What do you want to achieve?
A safe and enjoyable experience for Roblox players.
What is the issue?
My game, Variant, has recently been subject to a botting attack by a specific player. I’ve worked relentlessly to combat and suppress these attacks so as to not affect gameplay for others, but to no avail, it continued for hours. The game itself simulates Roblox inside of Roblox, and consists almost solely of single-player servers. When a Roblox player first joins my game, they are prompted to “Join” Variant with their own unique username, just like in Roblox. Due to the botting, I’ve actually had to disable the “Join” feature of my game, which means that no new users can play my game. The botting consisted of the player abusing this “Join” feature to make usernames like “Free(TheirName)(RandomNumbers)” (they were initially banned from Variant for simply breaking rules), and doing lord knows what else once joined.
Image of the “Join” feature when it had to be disabled. This meant no new players could even play my experience:
Image of the “Join” feature on a typical day, before the botting attacks:
What solutions have you thought of so far?
For the first several hours of the attack, I wasn’t online and my game was subject to botting so intense, that more bots were joining than real players (at a ratio of like 10:1). My initial response was to ban the botted users, but they kept coming in waves- several at a time- and it would not stop. I tried implementing algorithms to ban their hundreds of 2010 alts from joining the game completely, but turns out, they have even more Roblox alts to bot with.
After that, I made attempts to report the user’s main Roblox account using the Support system, but received the following automated response; When another user is breaking the rules on Roblox, please let our moderators know by using the Report Abuse feature on the chat/content that is violating them. When the specific chat, experience, or content is reported, this will send all of the information necessary for them to appropriately moderate the situation. The issue is that my game is almost completely single-player servers (with some exceptions). Therefore, I, and no on else, can use Roblox’s in-game Report feature to report the player or their botted accounts.
I’ve already made it so that Roblox accounts younger than ~a month can’t join.
Conclusion
If anyone would like to share their own solutions, or proposed solutions, it would be deeply appreciated. I’m more so looking for solutions that can be implemented via Scripts, because I doubt Roblox will reframe their Reporting system anytime soon to be inclusive of different games, like Variant. I can’t advertise my game, because the bots will likely return, making me have to shutdown the “Join” feature all over again which would just waste the funds spent. I’ve temporarily re-enabled the “Join” feature for you all to see the game itself, so you can better understand the core points of my topic.