We’ve had a great time hearing your thoughts and following up on the creator roadmap. Your advice and feedback are invaluable as we forge ahead with our vision for the future of creation on Roblox. We can’t wait to connect with you again in the next AMA.
Until then, keep creating!
[Update] - 1PM PT
Everyone, thank you so much for checking in and asking so many great questions – we are going to stop collecting new questions now, but will continue to wrap up and post answers to a few more of your questions.
Hi Creators,
Dan (@TheKingsHappyFool) and Manuel (@aelarix) here, and we are excited to kick off our very first Creator AMA!
Over the past four weeks, we have been releasing our Creator Roadmap, where we outlined our vision and plans for the future of the platform. We understand that many of you have questions about what’s been shared so far, and we would like to spend some time to help clarify.
For the next 90 minutes, we will be available live to answer any questions you may have relating to the roadmap and upcoming releases. For your questions to be answered, please share them as a comment below.
If you see a question in the comments that you would also like us to answer, click the heart to “upvote” it. This helps us prioritize our queue and get to the questions that matter to you.
Remember, this AMA is a friendly and open space. We greatly appreciate your constructive criticism, suggestions and feedback. Since this is our first public AMA, please bear with us and note that we may not be able to answer every question depending on volume.
Not trying to completely highlight my own topic, but on the creative roadmap it says that Roblox is planning on addressing long-standing bugs and pain points… I have a few listed here that managed to get swept under the rug to the forum. It mainly has to do with the Lock Feature bugging out, and grouping organizing in weird ways.
Roblox has recently been announcing that and announcing this with the UGC Catalog which has added some diversely great things but my question is how roblox items and limiteds seem a little disrespected now.
This vision of roblox seems so fast and the community doesnt feel involved in it really whats so ever especially with this,
So Recently Roblox wrote this post which has had massive negative feedback.
Roblox Offsale limiteds were treasued and the community finally felt connected with roblox and we could feel them actually listening to us. Roblox states there is “Competiton” so why dont you bring these offsales back on timers instead of turning them limited ?
These kept trading going and kept users happy that they could finally get the items they have wanted in a while, this also calmed down ugc copies and in general made the catalog more lively.
Will roblox listen to the feedback ?
Also roblox has left it so half finished, with turning blue clockworks limited but not the red and white ones ?
Is it just lazyness, because the marketplace team transparency is low and it was throughout the roadmap especially with the Full UGC Driven catalog, its all so unrealistic?.
Can they turn these items such as workclocks, red clockworks and half finished series items at least limited to respect the roblox created items ?
Since a few months of roblox treating limiteds with disrespect, trading is now stale, ugc copy clones are through the roof and in general a stupid move in my honest opinion, so the question ? will admins respond as the market team have hopefully read the negative feedback and will act on it.
Other Than this excited for the future of roblox and what is with it, i may also ask some other catalog questions later down in the ask me anything, Have A Wonderful Wednesday.
Roblox often calls its developer community its “life blood”, but it consistently and systematically fails to communicate anything with its developers on larger policy issues. Any statements made are contradicted by Roblox’s later actions a decent amount of the time, huge feedback posts on the forums here with hundreds of likes and dozens, even hundreds of replies often get no response and are either ignored, or never responded to despite being discussed / on the radar internally.
Some examples of this issue include:
Game discovery is fundamentally broken and only getting worse, it needs to be fixed, this only got a response because of someone poking a product manager internally on slack, and nothing changed despite assurances their would be positive change. Since this post, sponsored ads have gotten objectively worse by being hidden further down in sorts, being limited to 13+, etc.
Roblox announced at RDC that they would be preventing a “race to the bottom” in the UGC marketplace and has also stated that there would be systems in place to prevent IP theft. The recording in which they stated this was removed from Roblox’s RDC playlist on youtube for some reason, a 3rd party had to re-upload it : Archive.org link, yet the UGC program has not solved any of these issues. IP theft is a daily occurance in large numbers, creators are forced to price their items low because it’s a constant “race to the bottom” with item pricing, and a myraid of other issues. Creators have been trying to get communication on these issues for over a year now, yet no communication is ever given.
Roblox’s “featured” program states that applicants will hear back within 2 weeks if there’s been an acceptance or denial. It has been 2 months and no one that I know of has heard anything from the program. No acceptance, no denials, just radio silence (Get featured on Roblox!).
