Roblox's Public UGC Release is a disaster and there needs some quality control

As a Roblox UGC Creator since 2021, the way roblox executed the update of public ugc was horrid and there needs to be adjustments.

Limited knock off galore

I’m going to first mention about the limited knock off since a lot of people are forgetting what they promised on a devforum post regarding taking action on copies of items here. They say on the post about how they are so against limited knock offs are are willing to take action in them

In reality i have not seen this actually take place whatsoever and the only times ive seen limiteds actually get taken down as of recently is by the DSA system. Here are some recently uploaded items that are currently onsale at this given time!

for roblox saying they plan on implementing detection it sure does suck

This has been an issue for years at this point and i would honestly expect way more harsh punishments towards people that do upload these types of items as they are typically repeating offenders or affiliated with those that repeat those offenses.

Suggestion for limited knock off detection

I feel like this would be possible with the technology roblox has but what if roblox’s ai moderation could review items in a 360 angle instead of just the thumbnail? If you haven’t noticed a good bit of limited knock off faces for example have the thumbnails of the items facing the back to prevent it from getting detected. in other words, at least a thing where it checks the item all around would probably help it detect some copies better along with some other technical stuff to improve that process.

Free Limited fees are now too expensive.

Incase you haven’t been aware, free limited are a good way to keep a community active and be able to make events for your game with a reward. Unfortunately this is now nearly impossible to do unless you own one of the biggest games on roblox or is a brand.

Free limiteds are now 100 robux PER QUANTITY.

This means if you were to make a limited that was free with 10,000 stock it would cost 1 million robux to publish when before it was like 10-30 robux per stock depending on the accessory type. The sudden change alone is enough to anger anyone that do these limited events or were planning to.

Suggestion for free limited price

Lower the price a good bit at least so its actually affordable to host events with limiteds, people love being able to obtain stuff for free.

Lack of features

Theres actually a lot of unreleased features that were planned and things that just aren’t optimized. here’s a good list of some of those features that should be added in:

  • ABILITY TO UPLOAD SHOES
  • Changing thumbnails of already uploaded items
  • Being able to delete your own items that you did upload, with the same refund system taking place to users that bought the item recently

I can honestly go on and on about examples of these that would honestly improve quality of life for being a UGC Creator drastically that should of been implemented before public UGC’s release

Other suggestions that i want to squeeze in that would make a healthier marketplace

  • users that abuse their perms get their uploads revoked not only on their account but also hardware, IP, linked email to prevent their alt accounts from being able to upload as easily.

  • being able to select colors of items to buy, a good example would be just any online store that has a selection of colors to buy separately.
    image

  • the group page where you find groups should have a category for UGC groups for shopping for accessories

Be free to also comment your thoughts, or suggestions regarding public UGC since i know i didn’t cover everything but just the few big problems

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who would have guessed that something like this would happen :grin:

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Absolutely agreed. Blizzei made some great feedback and I hope that Roblox takes notes. As creators these changes were absolutely devastating.

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I completely agree with all the stuff said in here. One thing I have to mention though, is that public UGC being this bad was expected, and I’m sure Roblox moderation can’t do much aside from relaying on user reports.
I think, aside from returning the free limited items to their initial price, or atleast cheaper than the current fee, they should also reimplement “in experience only” feature for regular unlimited quantity accessories. Would also be nice compensating older creators with a few perks for the next 3 months atleast.

I think Roblox should have had a manual moderation & spend money hiring real people to do moderation jobs, instead of having an AI moderation.

Roblox right now ruined a lot of creators’ income and should atleast allow old creators to contact roblox staff privately for concerns such as people using alts nonstop to copy items, allow older creators to test upcoming features until roblox finalizes the avatar creation part of the website (EG: early PBR testing for accessories and other features)

Another nice bonus (which is most likely never going to happen) would be, allowing ALL old creators to create 1 particle item of their choice in the first month of public ugc (a very nice way to show gratitude to older creators)

In my opinion honestly, the public UGC is as bad as I thought. I don’t think it lowered my expectations, but one thing I’m happy to hear, is that now ALL creators Roblox never gave a chance, can now upload their accessories.

To end this post, I want to say that I’m not disappointed at what Roblox done, because sooner or later we had it coming, was to be expected, but I’m disappointed that the current moderation is very bad, a lot of people are going to lose their income (this started with the very unasked and unneeded publishing advance update) and a lot of people will get scammed, trying to upload their own accessories just to be prompted by purchases & bugs everywhere. Roblox’s moderation was not ready for this. I’m hoping it will improve in the future but I highly doubt.

