Game seemingly vanished from all game sorts

[colbert2677 (ImagineerColbert)]

Its difficult to get proof of the change to shadowbanning as this is an internal change and not something that would realistically be publicised, in light of those who would attempt to use standing policies to develop a workaround. You kind of just have to work off of assumptions. Regardless of soft shutdown or not, the system is probably flagging you due to seeing a massive increase of players over a short time.

Shadowbanning, if anything, seems to serve as a moderation queue so moderators can surface-investigate your servers and confirm the legitimacy of its player base. Better this than to be banned for artificially inflating player counts. In the past, instead of being reviewed, you’d just be banned for exploiting to the front page and it may not even have been your fault. These games could also last longer on the front page and potentially harbor bad content.

Your game may have been shadowbanned multiple times assuming the system is automated and it detected player inflation twice over. There’s no information and you can expect there not to be any for the sake of keeping security practices discreet.

[Smeers]

The issue has since been fixed which is very relieving, but…

Are you saying that since we were “shadowbanned” instead of immediately banned, we should be appreciative? This left us completely in the dark with a massive revenue and concurrent playercount hit. I appreciate Roblox attempting to filter out the fake, botted, and cheated games, but not notifying developers at all of what is going on when your game effectively gets taken down is terrifying.

Especially when it’s your only source of income…

[colbert2677 (ImagineerColbert)]

Yeah, that’s pretty much what I’m saying. The lack of notice to shadowbanning is a major deterrent especially if it’s not perfected and is prone to false flags, but it can’t really be helped either. It’s one of those things that you have to grit your teeth for, no matter how annoying.

A response from staff would probably be appreciated to notify us that there is an active change on-going to prevent bad actors from manipulating features to push their games to the front page at the very least. I don’t like being kept in the dark and I can see how infuriating it’d be to get shadowbanned without prior notice.

[ArcadeRockstar (Guthix)]

This just happened to me. I dropped a big sponsor on my new game and after a couple of minutes it was hidden from sorts, favorites, etc. Yet to be fixed as of this moment. Anyone looking to sponsor a game drop, beware for the time being!

[xJos_hy]

This just happened to my game right after a YouTuber uploaded a video on it.

It’s even disappeared on the “Rthro” section it was in.

I’d appreciate some help.

[Ezok]

This just happened to my game after I ran two 50,000 Robux sponsors on it. Would appreciate any help on the matter as well! Would agree with Frigitec and say be weary of running any sponsors or ads on your game until Roblox can fix this issue!

[aburt10 (aburt)]

Almost 6 days after and nothing has been done for my game. I’m just sitting here hopeless. I don’t know what to do at this point.

[Hyperant]

This just happened to my place after I pushed a major update and a major youtuber played it

https://www.roblox.com/games/2569453732/Economic-Update-Rise-of-Nations

This is rather strange and I feel that this is detrimental to affected places, especially in scenarios such as mine, and such as the users above.

[unix_system]

https://www.roblox.com/games/1581113210/SALE-Area-47

30 minutes before I posted this report, I received a report that our game was not showing up on any sort, including recently played.

Steps to reproduce (can’t reproduce without another front page game, obviously):

• Push Update (my TC is disabled)
• Shut down all servers

Current statistics:

As my game is not being performance filtered, this is clearly a mistake that is causing my game to be completely unavailable to our user except through direct link, joining on friends or the group page - severely limiting any ability for us to operate (we just published a sale).

I have heard rumors of “shadowbanning” of games from sorts for reasons other than performance filtering, but no staff response has been provided officially about this).

---

UPDATE / PSA

Do NOT use any auto shutdown-rejoin scripts (which make players rejoin when you shut down automatically) as this will likely cause a false positive with the interesting implementation of this new anti botting algorithm.

Here is the shutdown we made, courtesy of blade. As you can see, shortly after our player count drops significantly (due to this shadow ban).

Until this experimental behavior is resolved, I would recommend not doing anything that might make the algorithm detect bot behavior, such as shutting down large servers, large advertisements, placing users from other games in bulk, etc.

[ONLYTW3NTYCH4RACT3R5 (Chars)]

I just released my game 3 days ago and I’ve got shadowbanned 3 times, the last one was the one which impacted the game the most since it was on the third page(about 4.75K concurrent players) and probably would’ve hit frontpage if the system didn’t shadowban it.

