Comment by jjmarr
1 day ago
The "child safety measures" was dividing the playerbase into age groups and banning almost all communication between them. The age groups are under 9, 9–12, 13–15, 16–17, 18–20, and 21+. Users only speak to other players ±1 age group, so 18-20 can speak to 16-17 or 21+.
The problem is almost every game on Roblox is social and the matchmaking isn't mature enough to ensure players in a lobby can all communicate.
My favourite is "generic roleplay gaem". The main fun is inciting riots against the leader or forming alliances to do raids. I could join a game and within half-an-hour I'd be engaged in drama, since Roblox incentivizes ephemeral lobbies with random people meaning I don't need a lengthy time commitment to form an alliance.
But I can no longer do that because I am 25 years old and the lobbies are too young. Heck, I'd rather play that game with only other users over 18+ because I could swear and be more toxic. But the matchmaking system literally makes that impossible.
I've had the same Roblox account for 18 years and have spent tens of thousands of Robux on the platform. I let Roblox scan my passport even, so they know who I am. Even though I own nearly 1000 Steam games, Roblox still filled my desire for low-commitment social games I could jump into on my phone or computer if I had a few hours of downtime. Now it is effectively unplayable.
I'm in favour of child safety. But these measures were implemented poorly and needed to be paired with matchmaking to not destroy the platform.
> these measures were implemented poorly and needed to be paired with matchmaking to not destroy the platform
I see these as orthogonal issues.
Your mathmaking gripe sounds legitimate, and is probably driven by Roblox's low 21+ user numbers. That would be expected to change over time. At the same time, I'm not seeing a great argument for why these folks (EDIT: Roblox) should continue to have unfettered access to kids under 14.
Roblox is absolutely torching their platform, in many ways besides matchmaking and the age verification. Ask any kid who's grown up with the game. Players are leaving in droves and Roblox has become quite un-cool in the last six or so months.
As someone who dislikes predator havens that are combined with addictive dark patterns honed to maximize children begging parents for Robux (or just stealing parents’ credit cards to get it) I couldn’t be happier to see Roblox collapse.
I’m sure what replaces it will be even worse though. :/
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I can tell you right now that any kid that’s growing up with the platform right now couldn’t care less.
They don’t communicate in chat. They communicate by shouting at each other from 2 feet away.
> Ask any kid who's grown up with the game.
I don’t have a kid who’s grown up with Roblox nearby to ask. Can you please explain what you mean?
“thing that was cool to kids is not cool anymore” is not a new phenomenon, and the onus is really on you to show the causation.
If communication was proactively filtered to prevent bad actors (which Roblox obviously failed to do for years), why should it matter if an adult is playing a game with a kid they don't know?
> why should it matter if an adult is playing a game with a kid they don't know?
My main problem is the kid is playing a game with significant social-media (and gambling) components. That's orthogonal to the question of who is playing with whom, which I agree, is theoretically solvable with better filters.
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There’s a large risk and hugely adversarial nature/motivation for predators to bypass whatever proactive filtering is put in place.
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Roblox is effectively a casino for kids with more social elements than in adult casinos. The corporation failed to prevent children from rapists for decades. Why would any rational person trust them to implement either proactive communication filters or to even allow something so close to gambling amongst different age groups?
Roblox doesn’t deserve to be a business and I hope the lawsuits and equity markets solve that in a hurry.
Why 18-20 are isolated from 21+? Aren't they all adult or in some countries children develop slower?
They aren't:
> Users only speak to other players ±1 age group
I.e., 18-20 can speak to 16-17 AND 21+, but 21+ can only speak to 18+
This seems like a very reasonable system to ensure e.g. you and your classmate/friends can still interact as you grow up and switch age brackets. I wonder how families etc deal with it though? Can you play with your younger sibling/cousin? Is there some sort of parental approval/override?
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US drinking age probably being used as a proxy for "adult-ness".
> Why 18-20 are isolated from 21+?
We have 18-year olds in high school in America. The headline risk from a 40-something sleeping with a high-school student is probably something Roblox wants to get ahead of.
Yes but an 18yo can also buy a gun, get drafted into the military, and produce OF/porn.
But no alcohol.
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You've had your Roblox account for 18 years? Wtf, I could've sworn that game was released 4 years ago!
Thanks for making me feel old I guess.
Don’t forget the part where GP says they’re 25 years old (currently) and have spent “tens of thousands of dollars” on the platform.
Just a point of clarity (because I read that at first as well), they spent tens of thousands of robux, which are at a generic level 100:$1. So not as crazy as it sounds, still an investment.
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It doesn't seem surprising me they started playing at 7, and they were playing the game in 2008. I definitely recall the game taking off a good bit with little kids around that time. By like 2010 or so I knew of a ton of little kids who were at least aware of the game if they didn't play it themselves.
Game has been around for almost 20 years now.
Roblox is older than Minecraft...
Why do I remember learning about Minecraft way earlier than learning about Roblox?
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> But these measures were implemented poorly and needed to be paired with matchmaking to not destroy the platform.
