As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to make sure that when I allow visitors to bring their own avatars into my experience, they aren’t wearing assets that are game-breaking. I have to block either an entire category of accessories from wear (mostly Back accessories since that category is easily the most abused to make these), create a custom avatar appearance system (effectively disrespecting other creators’ IP but I have no choice in the matter anymore) or invest time and money into solutions to ban specific UGC accessory creators’ assets in my experiences. At this juncture, the only thing I can think of is simply blocking all non-Roblox-created assets from wear in my experience.
If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my development experience because I could personally handle the scourge of the UGC accessory catalog by not allowing those assets altogether and not having to deal with the issues that are arising out of them such as assets that completely obscure the avatar (horrible for experiences requiring collision, hits against a character or the character to be visible for some gameplay-specific feature).
Below talks about my motivation, but it’s more to do with why I am dissatisfied with the current UGC accessory catalog which directly ties into why I don’t want non-Roblox-created assets to be worn.
It is abundantly clear that while Roblox’s vision forward is to put the catalog in the hands of the creator community, a simple glance at the catalog reveals that given lackadaisical and relaxed moderation criteria, creators will upload anything and everything to the maximum extent permitted. This is straining to me as a developer and I am getting utterly tired of having the problems of the openness of the avatar shop being offloaded to me as a developer instead of having tools readily available to deal with this.
It took us long enough to get access to check a MeshPart’s size and even then it’s not an adequate solution against some of the creations on the catalog. In general, none of these solutions work for me as a developer without in one way or another breaking a rule, violating a personal principle or having to bear costly expenses for solutions integrating third party solutions.
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Blocking an entire attachment’s worth of accessories is unfortunate because it comes down to the situation of “a few spoiling the bunch”. There are great accessories, for example, that can attach to visitors’ backs, but as it’s also the most prominent category for silly avatar-covering assets, I also have to get rid of those as well.
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Blocking an accessory by size is simply infeasible. It scales well but that’s all it is - it doesn’t let me fine tune for other problematic assets such as those with ample distance away from the avatar or making some room for genuine assets with a large size to fit onto the avatar.
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All in-house solutions suck. It’s not hard to hit rate limits on certain APIs especially on larger servers and an arbitrary amount of assets per avatar and that’s with memoisation as well. Not only that but the only thing that I can get out of that is the details on the website. It doesn’t tell me anything about the asset, nevermind determing which creators I should ban.
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Same goes with a third party solution. All it would do for me is allow me to apply a universal solution to all my experiences but I would be expected to shoulder the costs for hosting it and learning external development solely for this use case. It doesn’t help me better guard against UGC accessories that don’t belong in my experience.
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At the very extremes, I have to completely remove visitors’ ability to bring their own avatar into my experiences and I need to either create my own characters completely from scratch (I have to finance mesh and clothing creation because I cannot do that myself) or I have to take others’ assets from the catalog and add them into my own experience with or without permission just to granularly control what kind of things visitors are allowed to wear.
Developers need better tooling to handle what’s to come of the openness of the UGC accessory catalog. This was already concerning when the program was closed to a few select creators and when they started uploading these assets, but it wasn’t bad enough to warrant a solution beyond manually writing the problem assets into a manual ban list. Now, UGC accessory creators want their share of the pie in the money to go around in creating accessories and simple bricks with pictures slapped onto them are being allowed to pass UGC accessory moderation into the catalog, and we as developers are strapped for tooling to handle this.
The catalog is still an application-based program and there’s still time to write new policy, improve moderation and help us developers with tooling. I am fully aware that there can’t be a one-size-fits-all solution and there should still be an expectation on developers to handle some cases on their own but I simply can’t stand for “no help at all” where the alternatives are breaking rules, expending capital that I do not have, long term maintenance that I may not be around for or dealing with inane rate limits. There should be no risk to me as a developer for taking steps to reign in what Roblox won’t.