Introduction
Sometime in late 2018, Roblox gave users the option to hide your inventory publicly. This was an excellent change for better privacy, especially for developers who want to keep their dev assets private, and also users who may have a lot of value in their account in the form of limiteds, and may not want the whole world knowing how much their account is worth.
As a symptom of this benefit, the Owners API was completely blocked off for Roblox-made items that aren’t limited. If they are limited, owners are shown, but regardless of whether a copy is on a terminated account, or an account that is private, there’s currently no distinction between the two, showing nil for both terminated & hidden copies.
The most prominent use case for separation is with limiteds/collectibles. Every limited on Roblox has its own value determined by the community, in fact there’s multiple websites which establish its own values, like Rolimon’s, and while it’s often associated with RAP (recent average price), this isn’t entirely accurate, especially for rarer items.
Many limited items, such as ): Euro 180 and Red Sparkle Time Fedora, has increased drastically in value over recent years due to an interest in these sought-out collectibles. But I believe this is not the only factor - rarity also comes into play. While originally 100 copies were sold for both of these items, accounts get terminated with these items over time, which causes these items to get rarer and rarer, and these copies usually never come back to life, just like certain Pokémon cards degrading over time.
The problem with lack of separation
The problem is since there’s no separation of what copies are Terminated, and what copies are Hidden, this makes it tricky to figure out how many copies actually ‘exist’. This has also been maliciously used by traders to trick other users to make it seem like their item is rarer, when in reality, a large amount of copies of the item may just be hidden behind a private account.
Take WCU:AA for example. This item appears to have ~12 available copies in existence, but it actually has more than that, with a suspected hoard of 25, 1/4th of all copies! Traders know to be more cautious if there’s a hoard of them publicly visible, but if they’re hidden and haven’t been hidden recently, you can really only guess.
Since Roblox has recently been investing more into collectibles, like releasing many older off-sales over the summer and turning them into limiteds so they can be sold and traded, it feels this would be a great time to ask as this would definitely benefit the trading community.
SUMMARY —
We have no accurate way of measuring how many copies of a Roblox limited exist. This is an important metric of Roblox limiteds, as the amount of original sales don’t tell us much. It has been proven that as items get rarer over time (deleted/out of circulation), they become more valuable, and while this can be useful, it can be abused for any user.
We’re basically only told the maximum and minimum amount of copies that exist, but any Roblox user can really only guess.
Notes:
I made a post sort of like this two years ago, but as I felt there were some privacy concerns, I made a more generalized post here. I wasn’t sure how to format this post as well with the ‘as a developer’ format, as this isn’t really a suggestion for something that could benefit developers, but all users instead.
A minor note I felt was almost out of place, is the fact that Roblox doesn’t tell us how many maximum copies exist for off-sale items, or how many have been sold of particular items. Bighead went limited recently, and we were able to figure out its “Total Copies” only because it had limited status. The amount of copies of BiggerHead is a complete mystery. While very low priority, I feel like this could be a welcome change for many users who own items they anticipate to go limited.