Combating alternate accounts is hard. We end up having to punish new players in the process when we do things like restrict features, areas (or whole games, cough Arsenal) just because their account age is young. Not only this, but it only just delays the problem and the alt account can resurface after time has passed.
Potential Solution: An API to check if a player has a verified phone number. You would only be able to link one account per phone number (maybe it’s already like this). There’s holes in this idea, like the fact that not all players have phone numbers to attach to their account. But what if this action was ONLY needed to do if a game required it to participate or do xyz? Not every game would require such a feature to be enabled on their account, but it could mean wonders for games where alts are a big problem and they’d do anything to keep them out, ideally a solution that doesn’t punish new players at the same time.
Right now I hide content behind in-game level restrictions solely to scare away alt accounts, and I HATE punishing new players with this! And this morning I’m faced with a dilemma of a big influx of alt accounts at the fountain (where you can win a super rare item) so I’m having to lock this feature by account age. This may keep them down for the time being, but they are persistent- I know they will be back. Level restrictions are also only to scare away the lazy - there’s still plenty of players who level their alts up and the problem still exists.
I’m on a thought track of being able to verify your identity on roblox only on one account through some means (a phone number seems the least invasive, and verifying their phone number already exists!). But maybe there’s another way to keep them down. Once again, I’m thinking that a player would only need to verify their account if a game required it to do a certain action.
If you have any other ideas please let me know! I’m sure there’s even more holes in this one I didn’t think of/mention, but maybe we can think of a close to perfect solution together.
I agree. However, requiring them to have a valid phone number is not a good idea. Many non-alt accounts haven’t verified their account with a phone number because they don’t have one. Some people may also not trust Roblox to give them their phone number.
Some alternative solutions: some features may be restricted if they use a VPN or Tor, and there would be a way to check that out by a script, too. It is also possible to use IP addresses to check if an account is an alternative account or not. If too many accounts are created and/or used in the same IP address, some features would get blocked.
Your idea is pretty clever, however, it will be worse to punish users just because they don’t have a phone number rather than punishing them because their account is too new.
True! If there was an excess of accounts made under that IP then maybe we could do something, but I’m just worried about punishing people for having siblings now, hahah. Im finding it very hard to think of a perfect solution. That’s why I think it would be cool if the player could control this verification process so they wouldn’t get sniped by having siblings and couldn’t really do anything about it.
It does suck to have to punish people who don’t want to put in their phone number/ do not have one etc. I wish we could use email but those are just way too easy to make. Would still probably slow alts down by a decent bit though if we could require email verification. Oh, but then there is the “my parents won’t let me have an email address” argument lol
As a Game Developer I also share your concerns and frustration
However from my opinion I think there are two sides of this situation:
Alts → More activity / playtime in your game
No alts → More control over content flow
Didn’t this only became a problem to RH when you introduced Trading? Instead of relying on Roblox to solve your issue, shouldn’t you redesign Trading / Daily reward implementation instead?
I think you can design a well balanced system to combat using alts, I don’t like the idea of using Account.Age because it’s limiting, so I’d use something else that represents real commitment to the game.
To contribute to the idea:
As of now you can tie multiple Roblox accounts to a single Email.
However for phone numbers you can only use one per account.
Using IP isn’t practical because of VPNs and Families.
I like the phone number idea, Roblox can award a hat for people whom verify their account with a phone number like how they did for Email however not everyone will / can participate so this is still a problem nonetheless.
Nowadays, it’s pretty easy to detect a connection from a VPN. For instance, you cannot access some Netflix features with a VPN, since they can find it. There is a VPN detection on Discord and on Disney+, too.
This can easily be solved by allowing x sign ups on the platform without any restrictions. If more than x accounts sign up in the same IP address, Roblox can restrict the features of those new accounts until they verify they are not alts and/or bots.
A good idea for this I forgot to mention before is to restrict the creation of too many accounts in the same device, even if they are created in a different IP address. So, this is another solution to the problem you mentioned about VPNs. Connections from the Tor network could be blocked, too.
How would they verify that they are not alts/bots after their account settings are restricted? If there is a good solution for this, then I don’t think allowing x amount of sign ups would be even necessary. If they can prove they aren’t an alt, then all our problems are solved.
Having x amount of sign ups without any restrictions (let’s say that number is 5) means a person can have 4 alt accounts or 4 siblings.
The only solution to this would probably be to add a phone number or just contact Roblox support and verify that they are humans. I honestly don’t know.
Couldn’t Roblox easily change to one account per e-mail by requiring e-mail at login instead of username? Obviously you have all the accounts that already have multiple accounts tied to one email, but Roblox could probably either grandfather those users in, or push the email to the most used.
I doubt Roblox will ever eradicate alt accounts, but they could make it a more difficult process.
I don’t think Roblox should be encouraging users to add a phone number to their account more than they already are. Phone numbers are at risk of being sim-swapped and SMS traffic isn’t super secure.
Aside from the proposed solution, this feels like a “allow us to ban users across accounts” feature request, are you sure there is not already a topic for this?