I cannot provide a link for this as it’s a private thread, but very recently there was a large exploit discovered with Roblox’s chat system. This exploit was reported, as it could be used to crash servers. Instead of fixing this issue, an engineer replied stating “the fix is to just use our new chat system”. This was not an option for many developers. When this was brought to the engineer’s attention, the problem was simply ignored. This issue was not fixed until someone else was poked internally. I shouldn’t have to resort to doing that. Internal politics like this actively hurts developer businesses and causes strife between Roblox and its developer community.
I could list off so many examples like this. Creators across the platform have been trying to get communication & feedback dialogue on issues like these and so many more, yet there’s been a consistent trend of radio silence on Roblox’s end. What is Roblox doing to address these? I don’t want the typical “we love developers and we can always improve comms!” slogan, I want to hear what Roblox is actually doing, in the here and now to improve these issues. We’ve heard the words before. The words have been stated many times over the past 2 years yet nothing has really improved, and in quite a few areas has gotten worse. Developers want genuine communication on these, and a bridge to give feedback about them.
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Will the roadmap become more granular? It’s a good start, but it’s missing a lot of info. E.g. if I want to know what the status of facial animation rollout is (“when will existing avatar bundles get dynamic heads”), or I want to know what’s going on with volumetric sounds like announced at RDC (“when will walls muffle sounds”), and many other things, the roadmap does not cover these. Some of these are giving active info updates in private NDA beta groups, but this does not help the creators without connections or program slots. Will the roadmap eventually support being dynamically updated based on what developers are asking? E.g. if a high amount of developers want to know what the future of shaders & PBR materials is (“when can we get pbr.color3”), would the roadmap reflect that?
Furthermore, will the roadmap expand its scope to include programs, not just engine features? E.g. if I want to know what the status of gamefund is, or what the status of the verified-badge scope increase is, can I see this on the roadmap? Currently creators have no way of getting any info about these, and also have no way of giving feedback on these. Trying to give feedback on a lot of programs is borderline impossible because of the complete breakdown in communication.
UPDATE : This post has gotten a response! However due to the thread being locked, I was not able to give a follow-up with the response. As such, I am putting it here for visibility purposes.
Respectfully, a lot of these don’t actually answer our questions. It tells us that you’ve heard our feedback in a general sense which is great and very much appreciated, but a lot of our questions or concerns have not been directly answered. As mentioned in my post, having more two-way communication mediums for these would alleviate this issue. For example, I mentioned the developer awards program; having two-way communication on that issue would solve a lot of developer tension around its current problems.
Yes! A real-world example of this taking place was the playfab program being shut down. Under normal circumstances there would have been a large amount of pushback from the community because a valuable resource was being taken away for “seemingly no reason”. However, the folks handling that program directly explained the true reason for why that program was being shut down. It had to do with microsoft licensing & low adoption rate of the tools. While unfortunate, removing the program made rational sense with that honest explanation being given to developers. After that, we began getting two way communication with the creator analytics team to make a tool to replace it. This led to developers largely not taking a large amount of issue with the program’s removal. The process was constructive and overall positive!
And, as previously mentioned:
This is great and I am happy to hear this! Myself and many others are holding out for the actions & changes, we’ve heard the words before. Not trying to be rude, just being honest and straightforward.
This is great! Can we get public responses to them? Roblox discussing these problems & figuring out a way forward isn’t a big win if developers don’t know about it. It’s impossible to determine what Roblox is fixing or not fixing because there’s typically no meaningful public response and/or dialogue to them (see : playfab shutdown example I gave above for an example of a GOOD response). E.g. the stars post, nearly a full year later still has no response nor has it ever been directly acknowledged.
This is great news! I hope this improves things.
This is just a personal annecdote, but I’ve noticed a lot more of my bug reports getting resolved & replied to. A small step, but an important one! You folks are doing a great job with improving bug report handling so far from what I can see, and I hope to see that trend continue.
The roadmap covers a lot of great topics and I’m particularly interested in the marketplace opening up to everybody later this year – as mentioned in week 1, however I can’t shake the feeling that the elephant in the room is being ignored regarding the marketplace – the unfavorable creator percentages.
4 years after the programs release with the public release looming in the near future as stated by the roadmap, the platform continues to take 70% of all marketplace sales on accessories and layered clothing; while maintaining an affiliate fee that rewards sellers more than creators (40% to experience owners, 30% to the actual item’s creators)
is there any plans, in the future to improve either of these creator percentages? (marketplace tax or affiliate fee)
because once they’re combined with the additional 70% we pay via devex, it’s clear that roblox is not putting the creator first when it comes to the marketplace and it’s hard for marketplace creators to share the same guiding principles with the platform such as take the long view when we continue to get the short end of the stick.
