This update is quite good with the voice chat side, as Roblox wants a piece of that Metaverse pie, and expanding Voice Chat to as many as possible is important on getting that piece, but for the Marketplace, that’s kind of lowering safety. Phone verification is easier than ID Verification, due to phone generators, but we should be able to define between phone-verified developers and ID-Verified developers.
Either way, my summary is;
Voice-chat is now Metaverse-goodish.
Marketplace Safety is a bit worse.
This update definitely has some good intentions behind, but I am still surprised why stuff like IDs and phone numbers are used to verify trustworthiness.
I, and many developers would love roblox to start using a combination of things to verify whether the user is trustworthy or not. Devexing is a good metric to ensure that the developer is at least more trustworthy than the average developer. Also, you can determine whether the user is trustworthy or not by seeing if he purchased anything from roblox, as you wouldn’t normally purchase some robux and then violate some rules and risk account termination unless, you want to waste some money.
There are many things to determine trustworthiness of a user, but IDs and phone numbers aren’t one of those
While phone number generators work on other sites, Roblox is requiring users to verify they have access to the phone numbers. This means very few of these sites will actually work.
An example of where users could get phone numbers is something like Google Voice. The only thing is that real phone numbers aren’t actually that easy to come by, so many of these sites have security around giving free phone numbers (captchas or other requirements involving captchas).
This impacted my workflow. I was recently browsing plugins from the creator marketplace via create.roblox.com/marketplace and searched for keywords. The search results were very few, all you get is one page worth of creations, here is what I mean:
This takes up more time because you have to go to the filter and click toggle “Include unverified creators”, and the page refreshes too.
Immediately after toggling the unverified creators filter, I received at least seven pages worth of results compared to the unverified filter toggled off. This makes it difficult for a majority of developers who want to quickly install a plugin or take a model from the creator marketplace website.
Thank you for this. I am genuinely very happy for everything you guys have done to keep Roblox a safer place. By doing this, we can ensure that we don’t get involved with a lot of bad stuff. But will this also help with the problem regarding the inappropriate models being uploaded, or that already was uploaded?
I mean let’s just put it this way - someone having a phone number doesn’t necessarily mean they are trustworthy or even above thirteen years old for that matter. In fact, sometimes I wonder if thirteen-year-olds are even mature enough to be using spatial voice and other features on the platform that require identity verification. I’ve personally never used voice chat even thought I’m fifteen - I just don’t have a driver’s license or ID, nor do I feel particularly comfortable with giving that sensitive information to Roblox and I’m sure other people would feel the same way.
Anyway, getting back to my argument earlier about some thirteen years old not being mature enough to use voice chat. Just because some people that “meet the age requirement” for voice chat aren’t mature enough to use it doesn’t mean that everyone should be denied access to the feature. But if someone on the platform does want to use voice chat, they need to verify their age - with a phone number, or ID card. The phone number in my opinion is about ten times less secure than the ID verification mainly that isn’t gonna stop people visiting those websites where you can generate phone numbers for one-time use. Let’s not forget that most people wanting to use voice chat are generally quite young and most likely don’t have a phone or can’t afford to purchase a phone.
One last thing - the developer identity verification seems like a great idea and will make developers seem more reputable and so younger creators can see which developers make the safest models for them to use for free from the toolbox.
So, I understand what you are trying to do here Roblox, but there is still some questions that people like me, and others in this thread still want some answers to. I look forward to hearing any updates from Roblox or other developers in this thread.
The fact that relevance, top rated, updated, favorited categories have been removed to obscure market manipulation by bad actors is awful.
Its biting of the nose to spite the face of many toolbox users. I am really disappointed these were removed, as well as the general movement towards a sandboxed, unapproachable marketplace like the creator dashboard and not being able to see Decal Ids on the web URL through it anymore.
I believe my fellow devs already mentioned this but I feel like it is very essential to talk about it once more, some players that are verified can and ALREADY HAVE uploaded assets that include viruses, I like the change being made and it is very useful for security, but I still feel there is more that can be done.
For instance, this amazing plugin, Ro-Defender™ Plugin is very useful and it would be nice if it was added as a feature in ROBLOX Studio to lessen the probability of having a virus in your game.
Another suggestion would be to manually pick out more trusted developers, which will have their own badge (the already existing Official Model Maker Badge), this way we can safely know this developer won’t include any suspicious instances in their scripts/models.
And one last important thing, I hope that the phone verification process is taken very seriously as it’s extremely sensitive, anyone could use a website for a temporary phone number to verify their account which would lead us to even more issues that we don’t need for the platform, I’d say something that would be manually done would be better, and the player has to wait a specific amount of time before getting a message telling them if they were either accepted or rejected to be verified.
Its really not about trusted developers. It’s about stopping bots, as it should be.
Ro-defender is very old and Roblox already does everything that Ro-Defender does (mostly), through MD5 script blacklisting and catalog cleanups (and other top secret stuff)
I was reading through the Age verification page and it states the following,
“By verifying your account, you can publish more of each asset type and maximize their discoverability within the Creator Marketplace, as well as access age-restricted Studio features, such as Spatial Voice.”
Does this mean Spatial Voice will be coming to users with a verified phone number however are not age verified?
EDIT: Sorry if I’m a little late to this - I heard it was avaliable for people with a verified phone and email but I’m still waiting for access to it.
Hey! Yeah, I read that too and was wondering the same thing. My phone number on my account is verified. However, when I go to the main page on my account settings near where my birthdate is, the verify age button is still there. That will prompt me to scan an ID card to prove my real age. I also don’t have the “Beta Features” tab in privacy which is where people turn Spatial Voice on and off, even though I should have that because my age is verified with my phone number. I decided to contact Roblox support earlier this week hoping they’d give a proper answer (They didn’t, instead telling me they can’t verify my age for me, and to check out the faq page about Spatial Voice). Not once did they tell me if this is coming or it was only for players in certain countries. Great support team you’ve got there guys.
Maybe this phone number verification for Spatial Voice is only available to those in certain countries. I’m not entirely sure. I guess we’ll just have to wait an see for an update from Roblox. RDC is on at the time of me writing this, so maybe they’ll give us an update about it then.
