Sad to see that this has been an issue for the past 4 years now. More and more creators are experiencing major setbacks because of dislike botting and from what I’ve seen it can take a long while before moderation can revert the damage done on a dislike botted game. I’m starting to think the only way these people can prevent their game from dying off because of a dislike bot is if they like bot their game back to the rating it was before the dislike bot. Like what else are they supposed to do now?
I’ve talked to so many different developers and some of which ended up moving their games to different places but they just get targeted over and over and end up abandoning their projects. There’s a select few that I talked to who told me that moderation took nearly a week or two before they did anything and by that time the damage was already done to the games rating so they had a like bot counter-balance the dislike bot so their game wouldn’t crash and burn. I’ve seen quite a lot of games, especially group roleplaying games (due to competition), do this recently.
One game in particular had 21,000 likes and 24,000 dislikes. They like botted their game to 38,000 likes to keep them from going negative. The game itself is one giant cash grab so I doubt it was dislike botted originally. However, they abused the like feature to keep them from going below 50% approval. https://www.roblox.com/games/4238077359/UPDATE-Coruscant
There’s plenty of games and groups that are starting to abuse the like/dislike feature. And there are those who are starting to combat the dislike botting by like botting their own game. Pretty soon, a lot more creators will do the same unless ROBLOX does something about the botting. People are growing weary and desperate. I don’t blame them at this point. People’s careers are in jeopardy. I don’t personally condone like botting. However, others are starting to think it’s the only way they can save their games.
Yep, just happened to me. We were testing out our game with a few ads to see how people liked it, and then a well known botting competitor just spent a few bucks to dislike bot us. There’s a sudden surge in players for like a second and with no real reason, and there surely could be a way to detect real people’s votes and bot’s votes based on this. From what I’ve seen, they’re all created around the same time and are default skin, maybe used a reputation based system along with surge in visits to see if they’re legit players? Not to mention the play time decreasing dramatically from 10 minutes to 1.
If you required a player to play for longer to vote, botting would cost more and be more of a burden to the bad guys as the bots would have to stay in the game using their resources up for more than a minute. We could also implement our own systems to get rid of the bot within that time period as well and solve the problem on our own.
The fact you can dislike bot someone for a measly 5 dollars before you’ve even begun a launch is kind of irritating, hours of work down the drain until someone helps you.
This is not easy to fix. Well yes, you can for example set a account age limit, for example your account has to have 2 months to like, but people would create hundreds of accounts, and then wait that amount of time and then they can go sicko mode. DumbCaptcha is not the worst idea, but soon bots would find a bypass or either will learn how to solve them, which would be again useless. I don’t have any other ideas, removing likes and dislikes would make there be worse games selection, because only games with most visits would be most popular, also this would very increase the amount of visit bots.
I don’t think a “You must play this game for 10 minutes” solution would work, as if I join a game and it’s an obvious poorly built cash grab I’m going to leave and hit dislike after one minute.
I think using some form of artificial intelligence to notice strange patterns in voting behaviour is the way forward, but ROBLOX don’t seem like the kind of company to be ready for this kind of technology just yet. Maybe they should invest in some AI staff, it’s going to be needed if ROBLOX want to keep expanding.
CAPTCHA would be a good solution, similarly I imagine these bots will be originating from a similar IP address so limiting votes per IP address would be a massive hindrance. There are a lot of potential solutions, all we need is for ROBLOX to implement one of them… It’s a shame they seem to take ages.
What I noticed most of the time with the “dislike botting” is just players who didn’t receive your own game so well. I keep seeing people talk about how their game got disliked “dislike botted” after airing an advertisement but they don’t realize that the extra traffic also leads to extra ratings. Roblox already does a great job at removing “botted likes”, all you have to do is ask them to remove them.
A captcha is the best system for this, although who knows when Roblox will implement this. Hopefully soon
Limiting IPs probably wouldn’t work, as most bots are made through altering VPN connections.
For the AI part, there are already many plugins that do this, like RTrack, and others. RTrack uses some algorithm to detect if a game was recently botted, and from the looks of it, it seems reliable (of course it’s not perfect). If one person/a few people can do this, then a whole company most certainly can. I wonder if someone has made a feature request for this yet…
Apologies it took so long for us to take action on this – sometimes we are so busy working on new features we forget to check in and make sure existing features are working smoothly. Thanks for your persistence all!
@Seranok
My concern with dislike botting is innocent developers losing months upon months of progress because someone purchase dislikes for cheap to ruin competition’s careers. And then those developers who lost all their progress because of bad ratings are left with a few choices:
Like bot their own game back to the original rating to prevent further damage.
Email administration to remove the dislike bots (but by that time the damage is done and the player count has dropped since people will think it’s a horrible game and with mob mentality settling in, more people will dislike the game as well). So by the time anything is done, the game will suffer a huge loss in ratings. Some games I’ve seen go from 89% to 45% in dislike botting and when the dislike botting was removed, their rating was back at 67%. That’s a horrible loss.
Abandon the project completely.
Move places (which usually end up getting botted again anyways + it damages the games reputation and traffic since they have to restart everything again) and just accept the fact that you just got botted and your rating is done for.
