So with my game that I’m working on at the moment, I intend to allow my players to claim a plot of land and then they could build what they wanted in a Lego / Blockland like style.
The issue that I’m worrying about is that if I give my users the ability to freely build in such a way that they might end up creating some kind of offensive, vulgar or unsuitable creations that wouldn’t be allowed. I really want to allow building as I hope it to be a major aspect of the game, but I don’t want the game to be moderated because of it.
I know that many other games allow building on your own plot, such as; Lumber Tycoon 2, Miners Heaven etc but I feel that they can get away with it because the building in those games are more grid based and a bit more strict as to what you can build compared to what I was intending to create.
I was thinking of originally manually moderating each build that gets submitted before it can be seen by people who are not on the original creators friends list, but that would be a crazy amount of work. Alternatively I was thinking about adding a report system for the creations that if somebody found the creation to be offensive they could report it for moderation, again that would be too much work to manually moderate it, or when a build got a certain amount of reports then the build would be removed / the creator would be build banned, but I feel that would be heavily exploited.
I was wondering if anyone had any ideas on how to combat this problem as I was hoping to target the game towards people of all ages.
tl:dr How would I stop people building vulgar / obscene creations on a Lego / Blockland like building system?
If I remember correctly, Stickmasterluke had a drawing game, with a report system kind-of like the one you said. But instead of manually checking all reported builds, he made it so if 3-4 people reported a drawing as offensive, then it was marked as offensive.
To avoid trolling, if someone reports a build, but only they do that, take some currency from their account and tell them not to do that again.
Of course this system has many flaws, but it is the best thing I can think of. If you don’t want to use this but still want an automatic system, you will have to go crazy making an AI to tell if a build is offensive or not.
While it is possible to try to detect offensive combinations, people are just going to keep finding ways to get around it. If you don’t want people using it to create offensive things, don’t make a game like that, as you’re just going to keep chasing every possible combination and variation. A user-based system with reporting could also be exploited.
Roblox as a whole has systems in place to detect offensive material in anything uploaded, and even that gets bypassed time and time again.
I feel for sure an AI would be out of the question, for one I think that might be a bit out of my skill level, and two I think it would probably destroy performance, nontheless people could just find ways around it like @lArekan says, but that’s to say it’s even possible on Roblox.
I’m leaning towards a report system now, but rather than directly punish the creator after a person sends a report, I could just make the build disappear for anyone who reported it, and maybe if it was really bad the person could contact me with evidence and then allow me to manually check to see if the report was valid to which I could build ban them.
Instead of having people manually send it, you could integrate it to notify you when a build gets reported by using discord integration, for example. You or other moderators May review it and act accordingly.
I had an idea when I saw another game have a mod call of some sort.
So Players can just mod call for no reason BUT if you tied a Currency (NOT Robux) to it and then give the Full amount back if it’s a legit call then that would solve the problem I guess.
I don’t know if your game has any currency tho.
You can have a Kick system that’s what I seen in many games that have a drawing system.
or maybe Only friends can see your drawings?
Are you talking about the system that Deleted this Image (and more) for no good reason?
I would definitely not punish players for reporting. That’s a really dangerous thing to do, perhaps a reporting limit in a time period, but not removing their hard earned currency due to them possibly legitimately reporting someone that no one else did.
I was referring to Stickmasterluke’s system only. That’s what players would get if their report was the only one for one drawing. (Let’s also not forget that in that game you cannot buy currency and earn it so easily)
I think they must be able to report maximum once in 5-10 minutes.
Yeah that’s exactly what I was thinking about when I made this post, I knew that an automatic system like that wouldn’t really work, especially in a Roblox game.
I’m starting to think I might do something along the lines of what @Starception was talking about, by creating a discord channel to automatically post a build that received a number of reports, which would let me then easily decide whether the creator should be punished or not. Now I need to find out if it’s possible to extract an image of a build to post to discord, but that’s probably best for another time.
I probably should have added this before, but; would I be penalised for the creations that a user made in my game? Like could my game be placed under review or taken down?
bleh - don’t bother. People reporting will just cause more hassle than its worth, and you’ll have to deal with people ganging up on other people.
From a dev’s point of view, you’re not gonna see any noticeable increase in traffic or revenue, and that comes at the cost of developing something, and dealing with all the complaints that result from it.
If it does actually become a major issue (it won’t lol), then sure, maybe consider it. But get it out the door and popular first
I thought about this a lot when making homebuilder but ultimately I decided to do nothing and it hasn’t been a problem
every once in a while you get people making concentration camps or spelling out bad words but in general those people get bored and leave pretty quickly and aren’t very likely to return.
And honestly I think having a user reporting system without moderators wouldn’t help much, all it does is give trolls more reason to stick around and try their luck messing with/reporting regular players. I give all my players privacy controls over who can visit their plot and who can build with them so trolls don’t last long
