is Roblox Lying about the Botting Problem?

Roblox has a massive botting problem, yet nothing seems to be done about it. Is Roblox intentionally keeping this bots to boost numbers? And are they lying to us about their "response?"

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00:00 - Roblox's botting problem is bad
01:22 - How bots work
02:40 - Why do people use bots?
05:27 - Roblox's Response
06:08 - Is Roblox Lying?
08:28 - The truth...
09:20 - and the real problem

[Crazyblox]

As the dev of Flood Escape 2, back in 2021 I had to develop a snapshot system for validating exploiter reports because exploiters began generating fake reports making innocent players look like they were exploiting. Our game doesn't even have a competitive context, it's purely solo/co-op.

[ShiroRBX]

Plot twist: Roblox devs just realized they can save money by letting unpaid robots farm the game for them

[BSRG]

as a roblox creator roblox might be misleading investors with these stats as if an average of 35% of total player base is bots it counts for 4m players at it's peak of 11.2m

[Simply.Bamboo]

Roblox dev here. Bots are really mixed, like you said with player counts showing up. But for some games people negate bots with afk lobbys, in the afk lobby you get stats. Still less productive but multiple accounts = bank. There was this one game I helped work on, managed to uphold 80k players for 3 months, and then it died. That game had bots, one of the developers, INSANLY talented man, made his own system for detecting bots and they would be placed in a private server/local server for the bot to run on their instead, but it still would show up on the player count.

[Adrianex]

As a current Fisch Mod, I can confirm everytime I join a server, I find at the very least 1 or 2 bots farming afk in pretty odd inaccessible places that only us mods can get to with tp/fly commands. So who knows how many bots normal players end up missing when they join new servers.

We had a bit of an anti-script (that was also meant to deal with these bots) added to the game about 2 months ago iirc, but that didn't really go too well for us due to how sensitive it was and how many false bans were happening, so it was removed asap.

Most of us realized it's been an issue we can't avoid completely, and at this point, it's more up to roblox than us if it gets fixed or not sadly. So we are pretty much here banning as many ppl as humanly possible, which kinda feels like hitting a wall at times.

[Dynamitagious]

In Vietnam, VNĐ is equivalent to around $12 USD. Usually we treat money in Vietnam by removing the thousand and treating it as a part of the unit.
VNĐ is also considered quite a lot here.

[NyreFang]

Team Fortress 2 send their condolences

[ibrahim]

Just joined to Roblox MM2 again only because of this video (I didn't even select a specific server; I clicked the play button), and everyone was a bot in the server. It's crazy to see how Roblox changed in 8 years.

[ScottTheNot]

6:15 Roblox has never been a transparent company since around 2015 so I'm not even surprised at any of this being lies, thinking a multi-billion dollar company is going to be honest is like expecting Jeff Bezos to pay the Amazon workers fairly. It's just not happening anytime soon.

[NotEssentialU]

I bet my whole life savings Singlepack ain’t beating Tower of Hell 😭🙏

[influxional]

did not expect ntts to become a roblox youTuber

also ur growing so fast omg!! I remember when you had only 300k

[The_Devil]

"You might get lucky and you might not get banned or you might get banned" true facts

[Doctor_lce]

as a veteran roblox player, i have not seen these bots yet. Maybe because i dont play random games that are popular amongs kids due to eye candy and addictions. But it is a big problem. I am terrified of what would happen to the platform if this keeps going

The dead internet theory is becoming real on so many fronts...

[Moeturr]

hey- dev here. i've had to deal with exploiters before and the devforum post is essentially saying "we're doing things, but we can't disclose them. we're also making tools for you other people to use to crack down on things if it comes to that."

as you said, it's a monumental nothing-burger. i really don't think they're handling this well at all. since i'm lucky that i'm smart enough to program with several of roblox's APIs at once but not everyone has been programming games for >8 years now. for smaller devs or people who are lucky (or unlucky) enough to suddenly be front-page, this is DISASTROUS. smaller games with dev teams of <5 usually do not have the extensive programming knowledge on how to make use of these APIs quick enough (nor resources) and extensively enough to mitigate botting problems and/or cheating issues.

for long-time veterans of the platform like me, it's us breathing a very slight sigh of relief. for smaller devs that don't have the experience, they may just quit outright because they're now presented with "deal with it or wait for us to deal with it." this isn't good at all for smaller devs since it can force a crunch-time for weeks on end or in a worst-case scenario, kill a game outright.

the company structure within roblox reminds me a lot of modern day Respawn Entertainment- their devs love what they work on and want to improve it so much but higher-ups will shoot down any idea that won't directly translate to a number on a spreadsheet.

[iGottic]

Yo, developer from Slap Battles here (a top 35 game). Can confirm bots aren't healthy for us, and it's been a problem we've been having to dump time into.

Our botting issue got worse for a bit when we released trading, particularly because a dupe exploit was discovered quickly. For a bit, it completely ruined our in-game economy, and once we fixed it, we had to make all items minted before a certain date untradable, unfortunately catching many innocent players in the crossfire.

Fortunately, we designed the economy so that, assuming duping doesn't work, it's hard to automate earning our in-game currency for crates.

All in all, bots ARE a problem, and at this point even the top devs (who get special treatment from Roblox) are still desperate for any sign of improvement, which we aren't getting. It puts an unjust amount of responsibility on us, especially since Roblox does provide very many avenues for implementing anti-cheat. This isn't new though, I remember it being an issue even when I started Roblox development over 10 years ago.

As of right now, Roblox trusts the client way too much, with a lack of built-in server authorization. This, combined with the fact that Roblox insists on keeping Roblox characters physics objects by default (which clients have network ownership of), just means a lot of our resources get wasted combatting the issue.

I do have some insight on things (including the Byfron/Hyperion team) that hopefully could be revealing to non-devs, so if anybody has any big questions, I'll do my best to answer.

[ChloeWaffle]

It isn't just games with a botting problem its groups or communities too. There has been an issue for years with groups being spammed with ally requests from groups with bots in them programmed to specifically do this. They do this so they can boost their member count illegitimately. Its the same set of groups too and its very annoying to decline the same ally request as much as multiple times a week.

[Jintenzo]

0:48 For some reason this single edit is the funniest thing I've seen in the last week.

[Ghostgirly]

Fun fact about Roblox: You can hide what games you are playing. So your friends and others can't tell. However, if you head into a server (private or public), your avatar will appear as a default avatar.

Just a random fun fact that contributes to nothing

[LuigiDOTexe]

9:00 Last I checked, Roblox *is* getting sued for exactly that, so no, that’s definitely not out of the question. Especially because the fine is only a *maximum* of 10mil, which is chump change to a company like Roblox, certainly so if the cheaters are making Roblox more than that 10mil.

[quocanhle]

As a Vietnamese, i admit that people try to get some money no matter what, and kids are slowly touch phones more often and their parents are less likely to care about their screen time and not really look after them, this escalating very quick :/