All the issues in this post are very real and actual issues that somehow are occuring. Not only that, someone recently uploaded a Kleos Aphtition to UGC, just with a darker texture. And those who were behind it, are now claiming that they will soon upload a black Dominus, white Domino Crown, white Void Star, a darker Purple Sparkle Time Fedora, and a Rainbow Shaggy with a different texture.
At this point, Roblox should just get the first wave of UGC creators appointed as QA, since their current “QA” clearly do not know what Roblox’s original hats are and what the limiteds are.
I’m still surprised that a lot of developers are finding out very late about the intention to go public with the UGC accessory catalog since it was stated that this was the plan from day one of the private program’s release. That being said, while I understand the vision, I think it still needs more time on the drawing board or there needs to be continued, stronger, scalable ways to verify creators and provide developers with tools.
If a private program, even before the creator program increased, was incapable of controlling themselves from making absurd assets to capitalise off of the closedness of the program (I am still very upset about the creation of giant avatar-covering assets and how long it took before we could check a MeshPart’s size to guard against it), I have fears about what may end up on the catalog.
At this point, my level of frustration and lack of deeper accessory tooling/requirement for UGC accessory creators to add information that we can check as developers is at an all time high and I’ve taken measures from automatically deleting assets with a volume larger than around 1-2 studs cubed or based on the individual XYZ size components all the way to entirely disabling website avatars. In the worst of cases, I have considered creating a database that tracks deletions and goes as far as to ban specific creators’ assets from wear in my experience entirely if they’ve had enough of their assets deleted.
As a developer, the lack of ability to rein in UGC accessory creators is my only issue with a public UGC accessory catalog, and developers need the tools to address this issue first and foremost before I stand by any decision to go public. Once we have that tooling, I have no more issues. I don’t know what kind of tooling we should get to this extent or any thoughts on how to get this rolling, but at the very least I need to make some noise about recognising this as an active problem.
Ah yeah you’re right, I adjusted the title, I’m not opposed to it going public entirely but currently as it stands, without any implementations of solutions (although we don’t know for sure what happens behind the scenes but the lack of transparency also isn’t great…) to issues that we see today with a gated community, Roblox is not ready for a public UGC catalog.
Yep, the person who uploaded it was told by several UGC members not to upload for other individuals unless they could trust those people, but proceeded to do it anyway (having just gotten accepted into UGC at that…). The original post took a few days to draft which was why I didn’t include that scenario, but yes I saw on twitter that they were planning on uploading waaay more copies of limiteds. The uploader was allegedly going to be the same person who uploaded Kleos, so do with that information what you will.
Regardless the biggest problem here is that the fact that these copies can so consistently clear moderation (as well as other rule-violating content, but those would require knowledge of external references so I guess I would expect those to clear more frequently).
I agree with everything in this post. The UGC program in its current state is a trainwreck, and I’d argue paints this entire platform in a bad light as a result. Just a few years ago, you wouldn’t see people going around in games covered head-to-toe in accessories that are copyright-infringing, game-breaking, or both simultaneously. Now, however, that’s just the norm.
The combination of oversized UGC items and over/undersized Rthro packages has made banning certain clothing items from competitive or semi-competitive games a necessity, which is a problem that has never really existed before. It also isn’t exactly an easy fix, due to the fact there are always more potentially game-balance-breaking items being uploaded every day.
While I’ve never thought highly of the limited market myself (currently trying to deal with Roblox’s support teams to undo a hack that was all because of the stupid rare hats…), allowing people to just create their own virtually indistinguishable knockoffs of rare items is not a good idea, especially on Roblox’s end. Limited items could be easily devalued by people flooding the markets with much cheaper, if not free in the case of that one recent Dominus clone, bootlegs; this cannot be good for Roblox’s ‘economy’.
The copyright-infringing items. personally, drive me crazy. Sure, this platform is no stranger to users violating copyright laws, but it’s never been as in-your-face, spitting-directly-into-your-eye until now. Everywhere you turn now, there’s people wearing questionable-quality heads ripping off characters from whatever horror game the kids are into or items that are literally just giant PNGs of Saul Goodman. It looks ridiculous, and if it continues at its current pace I honestly wonder if Roblox will get in legal trouble over this, for people are making Roblox money by buying items depicting copyrighted material. The last thing this site needs is another disastrous duct-tape “fix” to a copyright issue (looking at you, last year’s audio update…).
I really hope your post, and the many similar ones like it, show someone at Roblox just how badly the UGC program is messing up due to its poor moderation, and how opening it up to everyone would be a horrible idea.
