Not too big of a topic and this probably isn’t the best place to ask in the first place since it won’t garner a moderation reply (or so I presume), but I’m interested in hearing mainly from those well versed with the platform or who have had this experience before.
So for a game I am currently working on, there are two game passes I would like to retire or change heavily. The cost of these passes are 7500 and 600 respectively, so anything that changes with them would not go unnoticed. I also have to consider 4000+ unique purchases being affected.
By the Terms of Service, the expectation with game passes is that you honour the purchases made. All passes for sale must grant some kind of benefit. I don’t know if this is the same with offsale passes but if it isn’t, that makes things a little easier - I just have to deal with the community side of things.
My question splits into two parts: a moderation and community perspective.
For moderation: can I just take a pass offsale, remove its features and not be at risk of getting moderated? For example, if I mistakenly upload a pass or give it the wrong benefits, I want to change it out for the right ones. Changing the game pass itself or making a new one may depend on the circumstances I’m being faced with. Another example: later into development, I decide a pass isn’t worth keeping and want to take it down along with its perks. Users may have, thus, gotten nothing permanent out of that pass and are just left with a void of used Robux.
For community: what are some good strategies to compensate players? With game passes costing 7500 and 600 respectively, a large change to them will not go unnoticed. If I suddenly discontinue them and provide players no after effects, I may get moderated (see first point), lose players or cause an otherwise very large outrage of players feeling (or getting) scammed. Hypothetically I can just keep the effects in and just take the pass offsale, but I don’t want the effects to stay in either, hence my pinch.
Refunds are not an option. Please do not suggest anything within that realm.
Maybe you could give them exclusive items depending on what price the gamepass was? Like if someone bought a 7500 robux gamepass they could have a very cool exclusive item or something like that. Just and idea.
If a user has bought a game pass and you remove the perks/item from the game you can get moderated for this. My friend had a gun on his game which was too overpowered so he took it down and got a warning from staff. If you want to remove a game pass and give other perks I suggest giving them in-game currency or other items/perks close to the original ones given with the purchase of the gamepass.
That’s a fair consideration and one thing that I’ve thought of doing. Although compensation isn’t feasible or realistic in all circumstances depending on what the pass originally gave, that’s a route that I do have in mind. Thanks for bringing it up.
For context, since I only now recognised I didn’t include the purposes of those passes (it was in my original script but I rewrote it): the 7500 Robux one gives players the ability to use admin commands and the 600 one gives them access to a room.
Now for compensation’s sake: have a look at the scenarios of these two passes.
For the command pass, I may change the admin script or make a custom one, that may have potentially less features than the current scripts. I don’t mind lowering the base cost of the game pass due to this and moderation is a non-concern since the pass is the same, might get some eyebrow raises from the community who had to buy it for more though, I can live with that.
For the room access pass, players get a tool to help them access that room. If I retire the game pass, that means that I remove the tool as well. My area access system allows merging so I can invisibly still allow purchasers to access the area regardless and this still sits well with the ToS. Now what if I don’t want to still invisibly keep their benefits (access to that area) and take the pass offsale? Now that’s where my troubles come into play with both moderation and the community.
Just be careful when giving players admin commands, something that would be a good idea is giving them admin commands that are not very destructive or can ruin the game for everyone.
All moderation circumstances are reviewed on a case-by-case basis so I can’t necessarily use your friend’s circumstances as a benchmark for whether doing it myself is okay or not. I need to know a definitive, neutral standpoint on if I can do this and where I trip moderation if I can’t.
This is the problem with my game too though. I have perks that I don’t want users to retain necessarily so I’d like to have both the pass and its perks removed without fear of getting moderated. Moderation action will adversely affect me for personal games and in my specific scenario from OP, the owner of a very large group as well as potentially all its members.
Compensation is considered but I’m more on the side of “if I can’t or it doesn’t seem realistic to”. We do not have any currency features nor perks that are equivalent in value aside from other area access game passes and I don’t know what would be good to give them if not one of those free.
I’m aware of the danger of connecting commands to a game pass and I have that covered. The issue is changing the perks or merging it to something else. Ideally, from a standalone commands game pass to unlocking a privileged user status with more game controls (e.g. map modification).
