Tens of games are being botted each day with approximately 50k likes and dislikes. Truth should be faced, it’s a huge flaw in the system and many games suffer because of unfair concurrency spending money to straight bot dislikes to even 20% rating or better - bot them dislikes to get owners banned.
Bot attacks are easy to spot when looking at the stats. Let’s look at one of my affected games as an example.
(focus on Like Percent, Likes-Dislikes per hour, Total Visits charts)
Credits to @IntegerUnderflow for resources from his amazing tool presented above.
And daily approximate stats from selected games (pretty fresh - 2nd May 2020 GMT). Stats collected every 10 minutes.
Games named by letters (N - Z).
Data
00:07 - 1 734 likes at game Z
00:17 - 545 likes at game Z
2:11 - 412 likes at game Y
3:02 - 1313 likes at game X
3:07 - 1197 dislikes at game W
3:16 - 7651 dislikes at game W
3:26 - 4962 dislikes at game W
3:37 - 2192 dislikes at game W & 2929 dislikes at game U
3:47 - 2318 dislikes at game U
4:03 - 2199 likes at game T (boosting the game for “Huge Update”)
4:13 - 5371 likes at game T
9:54 - 306 dislikes at game S
15:52 - 1148 likes at game R
16:12 - 1811 likes at game R
17:04 - 4580 dislikes at game Q
17:14 - 5536 dislikes at game Q
17:24 - 5066 dislikes at game Q
18:20 - 559 likes at game P
19:05 - 1704 likes at game O
20:12 - 422 likes at game N
(None of those games are bigger, just to prevent assumptions about false detections)
12 games, 17 218 likes & 36 737 dislikes from bots. All in one day. The impact is huge. It’s not possible that any game could gain 8k dislikes in 10 minutes. Not even those biggest games on Roblox. It’s not possible that this amount of users would straight up connect together and dislike at that exact time.
I imagine it’s pain for the Bots & Spam team to analyze and clear up each incident. It’s obviously impossible to keep doing that Sisyphean task forever (I am truly grateful for their job and how they managed to fix Roblox’s captcha).
And surely Roblox’s Customer Support (which responds with standard “Thanks for your feedback, but we are unable to give you further information about your request” message). It would be awesome if there was a transparency about such requests especially since they represent us. Message like this clearly suggests (I’m not suggesting it’s reality) that ticket is not even directed anywhere. Game rating is what represents us - developers, and everyone’s rate should be equal. Why would concurrency’s hate matter 8k times more?
At this point, I also appreciate Developer Relations’ work which always does the best to help developers. This for sure is not an appropriate nor efficient way to direct cases like that, but what other choice do we have?
What do I suggest?
- Nobody wants to see captcha when rating a game (besides current requirements), but the best solution I can find is showing it when the game might be under attack. Algorithms comparing statistics would for sure help with that. Checking how long a person (potentially bot) has been active in-game would be helpful as well. Botters usually don’t have enough resources to keep them in for long and bot games fast. (Show captcha below certain time spent in-game before disliking?) Tracking IPs, heders like Referer and User-Agent would be for sure helpful as well. Stop botting!
- Purge likes of terminated bot accounts (if not done already).
- Create a dedicated way of contact for such requests! ipcontent_removal_request@roblox.com has been an excellent solution, especially after it was automated. Why not do the same with botting? The best way to handle them is probably processing past cases after introducing the earlier mentioned solution. Dealing with them without taking any action to prevent them does not lead anywhere.
If we want ratings to be valuable still, it’s enough time to stop that. I truly believe and hope the request is noticed and processed at some point.