And last thing I wanna mention, congratulations to all UGC creators that made it before this update. You’re all nice people, I got to know some of yall, and you should all spend your wonderful 3d skills on something better than the badly AI moderated catalog.

EDIT: Forgot to mention the false moderations given by the AI moderation when working on avatar bundles

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I agree, of course, with your points, but this once again reminds me of the bigger issue with communication from Roblox, specifically addressing Developer Relations. The last of communication and sudden drop of this update despite the very transparent issues is a serious problem for any future interactions between a developer/team and Roblox.

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I tottally agree not gonna lie. But its Roblox so what can you expect. :woman_shrugging:

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Roblox really needs to add permanent termination for any intentional rule breaking. I see no other way to fix it. If an account uploads a clear knock off ugc ban them from the platform, and delete all of their items.

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Paying 15 000 robux for a shoulder limited with only 100 copies is so freaking terrifying for me. More than stupid. I regret totally. Roblox thinks its easy for us to make profitable when they were used to take us 70% in average.
Oh also it seems more profitable to sell free limited than that, it was the opposite before. Roblox didn’t do right its maths.
15k of publishing advance against 10k on free

Oh also it won’t prevent people from stopping creating knock off or stolen accessories because people are very attracted by illegal accessories by thinking they are rare or funny. So “publishing advance” is not a big deal for them unlike accessories like mine which try to be unique.

In my opinion
The best way to save UGC would be bring back humans moderating accessories. I’m ok if the process takes more time than now. Also removing these horrible and selfish fees.
It’s cancerous to want to tax everything and anything in every direction for someone living out of the US.

Update : I just realized I could sell 3000 copies for the same price (15k) so I hate this new feature so much.

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Yeah public UGC is going awful and you summed it up very well. The recently created section is now a plethora of re-uploads of other peoples’ items/IP theft, limited ripoffs, inappropriate items, and so on. It was bad enough as it is with a closed program, now that it’s public it seems to have gotten 10x worse. I can go to the recently created section and, without scrolling, find a bunch of these items. This was my biggest issue with public UGC in the first place.

The added fees to putting things on sale + 100 robux per copy for free items make uploading a pain as well.

For the lack of features section, I just wanted to chime in and add that we still don’t have surface appearance support :(

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I believe those are moderated by humans, and often your entire application gets rejected due to small issues like not having a large enough modesty layer, etc.

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Agreed. Roblox should really reconsider allowing the program to be public, as within the first day of it being public it has been a mess. I have seen a handful of items that are suggestive in nature and/or reference illegal substances, which somehow managed to get past QA and remain up for a few hours. There have also been countless stolen assets uploaded, with one large developer already having 4 items of his stolen in less than 24 hours.

The sudden price hike of the cost of free UGC limited stock also isn’t great at all; Roblox has previously cared about fixing ingame UGC and stuff but making free item stock cost 100 robux per 1 stock is beyond ridiculous and unaffordable for pretty much ANY creator; not to mention that given you only receive 10% of resales after 30 days means that free UGC is now impossible to profit from. This change in particular has hurt free UGC games, which have hundreds and sometimes thousands of players. I planned on having a free limited in my game soon with 1k stock, which if I had done that previously would have only cost me 10-30k robux. Now, it will cost me 100k. That’s $350 in devex rates, just to make a freebie that would have otherwise cost just $35-105 previously.

It’s obvious that Roblox does not care for UGC creators at this point. We still only get 30% of our sales, even now that it’s public. And when the announcement that UGC was going public was made, we had less than 24 hours warning. Did anyone at Roblox stop to think for a moment about how for many people, UGC was their job, how they paid their bills, their rent? Did they think about how suddenly that is affecting them?

Here is a list of what I believe Roblox should do in regards to UGC:

  • Don’t make it public. Bring back the applications, but hire a large team of people who can go through applications on a much more regular basis. This would still allow people to get into UGC, and would hopefully prevent the catalog becoming cluttered with low quality items.
  • Bring back human QA instead of the AI moderation system. I don’t mind having to wait several hours for my items to get approved if it means less clutter/inappropiate or stolen items on the catalog. Doing this would also solve the problem of miscategorized items on the catalog too. Remember when hairs weren’t allowed to be uploaded as face items to price them cheaper? That vanished when the QA humans were replaced with AI. It’s also pretty clear that the AI moderation isn’t perfect at all, as some UGC creators have been terminated without warning over items uploaded long ago.
  • Revert the fees for free UGC stock back to how they were originally. 10-30 robux per stock was perfectly fine, I don’t think there was any issue with those prices or anything. Doing this would benefit games, creators and players alike; Games could have ingame freebies with high stock, bringing in lots of players, which in turn gives devs more money from premium payouts/possible gamepass sales etc, and it would mean more opportunities for free-to-play players (or people who can’t afford to buy expensive UGC/people who just like to collect stuff) to do just that.