With this in mind, that may completely betray the expectations and intentions of the original game pass. Giving a user more and raising the pass cost is no problem: giving the user less and decreasing the pass or completely removing it is where the trouble begins.
I had a comparable situation with my game after our first major update. Not the same, but kind of comparable and I think my solution could work here too.
Context: In my game, players launch payloads like satellites into space. These satellites give the player a certain amount of money per second. When we first released, balancing was horrible and a lot of players spammed these payloads and were getting thousands of dollars per second.
So we imposed a cap on payloads to fix balancing. Like you’re saying, these payloads that were over the cap were perks that I didn’t want them to keep. So we decided to remove them, and reimburse players for the cost of the removed payloads. The dilemma here is comparable to yours, since players bought these items. We, as developers, had to choose whether or not we would let players keep them or remove the ones that went over the newly imposed cap.
It’s not the same since players didn’t directly buy payloads with Robux, although a lot of people did indirectly buy them with Robux by buying money to then buy the payload. I don’t know, sort of a similar situation and I thought my personal experience with my game could help. Best of luck with whatever you decide to do.
The biggest problem with games, not smartly planning your monetisation before adding it in. It’s because of this lack of planning from all the teams before me that I now have the burden of reviewing this as the new team lead.
The case I have in the OP is just one of many. Here’s another similar scenario, offshooting from what I described in the OP. For another game in the group, a pass (a gun) was sold for 200-300, then 500, now 950. Due to its low cost, it allowed a grossly high amount of players to purchase the pass. This leads to constant PvP and interference with other activities that the game has to offer.
We’ve tried many strategies, up to nerfing its stats into the ground, which generates complaints (realistically, anything we do would, not as concerned there). This is all because we know we can’t just remove the pass and call it a day unless we fancy a ban from either the platform or DevEx.
Compensating players for their purchase is sort of tricky with the particular situation I have since we’re not going to up and switch the place or anything. The commands game pass is slightly easier to change into some other kind of privilege role. The area access pass, on the other hand, not so much.
The area access pass allows entry into a single room and the cost is absurdly high given players can’t or shouldn’t be able to use what’s in that room at all without another game pass (see what I mean? they did not plan this well at all). We have 4 other entry passes which grant access to multiple rooms, I could hypothetically give one of those for free and take the single access one offsale.
Work at a Pizza Place had an infinite money gamepass awhile ago, and I think it was converted over to some-sort of VIP instead. Converting it to compensate players in another way is probably the best way to go about it.
On some of my 5+ year-old games, I used to sell simple gamepasses. For example, the Teleport Device in ForbiddenJ’s Park or the VIP Pass in Escape The Void Vortex.
Then I felt bad and disabled the gamepasses, instead giving the former benefits to everybody who visit those games.
I haven’t had any complaints from the few users who bought them.
What-if you merged the benefits with another gamepass, so that the former gamepass and the on-sale gamepass both behave the same?
idk. It may help if you linked the particular game you are concerned about.
The area access pass seems tricky. Does it go against ToS at all to give players a benefit that’s not at all what was described when they purchased the pass? In this situation, my first thought would be to give players a gun or some other item as a replacement, but that might get weird with moderation.
For the gun gamepass you described, my situation was the exact same. Prices were way too low at first, so tons of people bought the items, then we tried to nerf them hard and that didn’t help at all. Imposing the cap was the only thing that helped at all.
The admin commands pass, as you said, could easily just give players power over other players in some other way. I don’t think it would be too hard to retire that pass, but the area access one would probably require some more thinking. To me it seems kind of strange that a player would need two gamepasses to access a certain area of the game (or at least that’s how I’m interpreting it, again I’ve never played these kinds of games).
If you’re ok with telling your community that the pass is being phased out, I would probably ask them what they want as a replacement. That could give you a starting point and some ideas to work with at most, because Roblox communities are not game designers. I’d have to play your game to give a specific answer as to what you should replace it with. Your particular problem with this area gamepass seems like a problem that very few developers have.
That’s what I’m thinking as well, effectively giving those who purchased the single-room access pass a different one of equivalent value for free. That just leaves the point of community relations and still some doubt in my mind about how moderation will treat that circumstance.
