Creator Roadmap - AMA with Dan and Manuel [Jan 24, 2024]

Are there any plans to make spaced display names (or real names) available for users outside the USA?

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Will we see new improvements to graphics settings like higher quality shadows and an advanced/improved graphics settings menu?

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Will websockets & more events (like gdpr, ban request removal) be added to Roblox? There is an on-going feature request for this, and I wanted to follow-up to see if it’s planned, or whats going on.

What happened to expanding the UGC program to classic, 2D faces? When UGC was first announced, we were told that this would happen? But based on this statement regarding the release of UGC faces, I am not entirely sure.

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Thanks for all the great questions! This is more than we ever received, We’re locking up the post now as we continue to work through the questions asked. If you have a question definitely check above as it might have already been asked!

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Great question. Creator input of bug reports and feature requests are a key part of how we improve the platform. We’re glad you’re noticing the progress we’ve made on bug reports. We have made significant progress on bug closures, and made sure each bug gets to a development team. But there is more work to do, as we’d like to open #bug-reports to even more creators.

#feature-requests have to be handled somewhat differently. Our product and engineering teams review these regularly and those ideas go into our thinking about the roadmap. But it is one of many inputs into that roadmap process. As such, we might not take each request on as described, or even feel now is the right time (vs a bug report where, honestly, we just don’t want any bugs!)

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A key area of focus for us right now is enhancing our support for large creator teams and more sophisticated development processes, including CI and CD. You can expect us to provide full support for CI-type functionality, so you can securely and programmatically build, test, and deploy Roblox assets, including experiences. The core capability to run tests for your environment should be possible in the first half of this year with richer capabilities to follow.

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Our primary focus right now is flex layouts and custom styling, as we believe these will make building UI on Roblox significantly easier. Later this year, we will shift focus to work on UI improvements, and we will make sure these are on our backlog.

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The Discover page represents a very small percentage of impressions and playtime, and is an area that we plan to fully revamp in H1.

One important thing to note is that the main landing page for recommendations and game discovery is Home, which contributes to the vast majority of impressions for experiences, discovery and playtime on Roblox. This is the area where we have made most of our product investments and are seeing good success with new experiences breaking out and being discovered by more users. We are planning to continue to improve the user experience and recommendations on Home.

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“Up Direction” and other updates to the new character physics controller should be released in beta in the first half of the year. We want to make sure we get this right and the quality level is there for the release.

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Great question. We know how important this is to ensure experiences are safe and you can manage them well. Key functions we expect to provide are the ability for a creator to use the Ban API to ban a user with configurable duration and reasons, to unban a user themselves, and to read the previous moderation history for their experience. By integrating with the platform’s alt detection, when a creator bans a user all of their alt accounts will also be banned with high precision. We expect this feature to be available by summer of this year.

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Search and Discovery are areas of our product where we invest continuously to ensure we can match users with experiences that they’ll love and to give new experiences opportunities to be discovered. In 2024 we will continue to make improvements to these areas as you can see on our creator roadmap. Some examples:

  • A continually scrollable Home feed - targeting first half of the year
  • Labels like Friend presence in the experience on the Home page - targeting first half of the year
  • Algorithmically-Generated Categories and Sorts - Highlighting new, high quality, and trending experiences - later in 2024
  • Ongoing improvements to the algorithm improving refresh rates, signals, and many more

See related response here.

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Thanks for the feedback. Limiteds are a relatively new product for us and we are constantly looking to iterate and improve it. By having a quantity, this creates scarcity and can increase the value of the item. Since launching in 2023, we have seen Limiteds selling out and resale transactions higher than the original price. With that said, we are exploring some changes to how Limiteds work and the per-unit fees ahead of opening up creation for anyone in order to address some of these concerns.

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Thanks for the question. We don’t have any immediate plans to do so. With that said, we are regularly evaluating our approach to Roblox-created items.

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Thanks for this feedback. We’ll look at expanding SocialService to allow inviting a group of players, though it’s not something we’re actively working on. We appreciate the suggestion! For social interaction broadly, we’re also thinking about how to enable durable groups, and enabling the ability to join communities too. We’ll be moving the ‘collaboration’ use cases for groups to Creator Hub over time, but these changes will not replace the social use cases for groups.

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Please see a related answer here.

Based on community feedback, many creators avoid adopting newer features due to their lack of ability on the low end. For now, we are focusing on improving mobile performance, fidelity and scalability so that our higher-end features are available to more players. As we close this gap we will transition to adding more features at the high end like some of those that you mention.

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Many of our creators are already making amazing, high-fidelity experiences, like Frontlines. We want to see more experiences that approach this level of quality, and we want to continue adding functionality to the platform to make it easier and easier to build realistic/large worlds. Two years ago at RDC, David showed an image of a 50,000 person stadium as an example of the type of experience we’d like to support, and we haven’t lost sight of that goal. We want to enable limitless scalability and fidelity long-term.

In terms of specifics, this year we will be working on significantly improving performance, especially on lower end devices (better client frame rate, improved memory efficiency, etc.) so that higher fidelity experiences can reach everyone on Roblox. We’re also focused on avatar performance (such as layered clothing performance), and pushing the limits on larger experiences. If you haven’t turned on streaming, I encourage you to do so. We will continue to improve this system and long-term this is what will get us to being able to support truly massive worlds.

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Yes. We are in final performance testing and plan to release this feature soon!

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