This issue needs to be resolved ASAP, it’s ruining many game’s growth and income, especially the new ones.

I have no idea how this works but this HAS to be more transparent because not only it’s completely random but many developers are losing a lot of revenue and a large amount of exposure for something they have no control of.

This is just crazy. 20 minutes ago I was jumping from happiness because the player count was skyrocketing but now it’s losing about 20 concurrent players per minute.
I already sent an email to devrel explaining the situation but this is something that needs immediate action and it’s not something you can wait days if not weeks for.

[byc14 (byc)]

It has been pointed out, however most testimonies here share a common factor: a large spike in their player count, usually after a video creator joined or a shutdown occurred for an update (especially when using soft-shutdown implementations).

Supporting evidence.

Analytics from blade.

Disclaimer: time is localised to ACST.

[LOOTBOXES] Fortune Simulator

September 28th, ran two R$50,000 sponsorships. 9:54PM->10:14PM.

[SALE] Area 47

September 30th, shutdown for an update. Using a soft-shutdown implementation, player count bounced from 425 to around 800 at 6:00 AM. Dropped from #30 in top-earning.

[NEW] Hammer Simulator

Courtesy of @ONLYTW3NTYCH4RACT3R5 , taken off sort 3 times (highlighted above) after sudden spikes from video creators, and ironically enough after being unshadowbanned (800 → 4k players).

[Economic Update] Rise of Nations

Disappeared from sort on the 29th after pushing a major update and having a video creator play it on their channel. I assume it is the around 1600 player spike from the 6:02AM frame.

Sample size incomplete, however the trend persists. If you were affected, please DM me your statistics demoing your player count! Will include premium stats to complete sample.

This leads me to believe it is an implementation to stop botting (pure conjecture based on the above evidence. the evidence also points to spikes being the cause, not a steady snowball in growth. hell, it may be a bug). Assuming this, whether the implementation is some form of ML or purely based on a pre-programmed threshold, the results should not be automatically acted upon. Judging from the thread alone, 40 developers have been affected without any form of warning or notification. There is always bound to be false positives, especially on a platform such as Roblox which attracts the attention of video creators with hundreds, thousands, and millions of viewers who often feature games.

The 40 testimonies here may only make up a small amount of impacted users, considering the forum is not public to all users and developers aren’t notified that their games have been hidden.

While not meeting the ROBLOXCRITICAL requirements, there is unarguably a critical impact on developers. It is detrimental. Without warning, content creators are losing their source of income, which in some cases can be thousands of dollars (E.g. Area 47 posted by @unix_system, which dropped from #30 in top earning). Numerous developers in the devforum server have expressed concern for releasing their up-coming games and sponsoring/advertising their existing ones, which could further have an impact on collaboration with video creators.

It is appalling that there hasn’t been a solution, or at the very least public acknowledgement by Roblox, for over 15 days, to address the underlying issue.

[ONLYTW3NTYCH4RACT3R5 (Chars)]

This is unacceptable! My game got locked once again for the fourth time, it was sitting at 7.5K concurrent players and because I wanted to publish an update(which I have been delaying because worried something like this might happen again) however I just decided to give it a go and manually shutdown the game with NO SOFT SHUTDOWN script to push the updates out. Players quickly rejoined(4K players in a few minutes) and 10 minutes later my game was once again hidden from all sorts.

And again this is after I removed any sort of soft shutdown scripts(which I thought was the issue) but apparently it wasn’t.

Now I’ve lost more than 5k concurrent players, removed from the popular sort(2nd page) and hidden from continue playing and the thing that gets me even more mad is that this issue has been going on for the past 2 weeks and I cannot believe a fix hasn’t been found yet!

Stats

This is just unbelievable and it’s just very sad because there’s nothing I can do beside complaining.

[wravager]

The weekend that I was affected Roblox also went down so I effectively made almost nothing because I also spent thousands on ads that went nowhere because the game was shadowbanned and the site went down as soon as it was unshadowbanned.

I honestly don’t think that anyone with more than 500 players can shutdown for an update, as soon as everyone clicks “reconnect to server” you effectively killed your game for at LEAST 6 hours.

