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.
1 Like
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.
8 Likes
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.
10 Likes
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.
8 Likes
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.
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.
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.
17 Likes
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!
This is just unbelievable and it’s just very sad because there’s nothing I can do beside complaining.
6 Likes
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.
5 Likes
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.
4 Likes
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.
8 Likes
$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.
6 Likes
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.
8 Likes
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.
6 Likes
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???
2 Likes
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?
1 Like
Somehow this keeps happening please fix it already, we’re losing players and revenue because of some faulty algorithm
did you by chance recently update the ‘title’ or description of your game? Sometimes (at random) that may be the culprit, from my own experience. i.e. Try taking out the [NEW] and emoji and see if you get a better result. For whatever reason including these characters only affects some experiences.
No, I have 3 different games with the same name under the same group and the Live game is the only one that has these issues so far, it happened before adding any emojis, [New] and description
Currently happening to my game and it’s costing me tons of players, visits and by extension revenue, I once had my game on a sort that gave me 3k players. It got shadow banned from all searches for no reason and now my game is at 48 back shadowbanned, normally I can remove stuff from the description or title but it’s not updating on the page.
If you search my game’s name you won’t find it… Someone PLEASE HELP.
This is currently happening to my game as well
It has completely vanished from the search results despite it being ranked 37th on the keyword “soccer”. But today, it is nowhere to be found even if you search the full name of the game:
How can this be resolved?
This is happening to me as well, except it started as SOON as I published my new game (revamped version of a different one) to the platform. Didn’t even get a chance to not be shadow banned, just happened instantly. No transparency or idea why it happened. I emailed ROBLOX support only to get an automated response that had nothing to do with my inquiry. I really hope this is resolved soon, as it’s affecting my game and it’s player base so badly.