[ENABLED as of May 28] SocialService Game Invites are Live

This still doesn’t stop them from spamming. My game’s invite system limits each “invite session” to only count 1 invite per 6 hours and prevents them from inviting in that 6 hour cooldown span. Yet even with these restrictions, players that are younger or do not have a good idea on how invites work still send on average of 50+ invites per session even with a detailed explanation on how the invite system works.

There really needs to be a parameter we can pass when prompting the invite screen to only accept x number of invites.

SocialService:PromptGameInvite(player, MAX_INVITES)

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I agree 100% with you. You should be able to do that, my friend gave me 2 invites to “Pet Ranch Simulator”. Can’t blame him though, and I’m guessing you can invite people multiple times and get 2x of that reward.

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I agree that that Roblox should have systems in place to prevent spam or abuse of this system, but the fact that other developers may misuse or abuse a feature doesn’t relieve you of the responsibility to try and limit the damage caused by your own implementation. The bottom line is that other peoples actions don’t excuse your own.

I’ve seen people use this same argument to try and justify exploitative loot box practices, just because other games do something doesn’t make it right. You could make the argument that not using these practices puts you behind the competition, and that may be true, but don’t try to justify it by saying other people do it too.

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I wasn’t trying to justify my own actions but more so prove that the best fix would be to have limitations placed by the staff rather than hold individuals responsible as those are only bandaid fixes. I’m very aware two wrongs do not make a right.

For me, at this point, it’s not about whats “responsible” or “right”, it’s that I see no reason to remove a feature my players like to please devs who don’t even play my games who say I’m in the wrong. I’m looking out for my players and for myself first and foremost.

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Fair enough, though I do think it’s telling that most of the complaints in this thread about spam coming from this feature are from your game. I can understand looking out for yourself, but you are still 100% responsible for the outcome of whatever features you implement.

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Tuesday, March 5th

The feature was disabled today due to an unrelated CoreScript issue. We will let you know when this feature is live again. Use of this function will not throw an error, however the prompt will not appear at this time. We apologize for any inconvenience.

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R.I.P the SocialService. D:

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Is there an estimated time frame for when this will be back up and running?

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Realistically I would imagine no sooner than 3 weeks from now.

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Oh that’s nice to know that we’re going to have a break from this spam.

Will there be some more features added to it once it gets reenabled?

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As Capt said in response, incentivizing spamming invites isn’t cool. It also doesn’t do any good; if someone spammed me invites, I’d likely un friend and then never play your game (and I play lots on the platform for various reasons). However, if that same person sent me one invite and said, “Please join, if you do you’ll be helping me” or something of the like, I’d be much more inclined to do so; in fact, it’d increase my chances of joining.

And yes, I caught a bit of spam from this, not from your game tho.

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So you knew that there would be backlash from the spam caused as a direct result of your encouraging users to send out mass invites and you did it anyways? How Machiavellian of you. The point isn’t what’s going to get you more players, it’s that there is something inherently wrong with using manipulative tactics to get those players.

Essentially you are saying that though you would have objected to this sort of thing in the past, now that it’s making you money you are willing to let it slide? I understand that it’s this sort of attitude that gets people to the front page / top earning slots, but I think it’s worth pointing out that it’s not a very great way to go about doing things if you care about more than pure conversion rates.

I think as developers we have a responsibility both to ourselves and our players not to use manipulate methods in an attempt to get those juicy DevEx Robux. You do you though, it obviously works out well enough for the big game companies.

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So money trumps morality now? Nice to know.

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I want you to take a moment to appreciate the crux of what you just said: You don’t care about people being spammed and annoyed because you are gaining users.

Feelings like this are why we can’t have nice things. I suppose you also wouldn’t have cared about spamming people with mobile ads so long as you were getting Robux out of it?

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I realize my mistake. In the end the dev ecosystem is still made up of individuals rather than soulless large corporations. By being in their environment, it seems my sense of morality is far removed from what is used to be.

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See, what I’d have done is jerryrigged a system that required you to get someone to join you after they are invited in order to get a bonus. Then the objective is to get them to join, rather than to send X invites.

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If it requires you to get somebody to join then why does the SocialService have none of this in the API … giving the excuse of “this is what this service is suppose to do” isn’t very clear because Roblox themselves were very vague with its intended use other than to just send invites and see how many people were invited.

If it’s intended use was to get people to join, why was it called the SocialService and not a ReferralService. And like I said above, even with copious amounts of limitations, players still invite 50+ friends at a time even when you limit it to only 1 invite per 6 hours

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I’m only going to implement something using this for match invites only (also, I’ll make it so where they can’t use it once the match is prepped, so yeah).

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me my friends spam me from the new pet game and it’s very annoying


it’s not a discussion but spam every day

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If it was intended to allow players to spam invites to each other, it should have been called “AnnoyFriendsService”.

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