Experiences using Marketplace Items - Policy update

Updates Announcements
#75

I help maintain the Epix - Adonis Admin suite found on Roblox.

Adonis allows users (assuming the experience creator enabled it) with Donor, or admin permissions, to run the command !avataritem, or others like !shirt / !hat, and more.

!avataritem, as an example, allows users to wear whatever catalog item they wish on their character in-game. Another command, :char: allows players to set their own character’s appearance to other players.

Screenshot_292
!avataritem in action equipping a random hat from the Catalog, in this case the Sinister Fedora.

We would be required to arbitrarily change all the appropriate command functionality (within a week) to enforce this policy.

It does not help that updating the Adonis module constantly puts us at risk of it being deleted as we continue (for months now) to try and establish some sort of communication with the appropriate teams. The module has been deleted twice randomly, and without notice, for reasons that still are confusing and/or unknown to us.

Please reconsider the allotted time given to developers to make this change. Finally, if any marketplace-related/DevRel teams at Roblox are reading this, please consider once again reaching out to Davey_Bones as we really want to be continuously updating our public module without constant fear of it being randomly deleted and/or our accounts moderated.

54 Likes
#77

This is one of the single most disappointing changes that Roblox has recently released.

With the amount of recent changes in the UGC space on Roblox recently being absolutely terrible, I’m afraid to see what becomes of the space.

I plead that Roblox reverts or at least adapts these changes to suit community members, developers and UGC creators as for a lot of them, their entire revenue and livelihood depends on sales of these items.

36 Likes
#79

Roblox, you need leadership to sit down with the team behind this and figure out how something this bad could make it all the way to publishing. Any sanity check with any community member(s) would’ve immediately made this obvious. Every single response above and below this message covers exactly why, so I will not waste my breath repeating them.

This is a systemic failure. Figure out how this got so bad, and make sure it doesn’t happen again.

98 Likes
#82

There are so many problems with this new policy. For the sake of this thread, I’ll list one that hasn’t been spoken about yet.

What happens when a creator suddenly has their item go offsale? I mean, we already know Roblox is planning on killing the UGC catalog by making future unstocked items go offsale. Does the developer get punished and moderated just because a creator couldn’t afford to restock their item? What about Roblox themselves? You guys have a habit of suddenly making accessories go offsale, are you seriously planning on deleting the games of each and every developer who have a previously-onsale item in their game?

What if the developer isn’t active anymore?? That brings up yet another question - old games. Are you going to wipe out every old game that uses potentially offsale accessories which could’ve been on sale at the time of the game’s making?

First Unity, now Roblox. Please actually think about the changes you’d be making here. This sounds like the type of idea some corporate CEO slapped on the table and demanded an announcement of.

67 Likes
#84

Excerpt from the FAQ section:

Q: I found an experience that appears to be violating this policy (the Experience is using off-sale avatar items, Roblox’s items, someone else’s items, etc). How do I report this developer?

So… if we use Roblox’s items in our game, letting players equip hairs and/or faces made by Roblox for customization, like thousands of other games do, we have to choose between either remaking all of them or our entire game being taken down, a week from now?

I’m sorry, what?

77 Likes
#85

This change needs to be reverted IMMEDIATELY.

“Prompt a purchase UI for the item when the user equips it and maintain a prominent ability to purchase later if the user declines to purchase in the moment, using the appropriate MarketplaceService tools for proper Robux pricing and creator attribution.”

There is 0 clarification on these rules, and what we’re allowed to do in our experience. For example, can we just have our standard “Buy” menu that allows users to go through that to then purchase the item?

We also need clarification on if it’s actually true that we will need to prompt a purchase every time a user tries on an item.

If players are given a purchase prompt every time they equip an item IT WILL KILL OUR GAMES.

That is a HORRIBLE user experience, and completely kills the purpose of players being able to try-on items in-game in the first place. This is a bit ironic because players are able to try on items on the website without forcing a purchase prompt because they have the buy button right there, except we do the same thing and aren’t being held to the same standards.

“Prevent items that are not available to purchase from being used in the experience (i.e., zero quantity, only for resale, or off-sale items) with our CatalogSearchParams tools.”

This completely breaks our game, and @ItsMuneeeb’s “Catalog Avatar Creator” which allows players to create outfits using catalog items and then upload them to a section called “Community/Public Outfits”, so players can view these avatars other users have created and save them to either purchase then or purchase later. Items like Headless Horseman which is only available around October of every year will then no longer be able to be worn, created, and saved in an outfit for players to purchase when it comes on sale. This also goes for limited items before they are released.

Is there any clarification on whether this includes methods like ApplyDescription and GetItemDetails or only CatalogSearchParams?

If so, this is going to completely break our games, so a heads up on this would’ve been nice…

This is devasting for games like ours, Avatar Outfit Creator, and @ItsMuneeeb’s, Catalog Avatar Creator.

There are several other EXTREMELY important things that need clarification and/or understanding from Roblox before this change is put into effect on September 27th.

Such as:

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What happens if we allow users to view their own Roblox Inventory?