As a parent, my experience in discussion with other parents is: "Don't ever let your child onto Roblox, it is utterly toxic and should be avoided at all costs."
From that perspective, I think most parents view the destruction of the platform as neutral to positive, and it suggests that the status quo would destroy the platform anyway.
Which parents do you talk with? The consensus around me seems to be that it’s fine as long as whatever you do on there is done with RL friends.
This sounds like a really counterproductive system. Usually in age verification, you prove that you're over a certain age. 9 year olds don't have very many ways to prove that they're 9 years old. What's stopping the creeps from pretending to be younger than they are?
They automatically assign you to an age group based on AI/guessing/face verification. If you've been assigned to an incorrect group, you need to do KYC verification with ID.
My 9 year old got verified as 21+ somehow. He obviously doesn’t have a photo id, so there is no way to verify him as a child. Support refused to help. The whole system is insane.
Exactly, but it's pretty clear adults can work around the automatic assignment (being adult makes you much better at figuring out how to fool such profiling systems). And the verification with ID is only good for proving that you're old, i.e. to keep kids out of adult spaces. It's no good for keeping adults out of kids spaces.
What’s to stop a 40 year old from holding up a photo of their 15 year old self for the age verification camera?
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Or perhaps you’ve aged out of a game that is primarily meant to be a place for children. The child safety measures make things more difficult for you because nobody wants you there. And it seems to be working as designed. Maybe it’s time to find a new game that’s more for your age group.
LOL, they literally said they want to play with other 18+ players alone. Without kids in the lobby, at all.
What are you, fun police? What's next, ban on bright coloured clothes?
You'd be surprised to know the sheer number of "experiences" and games people have created on roblox as the platform.
There are fps shooting games that are more playable/mature than your yearly call of duty/battlefield and all kinds of games for older age groups.
In that sense it's probably hard to "age out of it".
There’s a whole bunch of Roblox experiences clearly designed for adults. There’s dozens of us xD
I’m not sure if I’d say it’s better or worse, the games are higher quality because they need to be to keep an older adience engaged.
Roblox isn't a game, it's a platform. It has hundreds of millions of monthly users. A significant portion of those are 18+. And unsurprisingly there's plenty of games that target older audiences.
This is quite like saying that because you’ve “aged out” of high school, you must be suddenly cut off from interacting with all the friends you made in high school
IRL, you stay in touch with some of those old high school friends for years.
I don’t know if it’s the Roblox system deliberately trying to prevent players from maintaining contact outside the game with their friends? Or maybe just that the players haven’t foreseen the need to be ready for the abrupt cut in communication on their next birthday? (Happy Birthday!)
Sounds like a serious strategic error by Roblox though.
You’re unlikely to convince an adult of that age who has willingly spent 10s of thousands of dollars on a children’s game that they maybe shouldn’t be playing it.
Tens of thousands of robux. That's hundreds of dollars, reasonable for a long term player.
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> Heck, I'd rather play that game with only other users over 18+ because I could swear and be more toxic.
Perhaps reexamine why you find it preferable to "be more toxic"
Basically, the game takes place in a medieval walled settlement. The person who's on the server the longest becomes the "leader" and gets to tax everyone/manage the settlement/build stuff. This is extremely profitable.
If the leader dies, the next person in line becomes the leader. Players can also buy swords and weapons.
This means the goal of the game, if you're ambitious, is gain power instead of actually contributing to the settlement. You could directly murder the leaders, but this is slow.
It is more efficient to incite an angry mob and make everyone extremely violent. Then leaders will get repeatedly murdered by the mob as the settlement burns down/devolves into chaos.
Unfortunately, everyone else wants power too. You'll take power and get killed by the angry mob you created.
Being toxic in an emulation of the late Roman Empire is essentially the game.
https://www.roblox.com/games/4598019433/generic-roleplay-gae...
I want to invoke my inner Catullus and insult my enemies but I am limited in what I can say in the presence of minors.
So adults having innocent fun together and perhaps "cussing" while in strictly 28+ game are somehow problematic to you? :D
This comment itself comes across as so toxic, ironically - as if it’s somehow wrong to want to blow off steam in a way that isn’t appropriate for a nine year old to experience personally.
Edit: I swear it seems like infantilizing everyone is suddenly a goal for some reason. This has to be the most annoying personality type on the internet.
Your comment is blowing something out of proportions. He prefers 25+, said so. Toxic in there means "F u", get a "F u and u'r mother" back and both persons laughs after. It's not toxic in the sense of "I will kill you and your entire family", but more like venting something in a safe space. You don't go in real life to a random stranger and say "F u", but in a lobby of a virtual game that's acceptable. And he's saying he prefer that since also going to a lobby full of 9 years old kids and saying that is way more toxic and he prefers the algorithm to actually match him with appropriate ones instead of throwing him in young lobbies and then cannot be able to speak with them. So clearly the algorithm is half baked, made communications worse and needs more tuning. Swearing is part of any culture in humanity, and there is a reason the among the first things you learn in a foreign language is swearing. Used wisely, that "toxicity" is actually a great tool to forge good relations.