Further Changes to Playing Ability of Experimental Mode Games

Please could we have this? Thanks. I get that Roblox is trying to protect our games, but honestly not everyone wants to work with filtering enabled. They know the risks of it or just don’t care as it’s something they’re messing with and would like other people to see rather than their “friends”. If not friends, then at least allow followers over the age of 13 to join.

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They also want to protect the players. To do so, they need to force filtering.

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There’s a difference in using filtering for small things that aren’t really games, and then a game that you intend to maintain a player-base. It wouldn’t be very wise to publish a game without the usage of filtering-enabled in our current day and age. But prototypes or small things? Why bother. It’s not like you’re going to have 1,000 players or more on an empty baseplate with almost nothing but a couple work-in-progresses. Exploiters tend to go for crowded/popular games.

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Problem is that it’s the smaller games which you need to worry about. You typically won’t run into exploiters in larger games.

Because working with experimental mode doesn’t make sense. All working without it is, is using remotes, which are a much cleaner, less hacky way of doing things. One example I have is that I played a game before which used guns, and it did the damage to players from a local script. When replicating this change to the server (automatically, since it wasn’t filtering enabled), the server would sometimes decide not to replicate the damage. Experimental mode is unpredictable unless you use remotes, and if you use remotes there’s no problem turning experimental mode off.

I’ve rarely encountered exploiters in popular games. I frequently encounter them in smaller, community-based games. I don’t know where you got this statistic, but based on my personal experience I don’t believe it.

The thing is, this isn’t just breaking old games either. One game I really like that has been running for years by now is unplayable. This isn’t a small game either. Had millions of visits.

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Lets not forget that virtually every single showcase ever made is now completely inaccessible. Most builders are not ever aware of FE or would even bother to tick it.

There has got to be some middle ground somewhere.

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I played a large amount of Experimental Mode games last night without knowing it would be my last time on them. I agree that this will help enforce Filtering Enabled games, but I’m going to miss playing the classics.

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Honestly I think all game should just be forced to be FE, and any restrictions on playing games removed. This way people can still visit old games, only the scripts would all be broken, which I would pretty much expect to be the case anyways.

I don’t see any reason why people would be coding the old way, except out of habit. The difference between the server and client isn’t all that confusing and should be taught really early on in tutorials after all the super basic Lua stuff. Just allowing devs to program their games incorrectly is kind of stupid because it just reinforces bad habits.

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At this rate just get rid of Experimental Mode altogether :thinking:
It’s only purpose now is to train bad behavior, why would we even have it anymore if the games can’t be played? It will hurt new developers in the short and long term. They will create their first game, invite a friend, and realize it will not be able to grow past that point and not know why. If i was new and learned to create in Experimental mode at this point I would be rather annoyed when i found out I had to relearn networking because the way I was doing it was not sufficient.

At the minimum please make all new places FE and place the toggle deep in the settings. When someone places a remote in their game for the first time, subtly pop up a link to a video that explains how to use everything. I’m open to hearing why we are keeping Experimental, I realize that I might have a fundamental misunderstanding of the goal of keeping it on Roblox. If i’m right, I would love to know what you plan to do to get rid of Experimental altogether.

Thanks!

  • Ben
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While I can understand a lot of folks are frustrated that some old games will no longer be available to play, this change is probably in the best interests of the community. Experimental games are extremely vulnerable as the client has the ability to make changes that will replicate onto the server meaning all players will see these changes. This can be extremely dangerous for the community and can expose players to things they do not want to see or should never have to see.

While I’ve seen some really good ideas for middle grounds, I don’t think it is truly worth it for the time and effort so players can play classical games which nobody even payed attention to until this change. Other larger active games will probably be fixed by their developers soon, and Roblox did post that this change would becoming in another announcement. I will admit, perhaps Roblox could have sent out some sort of notification to everyone or make a blog post so that more developers would have seen that this change is coming. But in the end, I think that this is a change that needed to be made for the greater good for the safety of everyone.

