Developers criticise “demoralising” lack of anti-cheat support from Roblox

Several Roblox developers have criticised the lack of support from the Roblox Corporation in providing adequate anti-cheat tools, saying it’s becoming “demoralising and exhausting” to create within the platform.

Back in April, a developer named Hutch took to the Roblox Developer Forum to start a thread titled “Developers are not equipped to deal with exploiters” (via PCGamesN). In his initial message, he wrote “This is a post targeting the severe lack of tooling and support provided by Roblox in regards to exploiting and dealing with generally abusive users.”

Are you a Roblox dev? Exploiters have you burnt? Tell me about it: https://t.co/dCbWmnNVeF

— Liam Hutch (@LMH_Hutch) April 27, 2022

“Despite my best efforts to build functioning anti-cheats and arm my moderators with tools I will never be able to build a better culture for my communities so long as Roblox as a whole fails to address exploiting in a more hands on way,” they added.

Yesterday (August 2) Hutch posted an update, saying that since Apocalypse Rising 2 went free-to-play, their moderation team have handed out nearly 3000 bans with another 25,343 bans coming through anti-cheat software.

It’s been a month since #ApocalypseRising2 released for free! In that time we gained 6M visits. Our moderators banned 2,964 accounts, and our automatic anti-cheat banned 25,342 accounts. @LMH_Hutch posted an update on his exploit thread: https://t.co/FvanvA9qiN#RobloxDev #Roblox

— Gus Dubetz (@Gusmanak) August 1, 2022

“It is exhausting and demoralising dealing with exploiters all the time,” they wrote. “The enjoyment I get out of developing games on Roblox doesn’t even start to outweigh the burnout myself and my moderation teams suffer through. It’s so much larger of an issue than just an anti-cheat problem and it never feels like any meaningful progress is made by Roblox to assist developers with these issues.”

“All the security work in the world won’t make up for the fact that I can’t even keep a person out of my game let alone report them to the platform they’re breaking the rules on. I’m tired of kicking individual accounts after they join.

“I want to ban a person from my game because I caught them cheating, and I don’t want them coming back or even being able to press play. I want these people to have real consequences for their actions. I want the effort I put into my anti-cheat to not be totally undermined by a social platform that only has one developer facing moderation tool 122 (with outdated docs and no tutorial for making the ban system the docs refer to),” they continued.

i have pretty much resigned myself to never work on a competitive game on Roblox again, because the experience of maintaining it against a constant wave of cheaters without any effective tools is a nightmare

— Polyhex (@tylermcbride) August 1, 2022

Fellow developer Polyhex shared the post on Twitter, before adding that they “have pretty much resigned myself to never work on a competitive game on Roblox again, because the experience of maintaining it against a constant wave of cheaters without any effective tools is a nightmare.”

Last month, Roblox announced a wave of new hires, including Spotify’s former head of music development and Meta’s head of emerging content in an attempt to “push the boundaries of creativity.”