I have no idea how anyone at Roblox could believe UGC should ever go public. They’ve been almost completely unable to moderate their clothing, audios, decals, ads, models, plugins, and chat for years and years and now decide it’d be smart to make their issues 10x worse.
I think UGC is fine but as they’ve slowly started making the program easier to get into its made it obvious its not a good idea to keep increasing accessibility. I went onto the catalog home page just now and saw 14 items that are either direct copies of existing Roblox items or could be copyright, and it just feels like the audio catalog all over again
What’s happening now is really only the tip of the iceberg, it’d only really get worse as it went on. I’m sure eventually every Roblox limited would have a close to exact ugc copy and there’d just be too many for anything to be done about them (which is already starting to happen now). I really hope the team can come to their senses and realize they need to stop before it’s too late
As a Valk owner, this hurts a lot because everytime I go to the catalog, and all I could see is a bunch of Valk copies. What annoys me the most is that some of the UGC Valks are Limited and people are selling it.
It’s not just the Valks that got copied, but also Domini (All Dominus Collection), Domino Crowns or other expensive Limiteds that got copied and created for a cash-grab. How can ROBLOX allow this to happen without properly checking the creator’s item before approving it and either letting them make the item Limited or not, including to check if their UGC is copied or not?
I don’t think it’s a good idea to make UGC public for everyone at this time because UGC is currently a mess at the moment, due to the items being either copied from Limiteds, characters from franchises, etc. What ROBLOX should be doing right now is to erase all of the UGC copied items completely, and kick the UGC creators who started this mess in the first place (the UGC copied items outbreak).
Just sit back and relax. This mess will continue to get out of control, until one day, any one of these stolen items ends up getting the attention of a large company and a copyright lawsuit is filed.
This will easily become another “audio privacy” update, with Roblox being forced to take ALL UGC offline due to said lawsuit until they only allow verified creators to return.
UGC is great, but recently it has felt like an instant upload tool. I thought UGC was reviewed by actual humans and that’s why it took so long to put up? At this point, hundreds of “creators” are uploading a day and it seems like they have given up on proper moderation, similar to voice chat.
Well, unfortunately today at RDC it was announced that public UGC was happening this month, which frankly is nothing short of disheartening to say the least. It seems that as time goes on the UGC catalog becomes even more of a cesspool with so many limited copies and rule-violating content being uploaded for the public to see. This has gotten even more apparent with the addition of bundles, items that are created to copy the “Headless Head” head are even being uploaded.
Sadly it appears this plea is futile, however I still want to reiterate on the points that I made that are becoming even more prevalent to maybe at least get a response and some insight as to how Roblox is planning on tackling these issues…
The number of limited/highly coveted items being uploaded has seemed to exponentiate since the original creation of this post. I cannot begin to fathom how Roblox expects to tackle a public UGC catalog when a private program with ~1000 members cannot accurately be moderated.
There are still a plethora of issues that exist as well that we still don’t have a resolution for as a private community that I want to share.
1- Moderation is abhorrent. This speaks for itself. There is a plethora of items that are either IP-infringing, sexually suggestive, or otherwise rule-violating. I’m not here to debate who owns rights to what because frankly I couldn’t care any less. The fact of he matter is that many of these items are straight up copies of valuable items/highly sought after items that are intended to abuse the limits of moderation. Here are some screenshots of what appear when I go to the catalog (names hidden of course). Many of these items have been up for >1 month which means the creator has made money off of it.
2- There is NO appeal system system for UGC. Once your item is declined you can email support but most if not 100% of the time you WILL NOT get a response. Speaking from experience. I tried uploading an item with Chinese characters, my assumption is that this is the reason it was taken down but because I received no response I have no idea whether it was moderation messing up or if it was actually these characters, but I digress. My email has stagnated for several weeks so it is safe to assume I will not get a response. I’ve tried dming mod review requests as well to no avail.
3- Advertising/promotion of items is fruitless. Worsened by the 13+ only ads update, advertising UGC items is impossible because your ads will be overshadowed by those who spend disproportionately high amounts of currency promoting their items. The CPC is extremely high and the CTR is extremely low. Since then, I received another DM depicting how advertising is fundamentally broken.
(Courtesy of @meepcell)
I’m hoping for at least a response or something elaborating on how Roblox plans on moderating these items because frankly Roblox is digging their own grave at this point. It goes without saying that if Roblox can’t even handle moderating a private catalog, there is no way they are going to be able to moderate a public one, and to me it appears that Roblox could actually get into legal trouble for this because they seem to be allowing this rule-violating content on the platform with no repercussions.
So as another update, publicizing the UGC catalogue seems to have been postponed until early 2024. Between now and then the announcement claims Roblox will begin to be transparent with respect to moderation and such which largely is what my original post outlined.
