With bots being rampant and even encouraged (kinda~), there is currently nothing to stop developers from creating sockpuppet accounts for their games to notify players about garbage like “it’s double xp wednesday!” or whatever.
Although I’m sure no such thing has happened yet, as roblox becomes more and more mobile-oriented it will be increasingly optimal for developers to adopt this method of forcibly getting the player engaged when they really just wanted to check for friend requests or unlock their tablet. Mobile games are known to do this, and we are competing with those now. This competition is needlessly unfair because we cannot remind the player to water their flapple trees like Flappy Farm can.
Of course, we can grab players’ attention by being on the front page, but we don’t need to get our players back if they never left. Another way is to have them join our group, but we cannot prompt players to join groups from in-game nor can group wall shouts hit the player’s notifications (only the feed on their home page, which is practically invisible on phones and uninteresting to players in general). Using a twitter account would be alright, but the roblox site already tries to do everything twitter can; it makes sense to shove a notification service in there as well.
Either as a bot or an actual feature, most of the implementation details come down to common sense. For what it’s worth, here’s my personal wishlist:
Players have to opt-in to receive notifications (unlike current spambots, which PM without consent).
Players choose to stop receiving notifications by replying “#” to the bot (should be failsafe) or by turning them off in-game/on the game’s page/in the notifcation screen.
Notifications are throttled. Games get, say, 4 notifications for a player when they visit once. When the player revisits the game, the 4 notifications are refilled.
A notification can be sent to any number of players at once.
Notifications can be delayed and cancelled, i.e. send one if the player hasn’t returned in 48 hours but cancel sending it if the player does return in time.
Built-in support for A/B testing: a notification can have N variants, click through/dismissal rates are availible for each variant. Variants are added via the site; notification contents are dynamic, but developers are meant to format the message they entered on the site in-game, i.e. %playername (everything is filtered really hard, like PMs).
Moderation has been only mildly adequate at fighting spambots, so it would be suspiciously poor form to target accounts used for this relatively legitimate purpose (and perhaps impossible when deployed on a large enough scale, like spambots are right now).
Thus it makes the most sense to offer the feature natively before someone capable and willing wakes up and does it themselves (this could be you!).
I thought this was the endgame of introducing the site and browser notifications, but it’s been a while since then and nothing’s publicly happened yet. I hope this thread will turn out to have been unnecessary.
Something like this would cost a ton of robux
I think you’d have to blanket it send to everyone who’s either played your game, thumbs up, or favorited it. I dont see a possible way to remind players about specific in game events
Why would it cost robux at all when using a spambot is free of charge?
All it should cost is the effort to get the player to allow your notifications (and to actually return to your game after at most 4 of them).
I do like your suggestion of supporting sending notifications to all players that’ve liked/favorited/played. My original proposal would require the developer to keep track of players-to-notify or manually schedule sending the next “big” (event) notification for each player individually. While I think the flexibility such a system offers would be worth the hassle, targeting these groups of players should be a native thing as well.
Because it will be spammed otherwise, just like any other form advertising.
I’m not sure how it would work if it were free. I personally don’t want a ton of notifications unless theyre important enough to spend money on.
I dont want to join a game and instantly get a notification to my phone and think “great, only three more…”
Its annoying enough to get a spam bot for every game I play already.
How would this work? Would this be something done ingame or on the site?
This sounds like a site feature so I’m not sure how it would be done unless you were manually plugging in userids which sounds painful
You’d have to opt-in to receive the notifications in the first place, as said in the OP.
For example, when a player leaves the game, you could schedule a notification for when the next event happens. This would be a notification for just that one player, hence “individual”, but of course this event notification would end up being sent to many more players at the same time. Plugging in userids wouldn’t be neccesary because you can just automate it in-game when the player’s actually there, per-player. If the player were to sign up for a scheduled tournament in-game, they would be notified of that in much the same way.
Grabbing a bunch of userids should still be possible though, for example when something happens to a leaderboard that only really concerns the top 50 players. Something ad-hoc that cannot be predicted or scheduled but should still be sent to more than one, but only the involved players.
The site-sided feature would be the part where notifications are sent to many nonspecific players at the same time based on unexposed data such as likes/favorites/having played the game.
The game-sided feature would be sending notifications to any list of specific players.
Sending is a little akward of a term as notifications should be able to be delayed and cancelled when they become pre-emptively irrelevant, but that’s my general idea at least.
That depends on how you present it, I’m sure most players would allow good games’ requests for notifications when they know what’s what.
Worst case scenario is they’d allow any games’ requests, not that they’d allow no games’ requests.
I mean, given that tattletail roleplay can sell vip rooms, real games should have no problem getting the player’s permission to send notifications.
Every successful email subscription is done with permission. Unsolicited emails are a great way to get marked as spam. Granted, most sites default the selection to “get emails from us”, but you can easily opt-out. Equivelant behavior would probably be auto-subscribing when favoriting/upvoting a game (which could easily be undone via a button next to favorite/vote).
I’d be ok as long as it wasnt forced upon simply visiting the place. I had a very similar ideas years ago before we got push updates about features on the site
This is something we’re considering! We’re looking into creating notification channels for games – whether that’s in the feed or the notif stream or push notifications. (We’re also looking into revamping the feed!)
edit: Just to add onto this / provide more detail – the endgame is to have all sorts of notification channels for different types of notifications. It’s been a while since we released push notifications & the notification stream, and it’s mainly because it takes a lot of time to build these systems. For example, we only support one-to-one notifications now – e.g. someone sends you a friend request or someone sends you a PM. To broadcast activity to multiple users at the same time (i.e. what your post is describing) requires a lot more work especially regarding scalability. And after we build out the infrastructure, different teams need to schedule in time to build out the actual notification types.
Anyway, if anyone wants to chat about game notifications one on one, shoot me a PM – I’m happy to discuss what I’m thinking about!