Roblox’s stance appears to be to enable users to use external tooling for many things like animation, modelling, UI, and just about everything except scripting, which is being pushed to use in-studio tooling only.
What changes will be made to support external scripting tooling like vscode, git, and generally using the filesystem?
Regarding the Open Source documentation, how will developers be able to contribute to it, as well as that, do you intend on developers being able to document their own libraries, frameworks etc. on the creator hub?
I probably have other questions but I’m a little busy right now, hopefully the next time there’s an AMA, I’ll have a few more questions
Hello, Dan and Manuel! Hope your day has been going alright so far. Here’s my questions regarding the roadmap:
The prospect of “dynamic filters” (aka Genres) coming back is amazing, but does Roblox plan on re-integrating the existing genres into the infinite-scrolling type system that Roblox once had instead of limiting sorts to around 20-30 games? This could help dramatically improve discoverability for smaller titles, as the front page could become a lot less exclusive with a system like this.
In addition, with the push for Future lighting, several developers have taken notice of advanced lighting technology such as Volumetric Lighting. (see Elltob’s VOLUMIKA) Does Roblox have plans to integrate such types of lighting into Studio at any point in the future?
Regarding the Balance safety and moderation point of week part 3 there is a bulletin for “Server-sided anti-cheat”.
Given there is another bulletin for Alt-Account detections, I can reasonably assume they are not directly related.
My question here is, while I assume you can’t discuss what these “server-sided anti-cheats” are exactly, could these be tools that developers can use or are they going to be something that just exists in the background, like general security enhancements (for example, the recent RejectCharacterDeletion replication)?
What will you do to avoid chaos in public marketplace? What requirements users will need to meet to upload UGC items into the marketplace? Will UGC creators who applied in the past have special perks or will they be no different from other people?
I love how the creator roadmap is going right now! I love how its being tried to improve Roblox a lot! I hope this effort works out and the updates and new things that have been said happens in the best way.
As everyone knows, a client-sided anti-cheat has been rolled out to all users known as “Hyperion” by Byfron.
My question is, what server-sided anti-cheat solutions will come to Roblox? And, how will you guys solve the alt account problem where an exploiter can quickly create an alt account and return to continue cheating?
As part of the Avatar creation and Marketplace section of the roadmap, it is stated that we can expect the UGC program to go public, in the sense that everyone can publish avatar items to the Marketplace.
Community-led Marketplace - Everyone can publish avatar items to the Marketplace, including Limiteds (Late 2023)
Can we get more information on the implications of this change? What would the requirements would be to use these features when it is public? Is the platform even ready for this change, given the current state of the UGC catalog being full of items copied from Roblox’s classic items, tons of low effort content, and a very out of touch limited system? I feel as though a ton of things need to be addressed with the program and the systems in place right now before any sort of public change goes live. Can we expect any changes to the current UGC systems in place before a public release?
What are the plans for improving the inventory system? Even when you developers inventories are set to private, anyone is still able to find our assets. We’ve been getting a lot of our new assets leaked from our inventories. These leaks have been even shared by some popular youtube channels. We’d like to be able to upload and create assets without the public finding out what’s coming in our updates. It’s a big issue for us.
This is a longstanding issue, and it should be a high priority. Any news to share on this? Thanks in advance!
With the introduction of Byfron and the announcement that we will Roblox will be “giving you more ways to identify and block cheaters” and well as the ability to “take action on repeat offenders and help us combat exploiters on Roblox”, does this mean that we will have better support for actually detecting cheaters and banning them rather than just hoping Byfron works?
Right now Byfron is doing great for my game, but there are still cheaters using alternative platforms to avoid detection and their numbers are growing. Will Roblox themselves begin taking action on exploiter accounts or will each game still have to deal with them as they come?
Loving the extra communication from Roblox lately!
The lighting engine has always been one of my pet peeves with the Roblox engine. It feels incredibly limited and creating an environment that is visually appealing (especially in large and open spaces) is far more tedious than it should be.
Are there any planned improvements to it or new features we can expect to see any time soon? Light range was brushed aside a while back for undisclosed engine level limitations, but unless it isn’t feasible for some reason should these not be ironed out for the sake of improving an absolutely crucial element of any appealing map design?
Somewhat related, if mobile support is of concern, would the possibility of adding some more advanced features be considered if developers are willing to narrow their playable devices in order to enable them? I am aware that Roblox aims to be as lightweight of an application as possible but I don’t believe that should stand in the way of quality.
