This post was written entirely using Google Translate. Many screenshots were also translated using it.
PART 1 | BLOCKING IN RUSSIA
On December 3, Roskomnadzor (abbreviated as RKN) blocked Roblox in Russia.
On December 17, an official statement was released on the RKN website, stating that Roblox had contacted RKN and was ready to cooperate in lifting the block.
Руководство платформы в настоящее время выразило готовность к поэтапному приведению своей работы в России в соответствие с требованиями российского законодательства.
Translate
The platform’s management has currently expressed its willingness to gradually bring its operations in Russia into compliance with Russian legislation.
On December 18, Roblox will disable all chat features in Russia.
Nothing has happened since then. There have only been two official statements from Roblox:
This on devForum
And for BBC:
“We have a deep commitment to safety and we have a robust set of proactive and preventative safety measures designed to catch and prevent harmful content on our platform,” the spokesperson said in response to the BBC.
RKN has repeatedly stated that it sees NO REASON to unblock the game, so the chat restrictions are POINTLESS. For over two months, Russian players have been unable to communicate and are using all sorts of workarounds, from playing games with custom chat to changing their region to Vietnam.
Roblox can’t even say how the conversation with RKN ended – are you that afraid of us?
I’m creating this post because the previous one (btw, here’s the link) was shamefully hidden and closed from your view. I will not tolerate this insolence from Roblox employees.
I demand an official statement from Roblox staff regarding the chat ban, stating whether chat will be enabled or disabled, and if no, why. Not the empty fluff tranquilvarun wrote in his reply above.
PART 2 | REAL-CASE EXAMPLE
In СБЕГИ ОТ САХАРКА! your goal is to escape a map voted on by players. Much of the gameplay consisted of conversations about where to find the key, where the killer is. Now the game is dead—its player base has dropped from 1,000 to 40.
A large (if not all) part of the community is asking us to add a custom chat or signs to the game where players can communicate. We work with a CIS audience, most of which is located in Russia.
Of course, this is also related to the Roblox block in Russia, but there are still a lot of players communicating in our Discord and Telegram communities, while almost all of the active audience in Roblox has disappeared (Let me remind you that Discord and Telegram are blocked in Russia, which means players have access to Roblox).
PART 3 | CONSEQUENCES
YouTube is teeming with videos about bypassing the block; the easiest way is to download the Vietnamese Roblox version and automatically change the region. The problem is that Roblox has trapped players: on January 15, Roblox disconnected global chat from the Vietnamese version, making it local.
All popular videos have garnered over 1 million views on YouTube alone. I used a precise search for the keywords “How to restore chat via Vietnam Roblox”, meaning these videos only include the Vietnamese method. There’s also TikTok.
Millions of players have become Vietnamese, which has significantly distorted the actual regional statistics for games. This is not good news for developers. And this is happening solely because of Roblox.
Expected behavior
Unblock ALL TYPES OF CHAT for players from Russia, why, I wrote above.