For users who own the discontinued pass but not another one of those on sale game passes, there’s no problem, they got something for free with some more value to it and there’s less spent overall as well. For those who own both however, that’s a void of lost Robux for them.
With all the stuff regarding moderation these days, I want to play it real safe. If I could just take the pass off and forget it, that would be bliss. Doesn’t seem like I can do that though. The majority of responses here have mostly been regarding compensation and I agree with that as well. I’ve had it in mind so I’ll definitely look into only going that route for now.
An idea that just sprung into my mind is to use one of those game passes, change them up and use them as the new game pass which gives new features that I do want and merges the old ones into it like a pack of sorts. I can then announce the change that was made. I might be able to give one pass for free in such a way where the void of Robux is unnoticeable, sort of like selling an expansion.
Pricing may get tricky and interesting if some players had this pass before it gave many more features while it was at a different price (exactly the issue with the gun pass), but maybe there’s a silver lining in that. It’ll encourage players to use that game pass. Incentivises them to play longer and coupled with engaging features could yield back returns that outweigh my current concerns with retiring passes. The gun pass belongs to an important roleplay game while these ones are more for the fun side of our community.
I also love that idea of limitations, forgot to say, so I’ll definitely have a look. The privilege user status can be limited to a certain amount per server (we already have problems with abuse anyway lol) and give enough to feel like their money was still well spent. Catches a lot with a single net, so thank you for raising your situation. Helps a lot for thinking of how to get this done.
All of these posts have been equally insightful and I’d give them all a mark if I could, but this one encompasses a lot. There’s the general idea that’s been recommended (compensation rather than hard retiring), an anecdote and a good idea I can put to use when thinking about how to change the idea behind the perks the pass gives. This is most likely the post I’ll be marking as my solution. I’ll wait for a bit for any other responses and review the current ones given.
I did have an idea. Sense that the game pass is priced high, why not just make it a pass that acts like it’s all the game passes in the game. Kind of like a season pass of a game and it would make the price they paid worth it still while other could by the other passes together for a similar price.
Hope this helps you out!
Edit: yo could make it off sale also sense they paid for your game back then. Again like a pre order where it comes with a season pass to all DLC of a game.
I think there’s a problem here: What if the player already has a different pass? What if they have all of the passes? The player that only bought the discontinued pass and the player that bought every pass won’t be compensated equally.
In my opinon, I think depending on what the gamepass is, you can take it offsale immediately and compensate them via in-game currency or a watered down version of the original pass. Admin commands? Let them have basic commands that don’t affect gameplay such as changing their skin color or hats or whatever. Eventually you’d transition into a state where they’re gone and the players would be given whatever it is as compensation. (an item, currency, special tag, etc.)
This would be a long term solution that may not be very great for the players, but it does transition those who stick with the game smoothly into having the pass deprecated.
Season passes have arbitrary content that can be phased in and out and are not typically a catch-all monetisation effort, there are still other passes that can be sold independently of a season pass and independent features are almost exclusively what it’s about.
It should also be noted that I have issues with two game passes, not one, so this doesn’t work out in my favour. I’d rather change the game passes into something else of equivalent or higher value, which is the plan I’m mostly looking at right now.
From a general perspective, if you make a mistake early on, then you won’t have amassed any purchases or will have enough that transactions can be quickly reversed: moderation may not be happy that you’re still not honouring the purchase but getting reported for scamming is less likely to happen.
In my specific scenario from OP, to which I’m primarily looking at game passes that already have purchases and use on them, that’s not feasible. They cost a lot and there’s already 4000+ combined total purchases across both game passes, so some kind of backup is necessary to stay on the right side of moderation and ensure players are getting rewards for the Robux they put into the game.
I do see your problem can’t really be fixed by a slow transition with external compensation. In that case I suppose you may want to do as others have said and award them an exclusive item or something. I don’t exactly know the context of your game in question so a specific fix isn’t exactly going to come here, but I think something that honors the people who have bought it in a meaningful way would be good.
If you do go the changing gamepass route in which you change the gamepass’s function entirely, you could potentially award extra bonuses to those who purchased it while it was still the other gamepass.
I’m not sure if you’re on the right side of moderation here and that’s where the transition strategy would’ve worked, but again, this is a very situational dependent problem.
