As I’ve been playing around with this I’ve noticed a bit of an issue for my use case. I’m using a system where every 6 hours the player can receive currency if their invited friend joins within 5 minutes. However there’s a chance the player may not close the invite menu before their friend joins, making the function not fire and not rewarding their currency because it hasn’t been checking for an added player.
I think there needs to be some sort of event that fires each time a player is invited instead of only when the menu is closed.
If I may ask, what’s the line between using and abusing? The callback provides a list of ids. What other use is there than to incentivize mass invites? From my prior work on Facebook games I found the most effective way to implement SocialService and brought it here. Player reception of this feature has generally been extremely positive with many people screenshotting the number of their invites. Should I make it less effective just so it wouldn’t count as abuse?
I don’t see it as abuse, you are the first to take full advantage of this feature that’s all.
Just because it’s effective doesn’t mean that it’s abuse, you can’t force players to do something against their own free will and this is no different.
It ruins the user experience of every person on the platform since they are spammed with invites to a game and it doesn’t help that there are incentives for players to do so.
They may not be “forced” to do it, but they are very heavily influenced to send mass invites. “100 Players” is half a max friends list. Now I just get a message pop up every few hours for a game invite thinking its something important.
So whats your solution? Make me remove the feature or severely handicap it? I can guarantee there will be similar implementations from others in the near future. Rather than targeting my individual implementation publicly, complain to the staff in charge and get them to place limits.
I’ve already voiced a potential limitation that could be added in the thread: “Make a setting to disable game invites”. And I’m only targeting yours since its the most frequent one I see in my messages and one with “100 Invites”. And it’s not only up to the staff to place limitations, the developer themselves are responsible for their own game and how they choose to implement features.
It looks like your prompt offers players to invite their friends to their game, but how are you measuring your success here? It looks like players are invited but I’m wondering if these referrals are genuine to your game.
I wonder if you’d see better long term success if you adopted the following model:
For every player a user invites, they get rewarded for when their friends hit milestones and achievements themselves. This would encourage more meaningful referrals and allow users to encourage their friends to continue playing your game so both friends benefit from the referral.
For example, for every friend you invite, every time they level up, you get a small reward as well. This would likely encourage better long term growth of your game and allow for more meaningful invitations.
This also has the benefit of balancing the cost of adding raw resources to your game. Right now you are basically printing free money at the cost of pressing a button. Ideally resources (money) added to your game should be paid by your players either through their time or money (robux)
If you arent getting time or money in return and you are not able to guarantee the current referrals are effective, you are essentially creating a large black hole in your in-game resources and your game may suffer from long term effects.
I think a simpler way to do this is that the friend must join the game within a time period, this is my model that I’ll be using for my game. Players also can only invite friends once every 6 hours if they have already received a reward from a referral.
I really like this idea, how you’re able to invite users directly in-game is very cool. My only thing is you should be able to disable getting those messages or put message caps. I’ve already seen 1 game in certain mass invite users to get rewards and spam them with invites. I feel like this could have the potential in ruining the Roblox message system.
I’m surprised that the developer didn’t think of how players can misuse this feature intentionally. Since there’s no limitations implemented by Roblox themselves I assume this particular referral system doesn’t check for the following:
How much x amount of progress, time has the player put into the game?
How long does the player have to play or what requirements need to be met before they’re able to claim their reward.
Is there any join date discrimination? Yes to a certain extent this could be harmful however it’s rather suspicious for a user created on 3/4/19 to all of a sudden be invited by a friend. If the user hasn’t existed for up till 10 minutes ago on the site… then 90% of the time those referrals will be alts while only 10% will be actual users.
Is there any advantage given for ex the final tier reward of 100 people. If so, is the advantage given enough to be considered “end game content” meaning have they satisfied their dopamine rush to where they don’t feel the need to continue progress through the game.
Am I saying everyone is going to be fixated on farming?
No however you must always ask yourself these questions before implementing a new feature:
Can my system be abused?
Is my system abused because of roblox or was my idea poorly thought out?
Is my system in it’s current state worth the risk?
Is my system more beneficial than harmful or is it more harmful than beneficial
I understand your frustration with the limitations this feature has, however it’s rather doubtful that the limitations will be lifted anytime soon.
If for example the referral system you’ve created is directed at new players then you could blacklist those that have rare items or a plentiful amount of currency from being eligible.
(I apologize for how I originally responded, my intentions weren’t to provoke or pin the blame on anyone. I thought “tough love” would help rather than harm however I see now that I could’ve worded it in a less hostile manner)
I highly recommend this to anyone that is interested in learning how to make a good system.
There should be at least a cool down for invites or an option to prevent users from sending those to you. I literally need to remove people from my friends list to not get spammed by that.
Me resolving the issue isn’t going to prevent others from doing the same thing. Even if I protect players from themselves others will eventually not. The spam of invites will inevitably become a systemic issue(See Facebook for an example). Let me make this clear, I want Roblox to place limitations or a way to mute the messages. Expecting everyone to play by unwritten rules to follow a subjective definition of “good” is naive.
However, I think it’d be better if you made it so you can disable game invites (in user settings or something). It isn’t necessary, but it’d be cool and stops this (credits to chrismash for the photo):
This is an amazing update that will serve to better allow developers to increase marketing with referral programs and the like.
However, let me be clear, “invite # friends to get X” is NOT a proper referral program. Simply inviting people should never award users. This is being abused to an extent that is not ok. There are too many games today that employ major tactics of addiction and this is just the newest.
This is a great thing if used properly. A proper referral program would only award if a user joins/spends money as the old Roblox referral program did. It only awarded you if said user buys Robux, and it’s the same thing with the new user thing for games. It only awards when they buy stuff. This does not include you encouraging users to invite as many users as they can with no consequences.
You as the developer have the responsibility to make sure that your users use your programs appropriately, and spamming as many users as possible to get insignificant virtual items is NOT appropriate. Just because you develop games on Roblox does not absolve you of the responsibility to yourself, your users, and your platform.
I would love to see a proper referral program implemented with this.
