I was a popular troll on this one server and one time I RPed as a girl and WOW my voice changer must have been good because I got SO much mysogyny. Needless to say that experience made me feel not even remotely bad when I ended up getting the place shut down later.
On one hand it can be damaging to take away opportunities from kids, on the other hand roblox is massive groomer haven; I genuinely don’t think the kinds of connections they would make there would be worth the long term harm that may result for being involved in that shit.
Ultimately I think you did the right thing by banning it. You’re locking out like a 10th of their social life but those aren’t contacts they want.
I made an anti-cheat for vanilla minecraft once, it’s REALLY easy to tell if someone is cheating it’s just developers are grotesquely incompetent when it comes to detecting that sort of thing or (more often) just don’t give a shit. They’ll just create a naïve solution then never test it. For example: minecraft’s god awful anti-fly and anti-speedhack which is just “is the player in the air for 5 seconds” or “did the player go too fast” which is notorious for false positives and doesn’t even stop people trying to cheat, just punishes players for its own fuck-ups.
It really is as simple as creating a model of what the player should be able to do, and then nudging clients towards that expected play. Normal players will not even notice (or will be pleased when it fixs a desync) but cheaters will get ENRAGED and try to cheat harder before eventually giving up. The point of a good anticheat is not to punish players for cheating, but to make it easier and more fun to play within the rules.
It’s like piracy: We had years of systems built on punishment and all they do is create resentment and people trying to break your system, but you build a system on rehabilitation and you become one of the biggest platforms for PC gaming with people willingly downloading it.
There is no problem involving valve games that can’t be solved by not playing valve games. Seriously, I quit a long time ago and my mental health has soared from not being around those borderline neo-nazi gamers all the time. Fuck valve for harboring fascists within their platform.
I want there to be systems that have absolutely no game design in them. Stuff that literally is just there to add random possibilities to the experience. Extremely basic and consistent rules which are extremely easy to grasp but result in all sorts of crazy shit. Stuff like redstone from minecraft or fairy dust in Stardew Valley. I want to completely forget about the game for a bit and just get completely lost in the intricacies.
A perfect example of this: Adding a joker (wildcard) to poker. It’s just one basic card, you know what it does, but the amount that one card can completely break the game leads to far more interest than the base game could ever provide.