[Serious] Players being mass teleported away from the games they're in

http://devforum.roblox.com/t/my-game-is-getting-50-000-free-visits-a-week-from-a-free-model-virus/30936
This is the original thread I made in Development Discussion asking what to do.

This should be seriously resolved or fixed. Why not give places the option to not allow place teleports to them? Or limit teleports without a prompt on your screen for Universes.
It started with 40,000-50,000 weekly visitors. That thread is at 70,000 visitors. This week, the number is floating around 85,000.

That’s a ton of players getting redirected away from the game they were playing.

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I’m not a fan of forced teleport prompts to other universes – this may be something I want to do intentionally as a game developer. As for place-specific permissions for teleporting, that sounds like a good short-term solution, but I can’t help but notice this seems to be a common trend:

  1. 3rd-party code inserted into game
  2. Code behaves maliciously
  • Teleports players to other games
  • Sells products not made by place creator
  • Advertises without place owner’s consent
  • Gives code publisher privileges in game
  1. Request for increased permission security for individual features

Perhaps the ROBLOX staff could look into quarantining 3rd-party scripts somehow and giving them limited permissions in the future when they fix this particular issue.

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Best solution I can see is allowing/disallowing third party teleportation from outside sources on the Games property page on the website. This could be extended to dev products and even items such as clothing and models in the same vein.

Whitelists could be introduced if this is too limiting.

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The best solution to this is probably better free model search. If we surfaced better quality models in the toolbox this wouldn’t be as large a problem. You should also report any models with the script although I’m not sure if we have any way of moderating the content of free models right now.

I was in a game and stepped on a pad that teleported me to another game (different universe)

Teleports to different games that are not within the universe should give the user a prompt imo.

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There goes my plan to seamlessly transition between my own games. Let’s say I want to use a popular one that has a docking station to advertise a new release. I’d put a dropship in the docking station with a billboard next to it that advertised the new place, and when players boarded the dropship they’d fly out of the station, resume their flight in the next place, and land in the new place’s lobby.

Taking away developer control is a bad idea, especially when the cause is novice developers not checking the 3rd-party scripts they use. Whitelisting which places can be teleported to is fine on the other hand.

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I guess, seems like an edge case but fair enough.

Instead of game id, make it share the same owner ID to teleport.

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What if I want to advertise a buddy’s game? Just a buddy, not a coworker, so the game isn’t owned by a shared group. Developers will eventually find that they need to seamlessly transition between different-owner games and they won’t be able to because of brutish anti-exploit implementations.

Forced prompts are not the solution. The issue is 3rd party scripts teleporting players without the game creator’s consent, and the issue should be tackled by making it so players can’t be teleported without the game creator’s consent – not anything that involves players directly.

Yeah that makes sense. I still think people advertising their friends games and whatnot is a serious edge case but I agree a prompt is probably not the best option.

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What could be bad about a setting in the game configuration that allows teleports? I understand shutting down that games teleports would mean I couldn’t use it either, but I don’t want anybody teleporting to that game anyway.

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I really like the idea of forced teleport prompts that can be opted-out of via game setting.
(like FilteringEnabled, AllowThirdPartySales, etc.)

Helps out people who don’t know how to script, but gives flexibility to those who do.

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As long as we can opt-out I’m fine with that.