Today Roblox announced 17+ Experiences Can Add Support for Strong Language, however it feels like a developer might be shooting themselves in the foot by only catering their experience to the 17+ audience.
Right now the solution is to release two uploads of the same experience with different ratings, however this lowers the player count for the main experience and could possibly damage the games standing in the discovery algorithm.
Please add a feature that allows developers to toggle age appropriate server options to players - allowing 17+ players to pick whether they want to enter a server with everyone, or only with other 17+ players in what might otherwise be considered a family friendly experience.
A property could be added to the DataModel that lets developers determine if a server is running for 17+ players or not, allowing them to enable/disable things accordingly, rather than having to specifically cater the entire experience to a mature audience, or not.
+1, every year I organise Roliday and I was super excited to take advantage of the 17+ setting, as the game has been running for over 8 years now and many people have grown up on Roblox playing it every December. It is such a shame that in order to avail of the feature, Roliday needs to be 17+ only (which I absolutely will not do, because it’s meant to be a game for everybody).
I see the “17+” toggle as “restrict access to > 90% of the platform”, it seems like a good way to harm your game.
Why would I take my game away from everybody else just so I can swear, or add a bottle of beer in the corner? Users could not care less and the engagement numbers reflect this. I’ve been 18+ for nearly a decade now (ouch) and I don’t think I’ve ever bought/played a game just because it has alcohol or swearing. This is like a teenager’s idea of what appeals to adults.
Actual 17+ servers where you are more likely to be playing with other people in your age group is a great idea. I don’t like using voice chat mainly because it’s often children (definitely under 13) screaming or begging for Robux.
By “versions” I mean two uploads of the same experience with different ratings to enable certain functionality. I’ve edited the OP to better clarify this.
No, I think that the 17+ section should still exist. My request is for the ability to allow 17+ players to start and/or join 17+ servers in experiences that might not have the 17+ rating so that developers do not need to split their players into separate experiences (possibly damaging their experiences’ standing in the front page sorts).
Just to clarify, you have two separate versions of your experience. One setup for Mature Players and the Other setup for the Kid Friendly, not the same single experience that can do both at the same time?
The second part, you want +17 player to be about to start a +17 only players server for your non-17 experience?
I apologize if I sound confused because I’m pretty sure that’s already possible and I’m already doing that now with my experience.
How do you enable swearing for people 17+, which requires a 17+ rating on the experience, without denying access to everybody else? (Or anything else that the guidelines say is only acceptable in experiences with 17+ ratings - this is just the easiest because it enforces the requirement via technical means instead of them needing to see a guidelines violation)
The only way I see is to have two separate experiences
The 17+ Experience settings are not attached to the place file, but the Universe ID. You can have one version of your game and it simply checks the universe ID when it starts. If it detects the 17+ Universe ID, fire up all the Mature stuff. If it detects the non-17+ universe ID, fall back to kid friendly mode. This way, you only work on “one” experience and simply publish it to both universe IDs for the same game.
No more having to maintain two separate versions!
These two games are running the exact same game. The only difference is the Universe ID for different settings, one 17+ and the other non-17+
Yep, so you still have to do a bunch of extra work keeping two experiences in sync that could be entirely eliminated if they allowed 17+ servers for experiences rated for younger people.
Being it’s the same code base, the extra work is for the 17+ people, such as blood and gore. What you are asking for, I believe, is a way for the younger people to join the 17+ server with other 17+ players and the server just turn off the 17+ stuff for them specifically? I agree, I would much rather prefer it that way as I know how to do it, but Roblox is put into a situation where it relies on the developers to do this “properly” and I can already see abuse issues with devs not following the rules or making a gamepass for “turn on mature mode” that younger people could buy to get stuff without doing any verification. I agree with the spirit of your request, but I don’t see a practical way Roblox could enforce this if they just leave it to the devs. They have a hard enough time with devs that blatantly break the rules with sex theme games disguised as something else.
No, I mean you have to do work to publish the same stuff twice for every change. It also means you need to do a lot of extra work if you want saved stuff to transfer between the two experiences since they don’t share a data store, and the algorithm will treat them as two less popular experiences instead of one popular one, etc. There are many issues with this approach, even if it is a workaround.
No, I mean for an experience supporting this feature, there would basically be multiple join buttons - Join 17+, Join 13+ etc and it would use the one experience but have segregated servers by the rating you accept. You could theoretically have a version for every age rating that, as you showed, enables different things for different groups (via some new property to read the server age rating). One version doesn’t have violence effects and is cartoony, the 13+ might be very slightly realistic, the 17+ is more so and allows swearing and such, but all from a single experience, all counting for the algorithm as a single entity, sharing a data store, etc. Of course it only allows people to join servers based on their profile settings
I absolutely support this.
I’d really like a censor service so 13+ and 17+ players can enjoy the same experience but with restrictions/censoring in place where needed.
It’s been a long time dream of mine to develop games more aimed at mature audiences but also have some settings and controls for accessibility and for people who are not comfortable with extreme gore or cursing.
Currently making a 17+ experience just cuts your game off from a MAJOR player base because it requires ID verification and whatnot to play a 17+ game.
I’m in desperate need of a censoring service or a way to let all players enjoy a game without some being left out and missing out on a quality experience.
I would also like to play together on the same servers with non-verified friends but just disable some effects for them.
Yes, I agree we should have servers/places that restrict ages instead of experiences doing so. This is kind of the same problem that happened with the release of voice chat, you were only able to toggle it for experiences, which is bad because, for example, the DataStoreService isn’t shared between experiences.
-- Something like this would be good, on server execution (server script)
local CensorService = game:GetService("CensorService")
CensorService:SetServerMinimumAge("17")
I, however, doubt that they will add dynamic settings (toggling on/off while the server is running, like the piece of code I provided) OR that they even add it for servers, perhaps we can hope for PLACE restrictions instead of EXPERIENCE restrictions.
I understand better and you bring up some good points. You could technically already do this with lobbies and just teleport players to the mature servers or how many others versions of the game you wanted to parse out (under 9, 13+, 17+) and all the server visits and rankings would be preserved since everyone has to start at your main lobby version. If you want to share data between those versions of the games, you use the Cloud API for that; which is already built into Roblox. If you want concurrent player totals, then the lobby version will only show those in the lobby and not out on the other servers, so that also has it’s limitations.
So what you suggest is Roblox give us a way to have “one” central experience, a way to branch off that experience into whatever versions we need and for all those concurrent users to all count towards the main experience because if half are in the mature version and the other half is in the non-mature version, you want all of those counted together for the main experience?
Nothing is impossible, but that would require some radical changes to way Roblox does it’s development process and game structure as a whole, along with updated Clients to supported it, etc.
