Important Updates: Unrated Experiences and Changes to Experience Pages

Updates Announcements
109

yeah, it was based on age before. Roblox changed it as they thought it’d be better for parents to make the decision on what content they let their child see: minimal, mild, etc. instead of Roblox.

Most parents check out though and don’t put that much effort in. For most it’d be better to assume age based on established systems like esrb imo. :person_shrugging:

I can’t find where Roblox actually said it. Cause it wasn’t on the OPs account, or the person who made the other Content Maturity stuff. It was either a Tech Talk and the reasoning from the woman who’s in charge of policy or an announcement on here I can’t find.

1 Like
110

i hope you realize that this change does absolutely nothing but just make old and dated games unplayable for everyone.
idk if you’ve ever heard of this, but there is something called lying, and many bad actors on your platform tend to lie straight through their teeth. this change does close to nothing to combat that.

8 Likes
111

We asked for the removal of bad games and instead get the the removal of Ultimate Paintball, Underground War, Heli Wars: Desert Attack, Build to survive tsunami, and many more classics.

Thank you Roblox for taking down my studio’s experience and my colleague’s experiences for almost 11 days now with no appeal resolution in sight, following it up with something even more absurd by by wiping Roblox history.

What happened to the statement in the Tech Talks roundtable Roblox put out 10 days ago saying, verbatim:

“And one thing we really try to do is be fair to our developers, and to not moderate them for the behavior of their users.”?

Yet 10 days later, many of us are still actively waiting to be appealed because our games were wrongfully taken down. No, it is not fair.

I have been on this platform for 17 years, and this past week, the way Roblox has treated its developers has been the worst I have ever seen. My confidence in this platform is diving further every day, whether it’s from our 2 years worth of work into our new experience being placed on hold indefinitely by Roblox off an impulse generalized blanket ban on an entire genre, or making decisions like this.

I really hope Roblox can reconsider this action. I think everyone is in agreement that safety is the highest priority - but this does not feel like a step towards safety. This feels like a panic decision that’s resulting in thousands of developers that follow the rules being negatively affected. As for myself, I do not even know what to do at this point. Support is unresponsive, it’s been almost 2 weeks, and our game’s launch is being further and further delayed inevitably because Roblox is moving so slowly on restoring games they’ve wrongfully taken down.

I just can not imagine the bottlenecks this process will cause once this goes into effect, because as I’ve said earlier in this post, already many developers have their experiences wrongfully hidden for almost 2 weeks now that rely on Roblox for income. And that is only one genre. I can only assume based on precedent, that restoring experiences beyond September 30th could take even longer than it does now - it’s already been 2 weeks for some of us in the social hangout genre!

All I can say is it has never been scarier to be a developer on this platform. I hope things will get better for all of us.

22 Likes
112

Generally good update, but for future updates like this, can you make it NOT send 20 messages to my inbox and email.

Just have one that says that action needs to be taken on one or more experiences then have all of them in a dedicated page on the creator hub.

3 Likes
113

Wait so does this just mean that anything that ISN’T popular is getting the boot? That’s not a good sign.

8 Likes
114

It was announced here:

I don’t really get it either, especially since it’s not immediately clear on what “Restricted” means. To me this sounds like content that isn’t allowed at all, not content that’s only allowed for 17+ users. If anything they made it more confusing.

image
image620×506 66.7 KB

I’m glad that minimum ages were made visible again, because I think a lot of users weren’t aware of some of the age restrictions that existed (e.g. “Social Hangout” locks your game to 13+).

7 Likes
115

Not giving Roblox an out here, it’s entirely their fault. Telling you why it’s impacting you though:

Roblox is a public company. That directly goes against Roblox’s core value of “taking the long view” cause you don’t have time to sit and think when your stock is nosediving.

That means Roblox had to make a quick and sweeping decision, which is what this is. Roblox doesn’t get to skirt responsibility here, they’ve had years upon years to figure this all out. Just saying the why. Roblox’s lack of action and work, but over years of time, not necessarily this thread/action.

7 Likes
116

Do you mean unrated games should get 17+?

4 Likes
117

okay, i’ve thought about it a bit more, and i have a few more things to say:

i’m not exaggerating when i say i believe this change might actually kill roblox. on a fundamental level, forcing roblox games to have an age rating goes against the very concept of roblox being a platform for free creation, specifically because it now raises the barriers to entry to get your game published. there’s now an expectation that your game has to be complete or in some polished state before allowing literally anyone else to play it, on top of the fact that it also has to maintain some level of activity to continue justifying its existence on the platform. this change is worse than just closing down old games, it also pretty much kills future chances of any new games popping up that aren’t already fleshed-out experiences. this pretty much means that roblox as a platform for freeform user creation is dead. not only is this erasing history, but it will also prevent new history from being made.

not to mention that it doesn’t really solve the safety issues that plague the platform, as many bad actors simply lie when doing the questionnaire, only being given action when public pressure is mounted. if anything, it makes the problem even worse by making it easier for these bad actors to pop up amongst the now smaller crowd.

