Experience Guidelines: Age Recommendations & Parental Controls

pog update


imo could fit better on the website, it’s kinda out of place in it’s own box

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Currently the age recommendation survey only accounts for violence, random paid items, and trading.

Are there any plans to include difficulty into this? I am the owner of a game that markets itself as difficult, yet 5 year old children are allowed to join. The issue here is that the vast majority of them cannot handle losing, they get upset, leave the game along with leaving a bad rating, ultimately tanking our like:dislike ratio.

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This is interesting but, doesn’t actually solve the problem that it’s meant to solve. This assumes that kids are being honest about their age. I’m not even a kid and I’m not honest about my age. All a kid has to do is create a new account, change their birthday, and they can get past the restriction. I think that age restriction when you have no real concrete metric other than a birth certificate (which no parent would ever provide a third party) is a bit far fetched and impractical. There’s little that this company really should be doing before Roblox starts to become a virtual “parent”. If parents don’t like their kids playing on Roblox, they should handle that themselves. Not blame Roblox for their lack of oversight / parenting.

Personally, I think this is more reason that Roblox should phase out of child-only and move towards teens / adults. The more Roblox attempts to be a “virtual parent”, the more you alienate those who don’t fall under those ranges.

Informed decisions lose value when the person making said decision aren’t truthful in the first place.

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(Update: This has been resolved)

Really good update, however I’ve noticed what seems to be an issue.

You can no longer see the creator of the experience, because it is covered by the “All Ages” tag.

image

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My 15 seconds of Googling suggests that it’s more like 40 in 100 parents that configure parental controls.

In any case though, even if they don’t, the tools are being provided to them to do so. If a parent decides they don’t want to enable the parental controls, that’s their decision.

And in terms of bypassing, there’s not really any bypassing something that’s part of the platform. You can’t bypass the cost of items either, after all. The only time that a problem would arise where a feature like this can be bypassed is through improper implementation.

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From my perspective, I think the reason behind making these guidelines a thing is to avoid getting complaints from the parent, other countries maybe ask for a game to be taken down because it breaks the rules, and it could also help them not get sued.

  • If a kid lies about their age, the responsible will be the parent.
  • If a developer lies about not having gambling in the game, the responsible will be the developer if the game gets reported and reviewed.

Etc…

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I have a question, is something like Piggy or Minecraft contain 13+ violence? Like sword or bat mechanics.

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This is a pretty cool change. However I do have one question. Will there ever be a 17+ option in the future?

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Many other platforms have parental controls already, and besides, it’s not like they didn’t have parental controls in the start (account pin technically was for parents)

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There is the problem of people lying about there age though, a pretty big loop hole in a otherwise good idea to keep kids safer from those creeps and weirdo players.

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It’s the parents fault then, I don’t understand why people think it’s the company’s fault if the person lies about their age

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Just because you don’t like it when your parents control you, doesn’t mean it isn’t the right thing to do. It’s like playing video games in school.

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you got ratioed pretty hard there

anyways, I think this is a great update and it is definitely a good stepping stone to allowing more mature experiences in the near future

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Parents deserve all the tools they need to make it easier to moderate their children. You don’t want a 5 year old to be playing Halo or something.

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You may be unaware of the bad rep that the media is picking up about roblox developing a issue with predators and stuff. Roblox needs to protect them self’s from this vary bad rep before it becomes a larger problem, or it could be a vary big negative impact on both there business and there conscience. You may be smart enough to not fall for peoples tricks online, but other kids may not know any better, unfortunately sacrifices must be made to protect the vulnerable players. I believe they are doing a better approach then what some other online companies have done.

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I also hope this will mean more freedom to speak for older players, been filtered for so many unnecessary things…

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Uhh, I don’t think anyone would ever make something called that? And if so, it would still be only available to people 18+. 18+ content will always exist on Roblox, due to the vast amount of people who are always trying to bypass the censor, so the most we can do is give them a spot that anyone under 18 can’t reach. (For anyone replying with “but they can fake their age!” that’s the parent’s responsibility, not Roblox’s)

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Aren’t accounts only restricted from 9+/13+ experiences if parental controls are on though?

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They said they would be loosening the filter on 13+ users, though the full scale of it isn’t known. All that’s known is that “lmao” and “I love you” won’t be censored any more, though the second one might be a bit concerning on the context of Roblox.

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From what I’ve seen, accounts under 9 or 13 are forced to have the settings for higher age ratings disabled, however I could be wrong.

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