Experience Questionnaire Update - Age Recommendation Preview

Updates Announcements
#1

[2023 Update]

Hey developers,

Earlier this year, we introduced the Experience Questionnaire, a new compliance tool which can automatically adjust the playability of your experience based on the information you provide.

As we expand the questionnaire beyond regional compliance, our goal is to deeply understand the content within your experience and to use these insights to help it reach people who will enjoy it.

Today, we are expanding the questionnaire to include a few simple questions focused on generating a preview of the age-based Guidelines for your experience. This is a beta release and a part of our upcoming Experience Guidelines feature.

Age Recommendation Preview

Age Recommendation is now in beta and will allow you to preview the recommended age group for your experience, based on its unique content. Note that this preview is only visible to you at this time.

The beta release currently includes three age recommendations (“All-Ages,” “9+,” and “13+”). As we expand our policies and products, we will potentially support more content labels (i.e. descriptors) and age recommendations in order to more accurately classify the content of your experience.

In the coming months, Age Recommendation will become visible to all users, and will be added to our parental controls to help parents more easily customize what type of content their child can discover and access. We will share more information around this as we get closer to the public release of Experience Guidelines later this year.

Generating Guidelines for An Experience

At this stage, we would like to continue inviting any experiences with over 100,000 visits to take the questionnaire and give us feedback on the process.

Though this is an optional process, we strongly recommend you to take advantage of it so you can preview the Guidelines of your experience ahead of the public release. You can learn more about our work around dynamic and appropriate content in Tailoring Dynamic Content: Localization and Suitability from RDC 2021!

Steps

  1. Locate the experience you would like to submit the questionnaire for:

    • Go to the Creator Dashboard.
    • Select the Creator of the experience.
    • On the Creations > Experiences tab, click on the experience you are looking for.

  2. On the navigation bar, click Questionnaire:

    • If you know the experience’s universe ID, you can directly jump to this step by going to this link

  3. Now that you are on the Questionnaire page:

    • If you have never taken the questionnaire for this experience before, you will see “Questionnaire Not Started” as the screenshot below.
    • If you have answered the questionnaire prior to this release, you will see “Questionnaire Requires Update”.
    • Click the button at the bottom to proceed.

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  4. Answer each page of questions based on the content in your experience, then click “Save & Continue”.

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  5. You can preview the generated Guidelines before submitting to make it active. You can click “Edit” to modify your responses, or click “Submit” after confirming the responses are correct. At any time, you can exit the questionnaire or retake it to update your responses and generate new Guidelines.

  6. Voila - The generated Guidelines for your experience are now active!

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Note: You must come back and update your answers to the Experience Questionnaire if any of them changes (e.g. because you published an update, or additional information is required from you due to a policy / questionnaire update).


If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to comment below and we will make sure they are on our radar.

Thank you and we look forward to hearing from you!


FAQ

Why are only experiences with over 100,000 visits eligible for the Experience Questionnaire?

  • We are working on an incremental rollout as we want to make this feature available to you as soon as possible. We would like to start with the experiences which reach this threshold to collect early feedback on the process.

    After we add improvements based on your feedback, we aim to open access to the Experience Questionnaire to all experiences later this year!

How is an Age Recommendation determined?

  • Roblox’s age recommendations are grounded in child development research and informed by industry standards. To determine which audiences an experience is generally suitable for, we examined global industry standards and consulted child development experts to guide our policy making.

What happens if I answered the questionnaire incorrectly?

  • In the product, you will receive clear instructions on how to generate Guidelines accurately:

    • You can preview and verify the details of Guidelines before submitting to make them active.
    • You may update your answers to the questionnaire anytime to accurately reflect the latest content in your experience.
    • You must come back and update your answers to the questionnaire if any of them changes (e.g. because you published an experience update, or additional information is required from you due to a policy / questionnaire update).

    We rely on creators to give us correct information to generate accurate Guidelines. We may review generated Guidelines to ensure accuracy and will notify you to resolve any discrepancy between your questionnaire submission and the content in your experience. If you intentionally misrepresent your experience, you may be subject to moderation consequences.

If I fill out the questionnaire, does that mean I don’t need to worry about other Roblox policies?

  • Currently, the questionnaire focuses on Paid Random Items and Paid Item Trading only. You still need to make sure your experience adheres to all applicable Roblox policies.

    Please check out the Policy API, the Roblox Community Standards, and the Roblox Terms of Use to learn more.

What do I do if I preview my experience, and based on my answers, its playability is affected?

