As a Roblox developer, it is currently hard to deal with certain special effects included in avatar accessories created by Roblox over the platform’s long history, including particles, sounds, and even lights, which have the potential to be disruptive in certain types of experiences.
Over the platform’s history, Roblox has released many different avatar accessories that include special effects, such as particles, sounds, and lights. Some of these accessories are Limited items that are very expensive and sought after due to their effects (some are frequently resold for over 1 million Robux!). On Roblox, a majority of experiences allow users to bring their platform level avatar into the experience, including all of the special effects that their avatar accessories include. In a lot of experiences, these effects aren’t disruptive at all, and are just a really cool and unique part of player’s avatars, however, in certain types of experiences, particularly those where you are competing against other players, these effects can be distracting, or even give the player wearing these items a small competitive edge.
Developers should not have to account for the existence of this small pool of avatar items, and should have an easy way to toggle specific effects within their experiences. Roblox should add a toggle, perhaps within StarterPlayer properties (or elsewhere within experience settings) that allow developers to disable or otherwise control different types of effects individually. The reason that there should be different toggles for each effect type (eg Particles, Sounds, and Lights) is because each effect type may or may not be disruptive in an experience. Developers should have the choice to decide which effect types to allow in their experiences.
Just to clarify, this is not a request to remove any effects from any of Roblox’s accessories. Owners of these items should be able to continue using these effects within experiences that allow them, as these effects are what make the items special and highly sought after. Removing them outright would be unfair to those who purchased them, and in my opinion, Roblox has the responsibility to continue support for these items, while at the same time, giving developers tools to disable the effects that could be disruptive in their experiences.
If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my development experience because developers would be able to easily toggle specific avatar accessory effect types that they determine to be disruptive in their experiences, and players would be able to continue using their items with special effects across all experiences, with the effects only disabled in experiences that choose to do so.