24 Likes
118

The easiest solution would be setting it as 13+.

2 Likes
119

Roblox literally already does this for unrated experiences!

1 Like
120

If Roblox want to force the age rating questionaire down developers throats, they need to spend the time to make the questionaire forms more usable for developers. Here are my strong suggestions from my experience with using the HORRIBLE forms:

  • Firstly, move the submit button to the left, which is where the radial buttons for the yes/no answers are so we don’t have to move our mouse across the ENTIRE display for EVERY question.
  • Secondly, HAVE EVERY QUESTION ON ONE PAGE! why the HELL do we need to click submit for each individual question? Just give us them all in a single tabular format! This IS SUCH a huge waste of time and will heavily contribute to RSI alongside the first issue I mentioned.
  • Thirdly, default the old questions to our previous answer, so we don’t need to re-choose the same responses everytime the questionaire changes.
  • Fourthly, DONT require us to re-do the questionaire if our experiences wouldn’t be restricted more than they currently are! Or at the very least zero-restriction experiences should be allowed to skip it, which many developers target theirs to be to maximise the number of players who can play it.
  • Fifthly(?)… let us do the questionaire for multiple experiences simultaneously or side by side, give us a dashboard that lets us fill in forms for all outstanding public experiences sequentially, rather than forcing me to open up tabs for every game I have and scrolling miles to find and click the questionaire section, only to find that half of them don’t need to be re-filled in. Let us fill them in sequentially, where the next experience’s questionaire is given after submitting the last. Alongside this dashboard, give us monthly or weekly (configurably timeframe please?) notifications when experiences require the questionaire to be re-completed!
11 Likes
121

I was confused and thought they were doing this but no. Given that Surveys don’t allow you to update your Age Rating of the game below 17+ If it’s Restricted says a lot how Tone deaf they are in trying to do simple solutions. This is the nicest way to put it. Right now there is way too much negligence going on in this site.

5 Likes
122

Look. At this point considering the constant consecutive failures of roblox to take even the most simplest and logical of actions… I’m starting very quickly to believe that the only way forward is if you simply purge the entire corporation clean of most of its current employees (including the CEO, he’s the reason everything got to this point). I have not seen a company doing these many illogical decisions in like… ever. (Maybe intel)

Matt, i have to question your actual expertise in any sort of child safety or security or whatever too. If you do have some but are not allowed to apply it due to the CEO wanting easy cash then… i dont know what to say.

For years this corporation has done nothing but take wrong turn after wrong turn regardless of how much community backlash it got. I believe no one meaningful inside roblox has any real clue on how to run this sort of corporation. Im really left believing that david baszucki was never really prepared for roblox to become the titan it is today and has likely barely any clue as to what to do with it. The engine has been left in a insanely poor state with feature requests getting straight up ignored for a decade only to finally get some shallow excuses as to why this or that. If they cant listen to their developers then they cannot listen to anyone else. Any other competent gaming/game engine corporation would laugh in the face of the CEO the moment they find out the engine struggles from heavy performance issues from literarily UI.

The lack of care in actual safety is such a damn joke. I understand that moderating such a large platform is not at all easy but truthfully the issues people have been raising for YEARS at this point are so insanely easy and logical to do… yet they still wont do it. Rather they will instead shield inappropriate games behind age gates and call it a day. The issues are so blatant and obvious that this is no longer a question of how hard it is to manage moderation on such a large corporation but rather a question of how negligent can they get for the sake of maximizing profits and pleasing investors.

I’ll don’t believe for a second roblox will become any better with the current people at the top that run it. Purge the corporation and start fresh. Only way forward.

21 Likes
123

not that any of my suggestions have been listened to since this forum went public, but roblox really needs to reconsider (read abandon) this policy. just keep old games available. don’t kill the remnants of classic roblox.

9 Likes
124

This is a tragedy- are we not going to be able to revisit the vast majority classic/old games?

9 Likes
125

How quickly did this get restored? I’ve been waiting for some days and my email still hasn’t been answered.

1 Like
126

I’m not excited for this because games with terminated owners will not be playable anymore. Hopefully they don’t go through with this because I don’t want to lose childhood stables like this

image
image1920×1080 153 KB

7 Likes
127

ROBLOX TRY NOT TO MAKE THE WORST UPDATES IMAGINABLE CHALLENGE. (IMPOSSIBLE)

like seriously what the #### is up with y’all making some of the worst updates the community has to go through? now i can’t even play some ancient games with a few friends “connections” or some random people like c’mon man! y’all are SERIOUSLY gonna erase about 85% of Roblox History? like there’s some great old roblox games out there that nobody even plays anymore other than people exploring them and POOF! all gone! completely lost media forever! and y’know what? #FreeSchlep too. I get that y’all wanna like keep your players away from inappropriate games and stuff, but THIS? that’s only gonna start killing off the old games like previously mentioned! which only makes more and more people mad rather than happy in the slightest! like I just can’t with roblox anymore. ####.

6 Likes
128

Just pointing out that I have not seen a single comment in support of this update

18 Likes