Even if not awarding items from developer games, avatar customization is definitely an important social feature that has been gutted. Looking at our top games, it’s no coincidence that they all put a major emphasis on customization through item skins/playerhomes/etc that provide the player a sense of ownership. Games like Robloxian High School and Meep City have seen major success just by re-implementing the catalog and providing it to everyone.
We’re sorely lacking as a social platform now that we don’t allow all players to customize their avatars. 5 shirts with minimal variance is not going to cut it:
A platform as large as Roblox needs customization, and it needs it to be engaging. What we provide to non-paying users is not adequate, and greatly diminishes the social nature of the platform when you look the exact same as every other user on the platform.
Not a part of that team, but IIRC last RDC they said UGC pending anthro when scope of avatars is more finalized. Can’t ship UGC catalog only for it to undergo substantial changes due to needing to support new anthro stuff.
Tbh I feel like at this point Roblox is splitting too much. We already have 2 different avatar types, and now we’ll have a third.
I guess they’re good for one thing, and that’s giving three different core-systems for characters people can use right off the bat for their games (realistic, blocky but bendy, blocky) but as for the catalog and the rest of the ‘global’ things, it just doesn’t seem sustainable to me (cough also delays features cough).
As much as I understand this, I want to point out that Roblox allows me to create an account called “httphttphttp2” but not search for it, and the search gets filtered. If the username is currently getting filtered, I would think I shouldn’t be able to create an account with that username, right? Why am I allowed to create a new account with a filtered username then?
Account creation and the filter will always be out of sync because while the filter can be updated, usernames cannot. If random users’ usernames changed from what they were to ######## on a random basis it would extremely aggravating.
You are missing what I am saying. Currently, I am good to sign up for that username, but also currently, other filters censor it. Future and past aside, I should not be able to apply for a new account that is presently filtered everywhere else.
On second thought, maybe it’s for the better. I wouldn’t want to frustrate a new user that couldn’t find a username that passed filters.
The filter does not check against the string on its own. The filter will also apply context from the speaker and the listener’s point of view.
This is why under 13 accounts have stricter filtering tests than an over 13 member. Likewise, the filter will use previous entries in a chat conversation to determine the context of the sentence and apply its filtering if needed.
Usernames lack this context and are filtered without it.
I’d like it if parties on Roblox were improved upon, and were encouraged the use of.
As of now, they feel like they’re outdated and could be vastly improved upon and could engage more in social interaction.
I was thinking for a couple of things you could add in terms of parties, like:
Adding a specific chat command/tab in-game that’d allow you to talk to party members only. (Kind of like how you can use /team to specifically chat to people on your team in-game.)
Allowing people to add other people to the party while in-game without leaving the Roblox player. (Sort of how you can send someone a friend request.)
Possibly improve the UI on the website? It looks a bit outdated and messy. Separating the group chats from directly messaging your friends would probably clean it up a lot.
It’d also be nice if we could stretch and scale the UI’s to a size that’d fit for us.
I think there was some update to it recently on mobile, but I don’t think it was given that much attention on the computer.
Roblox usernames are filtered as well (note: filtered due to DMCA reasons and not for profanity).
Neither of them use the same filter searching does though. Could there be more parity between user/group name filtering and search filtering? Yes. What does this actually achieve though?
The names for the half-billion accounts we’ve amassed over the past 10 years are permanent, and it’d be years before searching for accounts made under the new filter became commonplace. Even then, the search filter has been updated again, so congrats – users you search for are still going to have their name filtered.
User/group name filtering being lighter than the search filter is not the problem. The problem is that we have perfectly legitimate text being filtered in the search. We would see substantially more improvement by improving the accuracy of the search filter than by anything we could due to name creation filtering.
Oh? I didn’t even realized that, really unfortunate since I want my followers to at least sort of know what is happening. I did also want some sort of twitter-like system where people reposted my status or liked it so I know there was feedback.
I agree with almost everything here, but a lot of them would be nice-to-haves for me.
I want to be able to have more effective communication with my players, friends and groups.
Players: It’s mentioned already in this thread a few times, but it’s impossible to communicate with younger players or just players who don’t have Twitter, get filtered out in a PM, and of course the discourages use of discord. Twitter works great for players that have it- but I’d say ~80% of them do not and won’t be getting one in the near future. Hence, I use the group shout.
Groups: I abuse the heck out of the group shot for announcements, and I run out of space much too often. The posting of events, announcements, information, etc. leads to a crowded and ugly shout. Want to put a link in there to the forums? Be ready to cut out other announcements. It’s a real pain. I need a way to effectively communicate these things to my groups without abusing the group shout. We have the group wall, but that’s really more of a group chat. What if we used that like an actual wallboard for announcements?
Friends: This includes friends who don’t have means to communicate outside of Roblox or friends who don’t pay attention to those outsourced chats. I need a way where I can talk to more than 5 people at once, in a better-filtered environment. It’s near impossible for me to say the simplest things to those who have a stricter filter and those who don’t.
I also would love @TheAmazeman ‘s suggestion of @ in groups. My own comments often get drowned out in the group wall.
Bring back comments, make them better and more useful
Manual Localization on the website itself.
Finding out if Localization is actually necessary in your game or not thru stats
Lots of Group Fixes to weed out need for Discord
And now, I want to point out the last link isn’t really about a social feature, but honestly, fixing the Develop page is way more important to me than fixing social things. Especially having the Library in the Develop area is a real hassle. I liked it better when it was apart of Catalog honestly.
I think a change for group games and payouts needs some updating.
I propose that we have the ability to have a teamcreate whitelist on individual games instead of one role allowing access to every game.
Also, make percentages for payouts for individual games instead of the group overall for instances where different devs get their fair share of profitys earned from the games they worked on in a group.
I don’t have an ideal solution, but I really want something attached to the game, and not having to delegate it off to groups. A single wall doesn’t really suffice for me, nothing gets categorized and you cannot really reply to something properly as a result. The hack week project linked above sounds extremely promising at least.
Better party user experience:
I want my players to be able to play together, but it’s currently too hard.
Parties work well for playing together if players can
(a) understand how the system works and know it exists,
(b) can use the system at all (it’s not supported on console).
Many players simply use the “Join game” feature. If a server is full, this leads to some annoying error. I’m getting a very large amount of messages of players being bothered by this, but those players don’t seem to be aware of the party system.
Some improvement could be to show a message proposing to form a party once such an error occurs, showing party notifications in-game, then instantly grouping them up and re-joining a server with enough room for both players.
Or maybe some simple button to quickly form a party from a user’s profile?
I want to do be able to communicate with my followers, and get feedback from players, on Roblox but it’s currently too hard.
Followers
I don’t think this is currently possible, but I would like to send out a message to all my followers.
Game Feedback
It is nearly impossible to get game feedback from players. Rarely do players take the time to send a personal message. How about a feedback button in the game description for players to quickly send feedback.
Groups
Groups are filled with spam and trolls, which makes it a constant chore to moderate. It is easier just not to have a group, rather than go through all the work of keeping a clean group.