Also, these points aren’t strictly related to UGC going public (moreso UGC in general) but I thought I’d add these too:

  • Stop punishing creators retroactively for items uploaded long ago, before changes were made forbidding said types of items. I’m specifically referring to blood UGCs here; items with cartoony, non-realistic blood were allowed for the longest time, but now all of a sudden due to a random change in policy, Roblox has begun retroactively punishing large creators such as BlushJar and Reverse_Polarity for items they were allowed to upload, have onsale for months if not years, and in a lot of these cases their removal is down to individuals abusing DSA. (Also “Blood” is/was a tag for UGC items IIRC. Why have it if its not allowed?) They’ve gotten banned for a few days, which in some cases could potentially affect their ability to devex. Remember, for some people, UGC is their main job.
  • Allow more creative freedom with UGC avatar bodies. Currently, UGC avatar bodies are subject to certain restrictions, for example, heads cannot be static and have to move, bundles that support 2D clothing are discouraged, and modesty bars are required on bundles which do have 2D clothing (even though 2D clothing has its own modesty features) Not everybody wants to have an avatar with a face that moves. A good majority of people use 2D clothing, either on its own or in addition to layered clothing. Being able to have UGC bodies that work with both 2D and LC is great and allows for more customization.
  • Let us have PBR textures for normal UGC accessories. If LC can support it, how hard can it be to make normal accessories support it, too?
  • Add other UGC categories and types. For example, for layered clothing, adding “Shoes” and “Hand” items. “Shoes” is self explanatory. “Hand” would refer to hand accessories (like watches) as well as handheld items (like handheld swords etc) currently handhelds are often uploaded under categories like shirts or jacket etc., so this would also help clear up miscategorization + make it easier to search for those item types.
    It would also be nice to see other types of UGC be supported, such as custom emotes and 2D faces (similar to classic roblox faces) having these categories available would also be good for other types of people too, such as those who can’t model but can animate well and make good emotes, or face artists who can make detailed faces. I know Roblox wants to push animated dynamic faces but it would be nice if this option existed too.

These are all of my thoughts on the current state of UGC, and I hope that Roblox can listen to the community feedback. It’s clear that people aren’t happy at the moment judging by the replies to Roblox’s most recent tweet.

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The items highlighted in this image are derivative enough from roblox limiteds that they should be allowed. They are spins-offs and recreations in their own styles; and one of them is a mod meant to be used on a limited.

I completely agree that the changes to the prices of creating limiteds was un-needed and should be reversed though.

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Unless you are a older UGC creator who has numerous items already uploaded and are pretty popular, you aren’t going to profit that much or at all.

I have been seeing people sell low stock (like 10) UGC items for 1k+ robux for one slot. I think that my be one of the few ways of profiting. The items have look really good, something people want like swords with tassels. However, I don’t know how the math works when uploading multiple low stock items at using this strategy.

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Ive seen the low stock and high price method but at a glance it honestly only looks like enough to break even or profit very little… bear in mind you get the “profit” after the limited release fees get covered after 30 days

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UGC is falling apart :skull:

Also the limited being 100 per quantity seems pretty fair. I could see there being an overabundance of limited that no one wants.

Its not like this has just started. A few days before the update i went onto the catalog after what felt like years and I see 3 oft he exact same things, dominoes and dominusez, whatever else and whatnot. Then they decided to make the secerity even worse with this. Update after update, worse and worse. None of the recent major updates on roblox i swear have been decent. Sorry for the rant, its just crazy to me how they keep pumping these terrid updates out, i dont know when this streak started, broken by a few if not one update(s). If you couldnt already moderate something why make it even worse? Seems like all they care about is money at this point, no care towards their users

@Roblox take notes from this dude

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Some of the games on Roblox…

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Months later Catalog is Ruined UGC is in seizure AND ROBLOX still can’t find the PANIC button to revert this mistakeeeee :sob: :sad:

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So if I were to copy your game
And just recolor and rename it

Its allowed?