The idea of making Atherum and what 'alts' mean

 

Recently (August 10, 2022), Session 42 Studios has released a new product dedicated for developers: Atherum. The product idea has been on the Roblox DevForum, YouTube, and Twitter.

What is Atherum?

"Atherum is a brand-new ROBLOX alternate account detection system developed and maintained by Session 42 Studios. Atherum aims to detect as many alternate accounts as possible with a high-efficiency rate.

We are confident that 80-90% of ROBLOX’s ToS-breakers, such as exploiters, trollers, spammers, raiders, bots, etc. are alternate accounts. People have been trying to combat those people with different methods, but what if we fight the source of it? What if we detect those accounts before they even get to try to ruin the gameplay? "

This is how InfiniteBlackPIX (Atherum developer), has described and promoted Atherum. It is an open-source program that aims to detect ROBLOX alternate accounts by performing several different checks on the newly joined player(s). 

The community's response?

The developer community that was meant to benefit from this system has turned out to be disappointed. Most of the replies on the DevForum thread directly claimed that Atherum is a "bad" system and should not be used in any circumstance.

"An unexpected reaction" was how the people behind Atherum described the community's replies.

Therefore, we have decided to write a clarification on how we imagined Atherum to be:

What we defined as 'alts'?

It turned out that people have a completely different definition for 'alts'. Anyways other than us. And it's understandable. People who never experienced game raids, exploiters, trollers, etc., or those who never saw how a raider group chat looks like can have a very different vision on 'alts'.

Many people may think that what we call an 'alt' is just a secondary account. Basically a second version of someone's main account, which is completely wrong. 

What we call an 'alt' are accounts either offered by an 'alt generator' or created just to bypass moderation. It's far from "email verified" or "is in many groups".

These accounts are used only once (most of the times), as a new account like this will be used next time. Here's an example of an 'alt':

This kind of accounts are used by raiders or exploiters and Atherum is meant to detect them. People who use these alts don't waste time joining groups, earning badges, and so on.

Why detect alts?

As mentioned, people take advantage of them to bypass moderation, or take no risk when raiding/trolling/exploiting. Some people claim that it's a bad idea to try to detect alts due to the false positives. However, nobody understood that alts don't have to be banned.