Your efforts would better be invested in other means of detecting bots than taking away useful tools. There are many other ways that bots can scrape user information (e.g. forums, popular groups, iterating over user id’s, etc.)
I understand that this update came from a good place, but I’m not sure it’s really going to accomplish anything. This reminds me of the old phrase “security through obscurity”-- You aren’t fixing the actual problem, you’re just hiding information.
I think you should revert this change instead of wasting development hours adding in alternatives to something we already had. At the very least, just remove the link to profiles and only show the avatar, like how the Steam Marketplace works, and as 1waffle1 suggested.
I strongly detest being restricted to relying on what a computer thinks is best for my experience, I’d take having the freedom to wander into whatever server I choose over a barely noticeable change in performance. The only legitimate problem that needed to be solved was the botting problem and Echo basically just solved that with his proposal, any bandage fix besides that is going to waste time, frustrate innumerable users, and solidify the degradation in usability that this change has wrought.
After discussing this with various members of my own group and of other groups, and as well as after reading @EchoReaper’s response, is that although popular games may not be impacted by this change, more niche games will be severely impacted.
For example, without custom server listing, games such as Territory Conquest may suffer due to their long rounds. Risky Strats gets hit by this as well. Any sort of round based game where players tend to hop from server to server looking for new matches are now unable to do this easily. Simply organizing the match maker to do this by assigning them to more full/empty servers won’t fix this, because more empty servers tend to be the ones that are ongoing rounds while full servers are likely rounds that just began.
A more personal example is with war groups, where now it is difficult to coordinate inter-group events.
I think EchoReaper’s solution to the problem is likely the only real solution that will respect more niche games and communities.
As @evaera has suggested, you will be patching a lot of problems this solution has caused than you would fixing the real problem (bots). They will invent crawlers that will scrape information off of more places rich with data, and we’ll be right back at square one.
The data required to get a list of all running games with Players and their IDs can be found in a publicly accessible JSON file for each game. This solution solves nothing and adds at-most 10 lines of code to a PM bot.
It seems like the recent trend in updates is that it is easier to remove a feature, rather than to add one. Revoking a tool Roblox users have had since near the beginning of the site’s inception is, in my opinion, a very misguided approach at combating malicious users.
I understand that this update has good intention, and that the bot problem is no laughing matter, but will this honestly help at all? The problem may be resolved for a week, but sooner or later a new big data-scraping method will come along, and we’ll be right back where we started, only without a beloved feature.
I believe @EchoReaper’s solution to the problem may be a better fit for the community.
Why can’t you do what numerous people have suggested? Highlight friends with green outlines and just have your profile pic; but no link back to your profile and no name hover.
I am the developer of a game that I am not the owner of. I use the server list to join server after server in order to
build player excitement and game loyalty
assist players that are stuck on a particular level
give players the opportunity to interact with me and earn some badges specific to encounters with me
tell players about rare and hidden features in the game
examine toxic behavior to see how the game could be changed to discourage or prevent behavior
Sometimes I want to join full servers and sometimes I want to join servers with few players. Sometimes I want to avoid Guests because I can’t interact with them or gauge their experience or their response to the game. Sometimes I want to avoid certain players. As EchoReaper pointed out, the reasons are varied and complex.
Without the ability to choose the server I want to join, my hands are tied.
The server list is a tool more useful to me even than the “Friends” feature that the server list is being used to exploit.
This is a good temporary solution for a small part of a big issue, but ultimately not the issue itself that we’re dealing with. And it’s also a little annoying for all of us, too.
I use these server pages a lot to not only find friends and near-empty servers, but to see what groups of people play the game, what the average server is like, if there are infact people even playing the game, etc. Plus, bots can easily get around this if the game utilizes the PlayerPoints system; just check the leaderboards and BAM, you got a huge list of players, anyone that did any thing on your game is right there for the picking.
There are plenty of methods that could help:
Enforce email verification? That could help. It would also force kids to get permission from their parents/guardians before playing on the platform, which is a good thing. I mean you obviously want to protect their innocence…seeing as the chat even censors the word “lol” at times.
Captcha during signup is a good way to block some more thrown-together bots, and it would only occur once for a regular player, so it doesn’t really kill that much of the “overall user experience.”
Limit only one sign-up per IP per day? Bots would have to be fairly advanced and IP-bounce to get past that. That could even prevent hackers making multiple hack accounts for the same game if they get banned!
What I’m trying to point out is it’s not the after effects that are the core of the problem here, but the very way it can start in the first place, which is creating accounts. Something needs to be done about it. Even if it isn’t a 100% solid solution, it’s the internet. People are always gonna find a workaround. We need to at least start taking action against the source rather than let it continue to spawn at a high rate and then deal with the issues it causes. Once the spawning slows down, we can begin to deal with the bot accounts themselves.
We wouldn’t never know until we try. There’s countless sites that use captchas with little to no issues. You guys keep denying saying “there’s ways around it” but yet we are yet to have even tried it… This whole update it just wack. It now makes life way harder for everyone, especially in groups, trying to find and join servers with certain people in it. It’s overkill and damaging to the players experience. As said, you’re not getting rid of the problem, just masking it. There needs to be better ways of detecting and deleting bots (i.e. Blacklisting sentences, captcha tests when making accounts, etc)
I have yet to see a single positive comment about this update, which has been around for as long as the site itself.
The server list is linked to an API which is what the bots use anyways. Can’t put a Captcha on an API…
Also, putting Captchas on everything doesn’t solve much, as there are services that crack Captchas specifically meant for botting. A huge hit on user experience for what amounts to an extra few dollars spent for the botters to crack them doesn’t solve much.
I used the server list to do a quick check to see if anyone was playing in my test server to which I just published to, in order for online testing to commence. If there were people in the test server, I would then know to shutdown before pressing play to test my new code. How do I do this now?
Edit: Okay looking forward to this iteration, thanks
This is shocking for people who only play ROBLOX for group communities. I actively participate in Napoleonic era styled groups on ROBLOX and we do raids at each others forts. This is where ping is ignored because everyone HAS to be in the same server for proper raiding.
Captchas do not work. I am clueless why thread after thread of explaining why captchas won’t work there are certain users on the forum who are still insisting that we should test it out.
Sweatshop labor: $1 per 1000 captchas – the service charges $2 (linked to article instead of service to avoid advertising it publicly). Right now the API returns multiple servers, but assume we restrict it to a captcha for each server you want to view (which would be hardcore draconian) – with this limit in place, it’s $2 for 1000 servers. The most popular game on ROBLOX right now, Jailbreak, has 18k players playing across all platforums split across 30-player servers (~600 servers). You could get every player in any game for $2, and that’s with the heaviest possible limitations on server listings. This is pocket change to both the people purchasing PM bots to advertise their group and those sending out phishing links. People selling PM bots probably charge well over this already.
Captchas are great for cutting back on low-effort botting, but otherwise they don’t work. Please never bring up captchas again – they won’t solve ROBLOX’s botting issue.
Thanks! I saw that but it was about giving group owners the permission to allow other roles to access the servers - I was just assuming that group owners would have access by default!
Thanks!