Since we’re not allowed to show offsale items that means we’re not allowed to show the users inventory if they have an offsale item even though they already own it?

Not only are these devasting things for our games, but we’re only being given 1 week to comply which is far from enough time to make this big of a change to the core mechanic of our games.

All of these reasons and more are why this needs to be reverted IMMEDIATELY and ACTUAL time needs to be put into thinking through and talking to developers to understand how they implement it into their games before changing something like this.

We need clarification immediately and adequate time to make these changes.

Please let us know ASAP.

Thank you

1604 Likes
#87

“… the experience must: Prompt a purchase UI for the item when the user equips it”

Do not do this. This is the worst thing you can do for monetization across the board.

MarketplaceService’s PromptPurchase is at least a 4 second long interaction from a Player’s perspective. Forcing developers to unnecessarily prompt users to purchase an asset because they merely equipped it in-game is totally asinine. It will ruin all market flow in every single experience that sells Marketplace assets.

I don’t understand how this intrusive, annoying behavior protects creators’ intellectual property. It’s the same kind of behavior that predatory/cheap mobile games do, forcing ads onto users every 3 minutes of playtime until they purchase a microtransaction to remove those ads for like, $2.99. But in this case, there’s no way to remove the ads for good.

This is not a direction you want to move in. Reverse course and come up with something different immediately. You have many prominent community members voicing the detriment that this will be to current and in development experiences, including my own.

EDIT: An unaffiliated marketplace asset item appears to be literally any asset that is for sale. An inability to try items on without prompting for purchase is incredibly bad.

128 Likes
#88

So this applies not only to UGC, but also items made by ROBLOX themselves??? wow just ban in game customization all together at this point

72 Likes
#89

So many words I want to use and not enough of them being appropriate.

I’m disappointed— No, I’m furious. ROBLOX will not have me stressing out and scrambling to make game-wide changes to comply in a week. I work two jobs outside of ROBLOX, and you expect those who are also under financial and real-world obligatory strain to conform to such a steep change so quickly? Get real.

80 Likes
#90

Judging by the post and looking through how the policy is going to work, it’s NOT very good at all. Most developers (including @codedcosmetics and @ItsMuneeeb) that have experiences with “unaffiliated avatar Marketplace item” will have to make changes to fit with the new policy and doing it in 1 week is slightly not acceptable. It would have been a lot longer like 3-4 months prior. But I highly recommend NOT doing this change.

46 Likes
#91

Horrible change. This affects small dev teams the most.

61 Likes
#92

I hope I’m misreading or just not understanding some of the very vague wording here, but just in case I’m not, are there any plans to update your core UI that lets you view off-sale items that other players are wearing, or is it a one-way street? Personally, I’d consider previewing items that the targeted player is wearing via the core UI as “using” it in experience. :thinking:

20 Likes
#93

So roleplay games with simple ID customization are gonna be smited, I see. Thank you for absolutely no notice

36 Likes
#94

Many roleplay games let their players use items by inserting them by ID for their character. They are usually small games with little in the way of maintenance, does that mean all of them are going to be taken down in a week if they can’t pull an experienced coding team out of nowhere to update very old games?

30 Likes
#95

Yes, I’m sure that making more barriers for entry on what’s supposedly a social platform is a great idea. Thank you for the one week homelessness notice. Yes, I’m sure we can rip our games apart in less than a week or change the entire core basis of our games.

Where has Roblox’s culture gone? It really feels like the employees coming up with these changes don’t actually play Roblox. Feels oh-so tone deaf. I still miss the group leaderboards, the removal of it made groups extinct on Roblox. There are so many complaints I have. And they grow with each announcement, like this and the home experiments. The only update I felt that was interesting today was the subscriptions. Many of these changes put people’s lives at risk. I don’t feel like Roblox really understands the repercussions of even the smallest of changes.

Stop coming up with your own ideas. Roblox isn’t a playground for your employees. Ask us what we want in a diplomatic way, then make it. Don’t figure out how we feel through surveys and data quantification.

40 Likes
#97

The fact that this update also forbids the usage of off-sale/limited items (since they can not be prompted for purchase) is absolutely silly.

28 Likes
#98

This on top of recent UGC annoucements.

Simply L after another L

I was trying to transition from UGC to game developing. But since my game makes heavy use of classic roblox items (most of them are offsale) this puts my game straight into the bin. 3 years of development btw. I have enough of this bullcrap.

50 Likes
#99

A week to redo hundreds of hairs, faces, and remake the entire body for NPCs across 5 large games because they are using off-sale Roblox body packages and Roblox hairs/faces.

Regardless of the time given, this is a WILD change that decreases the ease of use for young/new developers trying to get into this platform. Wow.

35 Likes
#100

The higher-ups don’t care about the community. Their overall attitude has made that abundantly clear. They’ve doubled down on numerous awful changes before, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they did the same here.

22 Likes
#101

the video displays a separate ui being created when pressing try on (not purchase prompt) but the policy states you have to purchase prompt the user each time they try the item on. what???

10 Likes