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Roblox Throws Out the Bots: Why Murder Mystery 2 Lost a Million Players Overnight
By Liska, has been playing Roblox and Murder Mystery 2 for almost three years
Since 18 August, Roblox has been keeping bot accounts out of games. In Murder Mystery 2 the player count fell from around 1.35 million to a little over 200,000. What is backed up, what is not, and why this is still good news.
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If you have been in Murder Mystery 2 over the past two weeks and thought it had suddenly got a lot quieter in there: you were not imagining it. Overnight into 18 August 2026, the MM2 player count crashed within a few hours. From a peak of around 1.35 million to under 220,000.
The game has not got worse. The bots are simply gone.
What Roblox itself says about it
Roblox confirmed this on 19 August 2026 in its own developer forum. The gist of what it says there: earlier that week the company began taking action against bot accounts, and it will expand that further. Along with it came a warning to game developers that player counts will fluctuate while these accounts are being removed. You can read it in the official post in the Roblox developer forum.
Two points from it matter:
The bots no longer get in. They are not just banned, they are turned away at the door when they try to enter a game.
What they left behind is being rolled back. Roblox is reversing followers, open friend requests, ratings and group joins from these accounts. So if your follower count has dropped, that may well be the reason. Those were not people who decided to stop following you.
The numbers, and how solid they are
It is worth looking closely here, because very large numbers are being passed around online at the moment.
| Claim | How well backed up |
|---|---|
| Roblox is taking action against bot accounts | Official, from Roblox itself, 19 August 2026 |
| MM2 lost around 500,000 players in two hours | Community trackers, reported in several places |
| Peak beforehand around 1.35 million | Statistics sites, not official |
| ”More than half of MM2 was bots” | Not confirmed. That comes from YouTubers and blogs, not from Roblox |
What anyone can check for themselves is where things stand today. The official Roblox interface reports around 282,000 concurrent players for Murder Mystery 2 on 29 August 2026, and 29.88 billion visits in total since the launch on 18 January 2014. The number moves around over the course of the day, with more going on in the evening than in the morning.
Roblox has not said how large the bot share really was. Anyone naming an exact percentage is guessing.
What a bot actually did in MM2
A bot is not a fellow player, it is a program with a Roblox account. In MM2 they stand out once you start paying attention: accounts that do exactly the same thing every round, stand silently in a corner, walk in circles or only collect coins. They do not chat, they do not react, they do not win.
Why would anyone do that? Usually it is about trading. Running a lot of accounts means collecting a lot of coins and getting to boxes and knives faster. Some accounts exist only to make player numbers look bigger than they are.
What this changes for you in the game
Honestly: not much, and the little there is is good.
The servers have not become emptier, they have become more real. In a round with twelve people, it is now more likely to be twelve humans than eight humans and four programs. If you collect coins, you have less silent competition. And if you trade, you are dealing with fewer accounts that were built purely to take.
What you should not do: get annoyed about the smaller number on the game page. The old number was partly made up.
Put in context for parents
The real lesson here is not in the game, it is in the number.
Every platform shows big numbers: players, followers, views, likes. In the space of a single afternoon, this episode shows that those numbers do not have to be people. A game loses a substantial part of its player base overnight without a single real person having stopped playing.
That makes a good occasion for a conversation at home, especially when your own child makes content and watches the numbers. Big numbers are no proof of great popularity, and smaller numbers are no proof of the opposite.
For further reading, our article Is Roblox safe for kids covers the settings that really make a difference, and Murder Mystery 2 simply explained is there if you do not know the game yourself yet.
Last checked: 29 August 2026. By its own account, the Roblox operation carries on over days and weeks, so the player numbers may keep changing. We will look again when Roblox provides new figures.