In the darkness of the recent changes, here is a genuine concern that I’d like addressed. I will pretend that none of it bothers me for the sake of clarity and brevity.
Unverified users, who choose to remain so for many reasonable reasons, are unable to type into the chat box whatsoever. With the new chat changes, only users of certain verified age groups can receive eachother’s messages.
Since this logic already exists, unverified users should still be able to type into the chat box and send messages. Obviously, these messages won’t be received by any other players (except maybe trusted connections whenever that releases and if that even works). However, many games use chat commands to do certain things. For example, one of my games has a chat command “/e DRAW01” which will open a drawbridge. “/e” commands in chat have been popular since they still trigger chat events for scripts to pick up, but they don’t show for other players because “/e” creates a hidden message.
This is purely a compatibility issue, and would prevent people from having to figure out how to rework entire game functionalities just because not everybody can type anymore, regardless of who might or might not see their messages. Again, the changes made to chat already designate who is allowed to receive messages from others, so there is no reason why this couldn’t be done.
i agree the chat box should still be accessible, although it would be confusing to unverified children as to why nobody is responding to them (unless a system disclaimer is sent in chat)
A lot of games use the chat for admin commands or by initiating events like solving puzzles via typing out the solution with a chat message. Not being able to write messages blocks all of this, so I agree that non-age-checked users should be able to. They should make it clear however that no user will be able to communicate with them, and that only the experience or Roblox can send messages to them.
There are many scenarios where unverified players would need to interact with the chatbox, a common one, which the OP already stated, is chat commands. Many games rely on chat commands as a core feature. Some of those games may not have active developers to update the game to fix this compatibility issue.
There would still be a system message warning them that nobody can see their chats.
I agree, you should still be able to use the chat box to send messages to the server only. I had to update of my games since some of the badges required chat. However if you’re unverified It should have a disclaimer saying no one else will see your messages
A year or 2 ago Roblox told encouraged us to use the brand new TextChatCommand instance yet now those who did use it (like me) are getting punished for using it instead of making our own command bar, genuinely did no one at their team consider that this breaks all kinds of chat commands??
In all fairness, there were already users who couldn’t chat at all before this, that would also have been unable to use chat commands. Consider users with chatting disabled in their privacy settings by their parents/guardians. It’s always been a good idea to offer a command bar for those who can’t chat.
That said, I do otherwise agree with the feature request.
I agree, though the title could be reworded. I would say that a message at the top could say something like “Chat commands can only be recieved by the system and are not visible to other players” and replacing the chat placeholder text with a similar message.
The inability to use commands has caused me great problems, because I play a lot of old badge hunts which use /e as a simple way to input codes (given most of the other options to input a code are either clunky or require understanding Client/Server relations which is an advanced scripting topic). These puzzles are completely inaccessible to me because I am not age verified, even though there is no communication happening by using a silent chat command.
In addition, it has harmed my ability to use emotes, as R6 emotes are impossible to use without chat at all, and switching to R15 limits me to using the in-game emote wheel which only holds up to eight at a time.
I really hope this use case is looked at, as it unnecessarily inhibits unverified users for something that does not actually affect textual user-to-user communication and thus does not fall under Roblox’s user safety concerns.
They already have a system for this when your chat gets suspended, don’t know why they can’t just use that but for unverified users, as well as replacing the “Only people in similar age groups can chat with you” with “Other players cannot see your messages. Get an age check to chat” or something similar