  • You can make updates to adjust the content in your experience to ensure that it aligns with Roblox’s regional policies. We recommend reading through our PolicyService documentation to learn how you can dynamically adjust the content of your experience. Once you are done, you can then come back to update your responses and resubmit.
148 Likes
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Roblox wont save my experience name suddenly and im not sure why [Update]
#2

This topic was automatically opened after 9 minutes.

#3

Why would I fill out an optional questionnaire that can limit my game’s reach and lead to moderation consequences?

Where’s the upside here? I only see downside. Can we get more information on this?

Edit: Please see @.LateNightDiner’s response, it provides further clarification on this and an answer to my question: Experience Questionnaire Update - Age Recommendation Preview - #30

59 Likes
#5

Happy to know that age groups are now being looked at for content guidelines.

My hope is that in the future when older age groups are introduced there’s more leniency regarding certain content (specific examples: pills and syringes for special effects in games), obviously with moderation oversight in play. I know that there’s always the argument of “use an alternative” but sometimes the alternative looks bad thematically and I really want to keep up certain appearances in-experience.

22 Likes
#6

Yeah, let’s make our own ESRB/PEGI rating about which any player or developer will not care, if this update only helps Roblox and doesn’t make developer’s job easier then it can not exist for me.

11 Likes
#7

I understand where ROBLOX is trying to go here, but I feel as if developers won’t take the age ratings into account after the update is fully rolled out.

6 Likes
#8

Roblox should have stuck to regional ratings as they are more well known and follow official regulations also I just want a PEGI 12 rating on my game page beacuse it may appeal to more teenagers

6 Likes
#9

Any estimated time for when the Questionnaire will be enabled for all experiences?

8 Likes
#10

Yeah I only see this being helpful if it would have some sort of priority for recommendations based on ages.

Or if the players would fill this form out to have some sort of game review system.

3 Likes
#11

At this moment, in my region Roblox uses PEGI 7 rating (mainly on consoles). Is 7+ not enough or not? I don’t judge it, this system was good enough, at least for consoles.

2 Likes
#12

OH MY GOD! Heck yes! It is great to know that we’re finally getting age restrictions. I’ve been waiting for those since they were first teased in 2018 and I’m excited that we can finally make sure the audiences intended to play our experiences don’t get spoiled by other age groups. I’m excited!

6 Likes
#13

Those ratings are given by independent bodies.

As you may expect, each review will take a long time and is bound to have a fee associated. Why would Roblox pay that fee for every single experience that takes the questionnaire?

PEGI

For example, the ratings fee for a ‘Lower Development Cost Product’ (where the game’s budget is less that €200,000) is €1,155 in the first instance and €1,050 for each additional platform thereafter. So if an indie developer was to launch the same game with exactly the same content on PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PS Vita, they would be looking at a ratings bill of €3,255.

Please don’t comment if you’re not aware on how external reviews work.

These official ratings are not applicable to Roblox games either way as they’re not independent products. Roblox is essentially your publisher.

10 Likes
#14

The questionnaire will be mandatory in the future. The only reason why it’s currently an opt-in is because it is still in testing.

4 Likes
#15

I really hope this feature is being expanded to eventually lead to a user controlled filter system, so I’m able to filter the experiences page to my tastes .

I think one big issue with the platform is older players can’t find experiences that are interesting to them, the front page is filled with experiences the tailored to the largest audience (Young kids).

10 Likes
#16

Please give me an API to check the parental-controlled age category of a user and allow me to control content based on that. If there was blood in my game, I could disable it for any users < 13 without preventing them from playing entirely if they had strict parental controls. Then, allow me to answer the survey based on what content is not automatically disabled.

25 Likes
#17

I assume it will be mandatory in the sense that only games that have filled it out and apply to the guidelines will be shown to restricted accounts.

5 Likes
#18

YES. I want to create a Left4Dead type game one day, but it would look really odd if it’s using some odd replacement. That and I would like it so I can upload the logo of my game without getting a ban with no reason.

5 Likes
#19

Nope. During the RDC presentation it was said that in order to publish a game onto Roblox you will need to fill the questionnaire out. That would then go for any major updates you do for it.

6 Likes
#20

Roblox has stated before in RDC that this kind of dynamic content control is planned, iirc they want experiences to have the 16-17 age range accessible.

5 Likes
#21

They were very much tip toeing around the adult content during that too. We still won’t be able to do anything too mature tho (18+ stuff).

2 Likes