I am hoping between now and then that Roblox will continue to address issues mentioned here and elsewhere on the forum.
That being said, I’m not going to mark this post as closed yet as there are still some issues mentioned which haven’t been addressed/afaik have no plans to be addressed yet (as a reminder):
1- No appeal line for rejected assets
2- QA does not reject any reuploads of 1:1 copies of Roblox-created limiteds down, just broken down into several parts, and sometimes entire 1:1 copies being made in a single part.
3- QA does not take into account context when assets that reference inappropriate topics are created.
4- Sponsoring UGC assets is fundamentally redundant unless you have enough disposable income to inflate the number of times your asset is shown.
I am in UGC myself and I know for a fact it’s not ready to go public yet. The amount of limited copies, copyrighted content, items copied from other creators, items being put into the incorrect sections and so on is pretty sad. I genuinely do not think public UGC will be ready for months. It is 100 percent not ready in its current state. I genuinely hope Roblox will rethink their decision to make it public this month. Seeing as how it’s already been pushed back multiple times it is possible it’ll be pushed back once more. The change of making all UGC items into limited’s is also another huge and terrible issue in my opinion, but if that’s the direction they are going in then whatever. But the public UGC REALLY needs to be pushed back, it is NOT ready in the slightest.
I do own some UGC, but never really liked it. I’m quoting this from my twitter.
"I think UGC accessories is stupid, and people are getting away with the creation of fake items that totally resemble real and costly items by roblox.
People are making profit on things that were originally by roblox, and highly wanted."
What I mean by making profit on things that were originally by roblox, are the recreation of items like Dominuses, Valkyries, and whatnot. The screenshot shows someone who owns a fake ugc dominus.
I’m going to be honest with you, at this point, I don’t think Roblox will step away from its plan to make UGC uploads public.
No matter what, as much as we don’t want it happening, I feel like such things will always be uploaded throughout history. Slips are going to always occur like how exploiters and trollers slip through experiences, do you understand what I’m saying? I don’t think there’s no definite (fully preventable) solution to this issue. I don’t want to imagine the exponential growth of how many copies there’ll be once UGC uploading is public.
I feel like the best way to lessen such uploads or to stop them from being sold ASAP is by creating/developing a report abuse feature specifically for UGC accessories; one that asks where the original content is from. At the very least, the accessories will eventually get deleted like what happens to Roblox limited copies, in my own experience.
Roblox uses the DMCA process as a solution, but the DMCA filer has to be the uploader of the original content. What are the chances of someone or some organization noticing themselves being ripped off on a game called Roblox though, it’s not a great solution. Consumers should be able to speak up as well - consumers turn out to be the reporters of IP infringememt most of the time on Roblox.
But like I said…I want to be real here, copiers will never disappear like how scammers, exploiters, trollers etc. won’t (yes they can disappear by being moderated but I’m trying to say the rule violation itself won’t).
Personally, I like when variations (not copies) of limiteds are made in UGC since it allows people to access types of accessory items they’ve always desired but were limited to affluent RTC members, which is a boon for equality and the value of your robuck.
However, Roblox shouldn’t make UGC public but go the opposite direction: limit access to distributing experiences, dev assets, and marketplace items. Essentially, people should either register for verification with Roblox to release assets to the public or submit their assets for manual approval through a greenlighting system from which only verified creators are exempt. This type of system would help promote a higher diversity of games due to fewer but higher quality uploads instead of 10+ billion dead games and many spam items.
And reselling a limited ugc item takes a 50% fee???
This makes it impossible to resell your items without taking a loss.
Charging a 50% fee to sell your item means you have to sell the item for at least double of what you bought it for just to make your money back, meaning limited ugc prices will just skyrocket until nobody buys the item but that is okay, because all ugc is just copies of the same few things over and over and over…
I just heard about this and I think this could potentially ruin a large portion of Roblox, and at the very least, get Roblox in a lot of trouble.
the aspect that I’m most worried about are all of the copyright infringement.
For the most part, I don’t really care about copyright infringement if it’s from a massive corporation (the copies of stuff from the platform is what I personally have a problem with), they can all rot in heck for all I care. Despite this, said greedy companies will inevitably come after Roblox, and I believe that it will be many multiples more disastrous than the great audio purge, because if Roblox were ever to be sued, they would likely have to purge every item that infringes on copyright, and it may end up ruining ugc for everyone involved, not only creators, but players as well.
I dread the consequences that are practically guaranteed to come from this, and I’m beginning to think that Roblox doesn’t see any problems making ugc public could lead to.