[ForeverHD (Ben)]

We’ve had a similar experience, however unlike the majority of responses in this thread, our game is still shadowbanned, despite this occurring over 3 weeks ago. For instance, after playing the game, it fails to appear under the ‘Continue Playing’ section.

Similarly, this has had a severe impact on visits and revenue. Since shutting down servers for our ‘Joker Update’ on September 14th, we’ve experienced a 60% fall in players and haven’t recovered since.

A resolution to the problem or at least some transparency as to what’s going on would be much appreciated.

[Hexcede]

I think this shadow ban system is extremely bad. Who’s stopping botters from simply getting all of the competition shadowbanned? Also likes vs dislikes don’t seem to be being taken into account in this thread. Are the people which are effected by this without player count issues seeing strange rating changes?

As for the soft-updating that’s definitely unintentional. I think that whoever is working on this shadow ban system (if it’s not a bug) seriously hasn’t been taking enough into account.

The shadow ban system should be based on player count over a long period of time. Clearly this check is occuring extremely frequently for soft-updates to cause this issue. This is just the number one rule of implementing systems like this. You can’t rely on most frequent information to detect things that don’t occur instantaneously.

Advertising isn’t being taken into account either. Advertising is of course going to look like botting. Players who are clicking ads are being detected as bots. Surely there’s a better way of detecting bot accounts rather than hotter games?

All player counts should be taken into account. All history. This is ridiculously implemented and I’m super annoyed that people are struggling to pay their bills because of this still ongoing issue.

Shadow bans should also take into account player account age. I’m sure that botters are going to circumvent this and use it to essentially wipe out all of the competition. No more of x genre of game? Guess what now you’re all playing Botter123’s x genre game and there’s nothing you can do.

You can’t even report abuse. This system is essentially under the radar of most players. How are moderators supposed to handle something like this?

Personally I think that this is impossible to fix with game statistics. You can’t detect botting and stop it without the risk of botters simply botting other games. There are hundreds of thousands of factors that would need to be taken into account and it’s just not worth the time of anyone.

[wravager]

$350 to $35 a day. This shadow ban system only hurts developers and loses thousands of real dollars worth of revenue the longer the shadow ban is active. It’s ridiculous that we haven’t had a response yet from staff.

[NateRBLX (Nate)]

I’d love to see an official explanation as to why this is happening from Roblox, as we have now seen upwards of several dozen unique users be effected by this over the course of nearly a month.

Roblox’s opaqueness on this specific event happening repeatedly has done nothing but harm the reputation of their development platform. How are users supposed to make money from their games if Roblox themselves are decommissioning games, with seemingly no explanation?

I understand that the botted games problem needs to go away as quick as possible, but to possibly ship an automated process which “shadow bans” games (I quote this phrase becuase this is honestly an assumption we have all made, in place of Roblox not yet giving an answer) without at least letting developers know via an announcement, is honestly pure shortsighted recklessness.

If shadow banning were to be the confirmed result of this fiasco, I’d be one of the first to advocate a QA based system for the games page, as consistent nonautomated moderation has been proven to be a must for these types of situations.

[arissgr]

Roblox has done more harm than good with this update. It seems that the new shadow banning system was never tested under real conditions and this ended up making a lot of game developers losing revenue.

Roblox is well aware of it but it seems that they are not willing to provide an official answer, so I doubt we will get a response anytime soon.

Roblox did some updates the past week, such as sending to the client a dynamic script in luau bytecode and requiring the player to execute the script with some parameters and send the result back to the server. This has resulted to random disconnections for users with poor internet connection, cause the server expects the response in less than 10s.

I am not saying that Roblox hasn’t done anything to address the botting issue, they have changed a lot of network stuff the past few months but like exploits, this is a cat and mouse game but this time it even affects “legit” games.

[wravager]

https://www.roblox.com/games/4165128118/stop-botting-me-please?refPageId=a2a2301e-bdd5-4b73-8a27-4f7ab06d2aa4

15,000 bots
First result on the home page Popular sort

But when you shutdown your game and just 300 people rejoin your game gets shadowbanned…

Was the shadowban system disabled for the time being???

[xPoloBear (Polo)]

This just happened to my game, we were on the popular page with 7k players but after an update, I can not see my game in any category except for up-and-coming and continue playing.

Did anyone find any solutions?