Isn’t it beneficial for Roblox and Developers to allow players to be idle but still progressing in game while players are sleeping, eating, doing other activities while they aren’t using their devices or using a different app.
In many Top games we see that they encourage idle / afk mechanics such as:
AFK for currency
AFK grinding for progression
Even Welcome to Bloxburg a very popular, well known and high rank on Top earning has this mechanic
You can’t really do anything to speed up your “Skills” progression by being active, all you have to do to get most of those skills up is interact with an object then wait for the bar to go up.
and many other players and games have came up with clever ways to circumvent this as well.
This Idle / AFK gameplay mechanic isn’t unique to Roblox. The entire game industry has it’s fair share of Idle / AFK games. Why should Roblox limit itself and ultimately Developers from this genre?
I can see two ways of this being implemented
Option 1: If you do not want players to AFK in your game you can make your own idle detection and kick script.
Option 2: Roblox can introduce a new Game setting that allows / disallows idling with a time threshold
for people who are concerned of Premium Payout abuse, the rate is very low you can never make back what you spend for it which is $5.
The solution is to design games in a way that doesn’t support idling.
Allowing users to idle indefinitely causes so many issues (metric abuse, monetary abuse, poor game design) compared to the simplicity of designing non-idle games.
It promotes metric and monetary abuse in exchange for lower quality games and higher server costs.
There is absolutely no incentive for Roblox to do this. I would argue enabling developers indefinite server times would be a massive cost on their end. It’ll be abused in so many ways for almost no benefit to everyone.
With the current free servers model, the closest Roblox will likely get is premium payouts. We should design things to encourage gameplay and replayability - not pointless idle timesinks.
Non-Roblox idle games have AFK mechanics to make the gameplay loop slower and have players come back. They’re not there to have a server open 24/7.
Most of your arguments has been answered in the OP but I’ll explain so we can be clear
Isn’t keeping players in our game (Retention) one of our main goals?
I understand that some may view Idle / AFK game genre negatively, I still would like Roblox to be more open.
Roblox should encourage better game design by teaching and not limiting options.
If a developer would design their game poorly then so be it, it’s their choice and a poorly designed game would never be successful.
A lot of games already have this mechanic so instead of stopping them why not benefit from it?
Clearly there is a market for Idle / AFK games, there are people who like this genre, this will allow more players onto the platform as well as developers how is that not beneficial?
I think you are missing the point of this, try to consider
a player is willing to AFK in a game to progress WHILE they are not using their device for anything else, this benefits both the players and developers
players spends more time in Roblox App, this makes Roblox climb on top of App store and Google Play store in Rankings and also provides metrics that looks impressive to the media and investors.
when a player is more invested they are more likely to spend and this “time sink” is the easiest way for them to invest
we should treat all genres with the same respect despite our own opinion of it
This is already being circumvent, Players could just use an auto clicker / macro to bypass this. So at this point Roblox is only stoping itself and us from gains.
This would surely kill bandwidth. It is for the same reason Discord ends calls after 5 minutes of being alone.
Yes, but not in a malicious/artificial manner (“yeah my popular game is just a bunch of players that leave their machines on all night!”).
The majority of the player base is users under the age of 13, and are likely not able to download input simulation software / believe it is a virus / otherwise do not have it. Also I don’t believe all machines would like being turned on all night, most laptops wouldn’t like it and definitely not phones.
I don’t think there is actually that much demand for such a feature.
Roblox games that encourage idleness are a non-comparison to non-Roblox games that have AFK/idle mechanisms. You’re welcome to discourage/stop disconnections from your servers when you start paying for your game’s servers as well. Until then, while Roblox pays a large amount of our costs including server uptime, no thanks. Sounds a little silly.
While you’re using servers Roblox provides with a guarantee of costs covered and infinite servers and regions to support your games, it’s really not your choice. Commit to better game design.
Sounds like a bad idea. This would probably get abused far more than it would get used for a good purpose. Roblox has no incentive to do this either, as it would just increase server costs for them.
Also, almost every idle game that I have seen off of Roblox has been where you collect money while you are gone. I have never seen a decent game where you actually have to leave the screen on to collect money. It would be a waste of battery on mobile devices, and leaving your computer on for a really long time can run down your hardware. Bad idea, both for players and for Roblox. The only people it would benefit is the developers who’d abuse this for extra premium payouts, which we don’t want to support anyways.
In this game you command your units to attack NPCs to gain currency then you open Stars to get new and better units, and eventually unlock a new island then repeat.
In order to get the best Unit you have to open a lot of stars and I mean A LOT you have to do it overnight to get one of the rarest units.
You can also Auto AFK farm for currency overnight as well.
Most players just use an Auto-Clicker or Macro software to prevent being kicked from idling.
My point is this game is currently #1 on Top Earning and has an insane amount of players.
Despite what the replies are saying if you look at this game you’ll see that these players will agree with this Feature request.
To be clear here, I’m making this Feature request as a player and a developer:
Due to ADHD I have trouble with getting things done because the lack of motivation (dopamine deficiency), so playing this game and leaving it in the background helps me a lot with getting work done however due to the time limit of 20 minutes I constantly get kicked for idling which could be distracting and counter productive
I am against this idea. I would rather not encourage users to create experiences that request idling, due to it pushing it more towards the top of game sorts. This also opens vulnerabilities for scam game botting.
The idea of “it doesn’t work” isn’t a valid reason to get rid of the feature. It’s like saying Roblox should get rid of the anticheat it has because users found a way to circumnavigate it.
