2 points, all calculations are made based on the universe_id. Therefore, we use the total playtime across the entire universe (all places) for ranking and premium payouts.

15 Likes