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I understand that due to the great growth and popularity of Roblox in recent years security should be one of the most important things for Roblox, however, the popularity and current growth of the platform has been in part thanks to many classics (like King of the Hill, Chaos Canyon, A pirates Life, Ultimate Paintball, Zeppelin Battle and many more!) that for people like me who have been part of this platform for a really Long Time bring us very good moments and memories. With these changes many of these games will no longer be playable! I would like Roblox to do something for those great classics that were the basis of this great platform. Maybe putting them in a special collection/category because although many of these games are no longer updated and will soon be forgotten, many can still be played and deserve to be remembered for helping to make the platform we know today. :slight_smile:

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Honestly, I would like to see roblox coincide with the community of developers more than just acting on their own.

Yea, it is their game and they can do as they so choose, but hearing the voices of the consumers makes a great deal ( That being us ).

I would at least appreciate having a say in this because more people (According to above polls) are against this change. Yea, this stops exploiters, but how often do you see them? and even if this keeps them out for a short amount of time, exploiters always find a way to come back unless you have solid, stable grounds. You can’t keep them out forever with these controversial updates.

That’s just my opinion on this.

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I wish these changes were explained better on the website, all of my players are assuming I made my game friends only and are demanding refunds, despite me explaining that its an enforced change impacting every experimental mode game

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Why did this have to happen all of a sudden? So many games in the past are now unplayable because of this and it’s kind of sad to see that. A lot of groups in the clan community will probably be oof’d by this since most small groups or so use open-source tech if they can’t make their own into FilteringEnabled. As someone mentioned in this thread way above, a setting that would allow us to play Experimental Mode games (defaults to false/no) would be nice but only for users that are over the age of 13. Sure like a vast majority of users fake and lie about their age on the platform but that’s their issue and they should be aware the risks of playing said game.

Just my opinion since there are people that I know that don’t like this change much.

EDIT: So one of the active group places in a group that I’m in which has FilteringEnabled on (Experimental Mode disabled) still can’t be played no matter how many times another developer and I have tried to fix it. There are no other places within the “game” - only the start place which is the main place. I can’t be bothered to go through more than 125+ replies to see if someone else has experienced this issue. Here is a link to the place I’m talking about.

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I was going to say that it’s a good update, until I realised that this also means we can’t play any of the old classic games which is very bad.

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In any other game or community, I’d expect for the main developers to have a little more sense than this or a little more care about backwards compatibility.

But having been with Roblox through thick and thin, we’ll probably get a “We’re working on a solution” somewhere, and then never hear from them again on this topic. Rest in peace old games. Normally I’d have some optimism about them re-approaching problems the right way, but I know how things usually go.

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I like how on top of all this, the “controversy” that arises around Roblox doesn’t have much to do with unfiltered games, but moreso with the already super popular games and media spinning things out of control.

“ROBLOX IS ENCOURAGING GANG VIOLENCE AND SHOOTING POLICE WITH JAILBREAK”
“MY CHILD WAS BEING FOLLOWED BY A PEDOPHILE INTO HER HOME ON ROBLOX”
“MY SON WAS THREATENED TO BE EATEN BY AN ARMY OF BEES BY 3 TEENAGERS HARASSING HIM”

Ridiculous stuff. Locking old games away like this hurts Roblox’s internal reputation more than it fixes the outward facing one. There were a lot better ways to approach this.

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RIP Roblox
I can see the reasons behind it from the pressure of news outlets regarding safety, But seriously RIP Roblox.

Filtering Enabled isn’t the simplest thing to learn if your starting off learning how make games. Previously, if you were learning, you might get encouragement from others playing your games. But now this feedback loop is totally inaccessible.
All I can see it as is a disadvantage to people learning how to create. If Roblox had of put more marketing focus onto their amazing educational benefits, rather than being a gaming platform I think this would have been much less of an issue. I guess this isn’t as profitable. Shame.

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In my own personal opinion, most of the games I see people going “RIP -name-” over are already dead, barely got any players and won’t impact anything at all if it goes. Most of the resistance from all of this seems to just be nostalgia and people wanting to be mad just for the sake of being mad.

In reality, nothing will really change once this feature is out. Besides, there’s not really any excuse for games today to not already be filtering enabled.

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Is there not already a simple guide to using RemoteEvents and RemoteFunctions? I see so many people having issues with FE, maybe I ought to write a guide called “Filtering Enabled made mind-numbingly simple” to explain it at the most basic level possible. It seems that the biggest issue people have here is believing that using filtering enabled is somehow very complicated, but perhaps the learning material on it is too confusing?

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