Roblox stats are counting obvious botted visits, creating inaccurate data
Roblox stats are the ways developers gather legitimate data about their games. This becomes a problem when even the official stats being provided are obviously the result of botting.
This for example, carries over to the monthly stats which are now FAKE data
There is nothing developers can do about these fake botted visits, and it’s hurting the integrity of Roblox stats.
A potential option Roblox should add is a way to filter out things such as brand new accounts/unverified accounts/a handful of other options from the visits list.
Not only would this be a way to get more accurate statistics after bots flood your game, but this could also be used to see what kind of players are playing your game (to make it easier to see if older users/likely more mature users are playing, or younger players instead, to help develop around that)
It’s disappointing that Roblox seems to be taking very little action against things like this, since this exact issue has been happening to everyone with a game ever since spambots existed. Surely something like this would be at least somewhere on their radar to fix/work around, right?
Full support on this, bots are one of the biggest problems of the platform snice 2014.
For now, bots generates this kind of problems:
Roblox does not uses the original Google ReCaptcha (wich is actually safe), the platform uses a diferent bot detection that is not made by google (and also weaker)
I think the only way to stop this is adding a e-mail verification when a new account is created (like when you create an account on discord), snice, bots cannot reply to e-mails, also you can’t use the same mail for 2 or more accounts
i have this issue with scam bots since december 1st and my game is spammed with scam messages, i can’t see my real stats for the visits or the correct playtime.
I remember some bots during the old spam bot wave having the verified user hat. This won’t be something hard to do, it’d just be an extra step for the bot creators.
Roblox should add some filters like filtering out users that are possibly bots.
Full support!
There should be an option for developers to allow the record of only a certain data. Like:
Only record data from > 30 secs visits
or any options like that. A filter for the data could also work. We all hate captchas and they do not seem to be working pretty good with bots, so that’s not an option.
This is just a bad idea. New accounts aren’t 100% bots, and most bots are stolen old accounts. Unverified accounts are normally unverified for a reason, and forcing someone to verify with email just to play means that a lot of younger players will get confused.
Why not make it so you can opt-in your game so that players have to have a verified e-mail with a secured account to rate the game?
Additionally,
Perhaps another option to allow ratings after a developer-determined amount of time. Say I only want my game to be allowed to be rated after they’ve played for 30 seconds, or 5 minutes, or 30 minutes, etc.
I’m pretty sure we can all agree we’d rather not have people criticize our games that just click play and instantly close it and dislike the game. Without even playing the game. This is painfully common.
All these options should be opt-in for developers. So for games that cater to kids they can have simpler options like no-verification ratings and can be rated after no in-game playtime at all. And for developers who want more accurate data/ratings they should be allowed to set more strict rules to rate their game.
By no means are these suggestions perfect and solve the problem entirely. But they’d be huge steps to taking responsibility for a crisis insufficiently handled by Roblox.
Developers want options.
I agree it needs to be fixed. The idea of timed rating is actually not bad, and would help with bots and players who leave after 5 seconds.
Also, great work on Tower Defenders 
In September 2016, Roblox already had issues where comment bots all had verified emails:
Do you think in Dec 2020, 4+ years later, this would pose any obstacle to botters at all? I’m willing to bet the majority of bots have a verified email or would immediately be allocated one by the botters if more functionality on the website required having one.
When I said,
I meant verified and with a secured account, such as 2FA, Account Pin, etc. That is what I see as secured. Though strict and perhaps even futile. But I would be surprised to see all bots able bypass all this.
Hell if a developer wanted to we should be able to lock ratings behind prerequisites. Locks including players who don’t have whatever security options the developer wants them to have: Verified e-mail, Account Pin, 2FA, etc. And an idea of developer customized in-game playtime.
I don’t think this has to be uniform but at least give us the options. We want to at least attempt to protect our games from one of the more damaging & prominent uses of botting, like/dislike botting.
Sure a game with strict rate requisites will have less ratings than one with liberal ones. But they’ll certainly be more accurate
Give us the options to at least try to protect our games.
Roblox has been needing to update the game rating system a long time now anyway. People should be prompted to write a quick review of their game like any other game platform ever.
They don’t HAVE to write the review, but it’s better than someone just joining and instantly leaving and disliking the game with no prompt to think about what they’re doing.
And I am certainly not alone,
Also adding onto inaccurate data as the OP reports is ratings lasting forever. At some point it should be cleared, or allowed to be cleared. My game is constantly evolving in intervals. It was not entirely the game it was a year ago, why should the ratings stay if I’ve introduced 5 major updates?
It is completely free for a bot to turn on 2FA and account pin (literally 2 POST/PATCH calls), this doesn’t change anything unfortunately. This whole idea about allowing developers filtering out botted statistics falls flat because it hinges on the assumption that simple, user-facing metrics exist that let you as a developer filter out bots. If such metrics existed, Roblox wouldn’t have a botting problem to begin with.
Bots can never be stopped technically, any form of captcha will only slow down bots but wont be able to crack down on them for good
Thanks for the report! We’ve filed a ticket to our internal database and we’ll follow up when we have an update for you.
Please note that filling a bug report does not guarantee that it will be fixed once triaged.
The engineers are working on this issue. If there are any updates i will pass the on here.
Aren’t these emails from email generators? Can’t Roblox instead, have a Whitelist system for emails from example, Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook, Uol, Yahoo, etc?
You have to understand they have several full-time engineers working on issues like this, the solution is never that simple, otherwise they would have done it already. Also that solution blocks legitimate users who self-host their email, and it doesn’t counter the fact that sometimes bad actors use accounts they have compromised previously (with real user data / email addresses) to do the botting.