I get that there’s very little people can do about this but it would suck to see developers careers vanish before them because they tried to either defend their game from dislike bots by like botting it to save face or just jump places over and over, eventually killing their games in the process.
Overall, this really is a tough and sad thing to watch and my heart genuinely goes out to all the developers who spent so many hours on their projects, only for it to be ripped away from them because someone decided for themselves that their rating deserves to be lower.
This is a huge reason why I am so hesitant to release anything with a big ad campaign. I heard even small ad campaigns still gained the attention of dislike botters for certain games and that’s just nerve wrecking.
EDIT: Below buildthomas was referring to a conversation that was deleted. It wasn’t related to my response to Seranok.
My game was dislike botted twice with over 6,000 dislikes around 5 months ago. I reported the issue to Roblox Support for both situations in which this happened, and I still haven’t received any sort of solution to my problem. I’ve heard a few other developers were able to get the bots removed from their ratio, so I was wondering if the same could be done for my game’s rating?
I’m sure Roblox engineers hate seeing their developers games getting dislike botted just as much as the developers do themselves, so I hope this can be fixed once and for all.
I’ve fallen victim to this two months ago as well and I’ve emailed support for help. I got replied they “would look into this” but the dislikes remained. I’m wondering if anyone here got their issue resolved at last? Should I keep waiting for Roblox to solve it or keep waiting?
It’s quite a shame that the issue is still persistent after such a long period and I hope they would patch it up soon.
I don’t know, I feel like most games somewhat depend on the like to dislike ratio as that’s what most players would use as a key factor on whether they should play a game or not. Hopefully it’s being fixed.
If Roblox dropped the “Dislike” option altogether, and only left the “Like” option, it would still be just as useful.
Rarely will someone click “Like” - unless they ACTUALLY like the game, and have a reason. So “Like” is a useful stat to use as a player.
But WHO KNOWS why an individual clicked “Dislike” (sometimes its for a reason such as "I only like shooters, this isn’t a shooter - DISLIKE)… It’s been proven that “Dislikes” are not a useful statistic. Not only that but they have been shown to cause depression in kids and adults - and this is a (primarily) under-18 Years of Age platform.
THEN you have the problem that competing developers might bot your game with dislikes.
I can’t see any reason Roblox need to keep the dislike option on a game. It seems irresponsible, unnecessary, and like just one more thing they have to patrol and moderate.
Who cares if someone dislikes a game? I’m a lot more curious how many people LIKED it.
I’ve been working on my game for almost 4 years now (if you count the learning period that led up to the game, too). I am growing more interested in other platforms as I see the issues with Moderation(horrible) and the issues with Bots and Thefts (horrible.)
All of this is preventable. Especially by a company with the kind of cashflow Roblox has…
You have a point here, but I assume if we take out the dislike option then players will no longer be able to distinguish clickbait/fake games. Imo a solution to this would be to add a commenting function, which I guess would be too much to handle for the Roblox server provided that it crashes too often
Yeah, you also run into the prob-prob with comments that people use them to post “GET FREE BOBUX NOW JUST ENTER THIS CODE AND JUNK!” or “/e free” or what-ever else people insist on typing there.
I dunno, several several platforms have gotten rid of “dislikes”. It affects the usability in only good ways.
Who wants to count on a 6-year old to use “dislike” correctly?
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I guess the big thing is that if it’s botted - get rid of it.
Maybe have a FLAG option for games… Much as our Devforum posts can be FLAGGED…or craigslist ads, or whatever…
Then a moderator can check if the game is a copy (augh… the moderation is really deplorable tho…)
I dunno. But botted dislikes are useless, and turn people away from the platform. Why sweat out 2 years of (deprecated and badly done) tutorials to only have your (finally working) game botted with dislikes?
I (and you) have spent SO MUCH TIME wrestling with this buggy platform.
I’m just bummed that some of you are having this problem. I’m kind of worried for the future of my own efforts (but I do really want to finish Timmy’s Mindwars just the same…)
There is a lot that REALLY needs fixed.
Roblox really does have the money to do it better.
I’m wondering if most of the botting could be avoided by simply not allowing people to connect to Roblox with a VPN.
Isn’t that key to this sort of practice? You use a VPN to hide your IP, then you can keep logging in with a new account/ new IP, and bot the game.?
Or is roblox not even checking IP’s ?
And if people complain, I mean, really, what GOOD reason could someone want to connect to a (mostly) kids game and also hide their Identity? Creeper-alert…or BlackHat actor… so…
That’s a terrible suggestion. A VPN is no longer indicative of a user being a bad actor, that’s old-fashioned thinking. It could be user that does not have a stable internet connection and needs to use a VPN to stay on a static IP (to play Roblox in the first place, since Roblox can’t handle frequently-changing IPs well when trying to join games), or a user that wants to protect their privacy online.
Of course Roblox already has IP and other kinds of rate-limiting on endpoints.
That suggestion also assumes that a majority bots are being run through VPN services, with absolutely no backing for that assumption, so this is a meaningless debate to be having FYI.
