Updates to Matchmaking: Introducing the New Text Chat Signal

Updates Announcements
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[Update] December 6, 2025

Hi Creators,

Today we’re launching the new Text Chat matchmaking signal that will increase the likelihood that players who are able to chat with each other are matched together. This signal considers if users have Experience chat enabled, have completed an age check (after it becomes a global requirement next year), and if they’re a similar age to other users in the server. This is especially helpful in team-based or social games where coordination is important.

We’re also making an update to the default weight of the ‘Language’ and ‘Connections’ signal for experiences across Roblox, as we’ve found increasing its weight benefits more social experiences on Roblox with a neutral impact on experiences in other less social genres.

How the Text Chat Signal Works

The Text Chat signal prioritizes servers with more players the joining player can chat with in common. By default, this signal will receive a weight of 3 to matchmake players across experiences on Roblox. If the ability for players to chat is important to your experience, you can increase the weight of this signal with Custom Matchmaking to make it more likely that players who can chat are matched.

  • As of yesterday, it’s a requirement to complete an age check to chat in Australia, New Zealand, and the Netherlands. We’re launching this signal to increase the likelihood that users in these countries are matched together and are able to chat, before it becomes a global requirement in January.
  • While the default weight is 3, we recommend running experiments in January, after age checks become a global requirement to test different weights to see which weight works best for your experience, and understand its impact on key metrics.
  • It’s important to note that this signal, even if you increase its weight, does not guarantee that players will be able to chat.

Updating the Default Matchmaking Weights

After running some internal A/B experiments, we’ve discovered that increasing the weight of the ‘Language’ signal has positively affected how long players stay and engage with the most social experiences.

Here are the results of the experiment:

  • Social Experiences:
    • Total playtime per player: +1.38% (95% confidence)
    • Session playtime: +1.11% (95% confidence)
  • Non-Social Experiences:
    • Total playtime per player: +0.29% (95% confidence)
    • Session playtime: +0.07% (95% confidence)

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As a result, we’re increasing the default weight of the ‘Language’ signal for experiences. We’re also increasing the weight of the ‘Connections’ (formerly ‘Friends’) signal, to continue ensuring that users are always matched with their connections. The new default Matchmaking signals weights are:

  • Text Chat: 0 → 3
  • Language: 1 → 2
  • Connections (Friends): 10 → 15

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As a reminder, you can always adjust the weight of the signal back down with Custom Matchmaking or run experiments to see if a different weight works better for your experience. Based on our experiments heavier social experiences benefit more from setting language weight to 3, so we recommend experiences that are more social try a bigger boost on language. If you already set a Custom Matchmaking configuration for your game, your configurations will stay unchanged.

What’s Next

We want to better support experiences that need to guarantee that all eligible users in a server can chat with each other. For example, in roleplaying experiences, this would enable you to manually sort and teleport players into server pools where you can be certain that every user can chat with the others in the server, allowing you to maintain the important social aspects of your game. We will share more details on this API in January!

We’d love your feedback on either of these changes, other signals you’d like to see introduced, or any requests you have for Custom Matchmaking; let us know in the comments below!

FAQs

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How does this affect my existing experiences that have a Custom Matchmaking setup?

  • Your existing Matchmaking configuration will stay unchanged. Existing custom matchmaking configurations will have a Text Chat signal weight of 0. If Text Chat is important for your game, you should edit your existing matchmaking configuration to give it a weight greater than 0. For reference, the new Roblox default Matchmaking weights are:

    • Connections (Friends): 15
    • Latency: 3
    • Text Chat: 3
    • Language: 2
    • Occupancy: 2
    • Play History: 2
    • Age: 1
    • Voice Chat: 1
    • Device Type: 0

What’s the highest recommended Text Chat signal weight for experiences that want to maximize chat?

  • Right now, we would not recommend going beyond a signal weight of 5. Past this, we do not expect to see any meaningful change to chat while other signals will continue to degrade. This recommendation may change as more users become age verified and once chat changes roll out globally in January.

Can I turn off the Text Chat signal?

