It is a necessity to promote experiences that features diversity, equity and inclusion

Feature Requests Website Features
#1

As a Roblox developer, I am a staunch supporter of social equality, and through my experiences I want to make clear that they are safe and empowering places for the socially disadvantaged to practice their beliefs and express themselves.

However, on Roblox, there really isn’t a facet which allows developers who focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion to let their games be noticed. I am the developer of Felandia, a cat game which heavily supports LGBTQ+.

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Just recently, @Fennecpaw and I have published an update to celebrate pride month. We have put on sale dozens of pride flags as in game cosmetics to put on your character, and pride themed items completely for free for limited time, alongside decorating the experience to reflect it.

However, there is just something so appalling that it shocked me to post this feature request.
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We released this pride update on midnight of June 6, and we instantly got flooded with a huge swarm of homophobic and transphobic bots, having our game plummeting in dislikes and many reports complaining about these bots.

There can only be one reason for this; Roblox failing to enforce an educative space around diversity, equity, and inclusion, as well as the lack of prioritization of the safety of these disadvantaged individuals.

We want empowerment. We want a platform work we do not have to worry about excessive hate that clearly goes against the TOS, but goes barely unenforced, and we want our games to fit within the Roblox ecosystem.

Us developers are creating games to serve these individuals. We want Roblox to do something that can increase the visibility of these experiences, especially experiences that celebrate or educate people about the empowerment of People of Color, LGBTQ+, the disabled, and many other marginalized communities.

Companies supporting diversity, equity and inclusion is the norm. They have a social responsibility.
Google.
Microsoft.
Amazon
Apple.
Twitter.

If Roblox wants to thrive as a company, they need to put emphasis on this.

I propose we should have a permanent game sort that we can apply for, and to have Roblox endorse DEI games often, through social media and influencers.

24 Likes
#2

I agree however, unless developers and customer support can get more control over likes/dislikes and have the ability to challenge and dismiss the ones that are unnecessary and unproductive, it’ll only put a target on everyone’s back.

What we need is to be able to actually get feedback from players or lock the like/dislike button behind a playable time (10-15 minutes min.) so at least the developers can rack in the premium benefits. Unless Roblox gives us control over that, there is no way that this update will do any good.

8 Likes
#3

This isn’t about likes and dislikes, it’s about making Roblox a safer place for LGBTQ+ as a whole. If anti-LGBTQ+ users target the platform, it’s okay, but targeting specific developers for promoting social equality is unacceptable. Instead, Roblox should promote themselves (not developers) as a safe place.

The Roblox algorithm is unpredictable and tends to favour games with high like ratios and player counts. The fact that it is possible for people to dislike bomb you over something that should be promoted on the entire platform is wrong. The proposed solution is for Roblox to promote games that favour social equality, rather than to ignore this issue.

8 Likes
#4

Although I will admit, the entire like/dislike system is very flawed. I do like your idea to make users play the experience for 10-15 minutes before they can like/dislike it.

9 Likes
#5

This is the point of my response. You’re complaining about your experience being targeted by a hate mob which includes dislike bombing. You want a safe place to grow and promote LGBTQ+ on the platform but by highlighting games like yours without any other changes, this will only end up with an easy way for people to target your experience.

I like the idea of a new sort and I mention it in my original but once again, Roblox does nothing to actually protect experiences from hate raids. All a new sort would do would is just send people your way with all the wrong intentions and tank your stats that you’d have to work for a whole year for this to happen again the next year. Roblox needs to give the developers protections from hate raids before we can think of adding a sort that will be unfortunately very controversial for the platform…

8 Likes
#7

That’s the issue with the Roblox community.
Roblox doesn’t care if you exploit or hack, you wont get banned for that.

But, if you say “gay” or “furry” even in the right context you can get slapped with a 1 week ban and no option to appeal.

The Roblox community is really not supportive of much and that’s been made clear.
Proving my point, most LGBTQ games have a high dislike count, no matter how good, bad, or polished the game is.

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People will just join the game and say “ew lgbtq”, leave, and then dislike.
I have never played any of these games firsthand, but from videos I have seen on them it’s pretty bad.

Furthermore you can join a game like Rate my Avatar with a furry avatar with some pride flags on it, and you would probably get a thousand 1 star ratings and a lot of hate.

I got a bit off topic there, but still. I would be shocked to see this happen, and if it did I would probably see a bunch of videos from youtubers known to cause trouble like Ruben and some others that are like “WORST ROBLOX UPDATE EVER??? :open_mouth: :open_mouth: :open_mouth:”

Even going into normal games I normally dont have any issues with my avatars, but sometimes I get stuff like “lol furry”, which could be amplified by this. On Twitter, I often like those kind of posts and follow furries. I mainly only post about Roblox, but when I make the occasional tweet about anything furry related I can get a few comments from people off of the DevForum or Roblox (being how I met them) commenting something about it, which happened the other day. That’s holding a lot of people back from making these kind of games, or changes. You added some pride flags, and you’re getting dislike bombed for seemingly no reason.

I feel like this could benefit the platform and select games, but that would just end up directing hate straight into them, and a lot of games featured there would have the effect that your game had, a decline in players and a steep increase in dislikes.

8 Likes
#8

That being said, I think we have to improve the rating system first, maybe we should hide the ratio and dislikes just how YouTube removed showing dislikes to others.

1 Like
#10

Hiding ratios is a terrible idea. One good thing that those do is expose games that are either fake rip offs of the original popular games or a down right bad game. If anything, it’d be great if Roblox made some improvements to the system that we all have been begging for years to be made.

16 Likes
#11

The Rating system was introduced in 2013 (or 2014 i cant remember). This was when Roblox was still a relatively niche platform and everyone, mostly said what they meant.

Let me set the stage, in 2013, you still had Personal Build Servers, FilteringEnabled had just been added (but not force enabled) and games like Work At A Pizza Place were at their peak.

However, as the platform has evolved, the rating system has still relied on this system where every vote has equal weight. Fundamentally, I believe this needs to change based on factors on both game interaction and how much trouble the user has caused in the past, or if the user gives this specific topic or the game creator favourably or negatively.

This system has already been implemented, to relative success, on another platform, Reddit. While I’m not claiming Roblox should directly copy it, the rating system needs to stop treating every vote with the same weight.