  • Yes. By setting the weight of the Text Chat signal to 0, the signal will not be considered when matching players to servers.

How do the Text Chat, Age, Language, and Voice Chat signals work with each other?

  • Text Chat and Age are somewhat correlated, since both of the signals look at age. But if your intent is to make sure that users can chat, the Text Chat signal will be more effective. Voice Chat will only consider if the user has voice chat enabled.

    Language is an independent signal looking at the most common language (ie. English, Spanish, French, etc.) on the server.

Should I run an experiment in Dec to find the best weight for Text Chat?

  • We recommend waiting until January to run an experiment with the Text Chat signal once age checks are required globally where chat is available. We anticipate the greatest impact to chat will be with this change, and would be the right time to start testing different weights with this signal. If you want to run an experiment now, please note that because only a few countries have age checks rolled out it’s unlikely you will be able to get a statistically significant result from your experiment.

Why did you launch the Text Chat signal before age checks become a requirement next year?

  • We wanted to support creators who have users in Australia, New Zealand, and the Netherlands as age checks are now a requirement to chat in those countries; this Text Chat signal will increase the likelihood that users in these countries who have age checked and are able to chat are matched together.

Why does the Text Chat signal’s Matchmaking Analytics chart look weird?

  • The Text Chat signal’s chart only has valid data starting on 12/3. Any data points before 12/3 were from simulated impact of age gating of text chat.
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This topic was automatically opened after 10 minutes.

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There is still no method to prevent players which can’t chat with eachother from sharing a server, which is what we need at the moment to attempt to mitigate the latest update.

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Many games are far too small to support matchmaking of this type, splitting servers could cause many smaller games to outright die.

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It would’ve been amazing if we didn’t have to do this and Roblox didn’t make our lives harder! Thanks so much!

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Even a game with 100 active players if split apart with age restrictions could lead to a horrible feeling of loneliness and barrenness within games, this could only work well for larger experiences.

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this is like trying to salvage a collapsing dam with flex tape

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Instead of all these dumb matchmaking tactics to ‘mitigate’ the damage of an already terrible update… How about we just reverse this entire thing and scrap the age verification stuff outright? This ISN’T the way to go and I will iterate this everytime.

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This is a recipe doom for disaster

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This is a heavy disadvantage for smaller developers. This is a recipe doom for disaster.

This will make people quit the platform → please rethink this

Do NOT make the mistake and rely on metrics only for this Roblox, look at it from a players stand point / developers (based on experience). This will not go WELL

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I already quit, and I know many other developers much more talented and invested than I who have or are planning to. So many people are ONLY still on the platform because they are giving Roblox too much of a chance to reverse the decision that is clearly not going to be reversed until its too late.

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This is what I call a weak attempt to make the chat restrictions be acceptable.

All of Roblox’s efforts have been pretty weak.

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All I can say is, I assume that the engineering teams developing these features were probably put on a difficult timeline by the safety team and are doing their best. Please try and get this sorting API out as quickly as possible surrounding the roll out of the chat restrictions. Otherwise we as an RP game basically have to crank that signal way up and hope for the best.

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This will legitimately kill off any hope for small developers to at least a build a community. Communication is important, IT IS HEAVILY annoying for me that team create is affected too by this.

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This is a change that will not blow over. This is not solving the root problem and it’s failing to do so at enormous cost. Games will need so much more traction to get off the ground, and entire genres now simply do not work.

You need to go back to the drawing board with this, because this is simply insane. You cannot play online games with strangers and still remain “safe” and “private”.

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This will only be useful to large games with huge playerbase that won’t suffer if you put players in separate servers. My roleplay game usually runs one big 100-slot server so as many players as possible can interact with each other freely, as it has a niche but steady playerbase. Matchmaking will do nothing to help my game, and will in fact be detrimental to it. We need some alternative to ID/face verification and age-gating. There are already players from Australia and New Zealand who can no longer play with the rest of the server because of your restrictions, basically alienated from everyone else. The age verification policy causes more harm than good.
When will you finally listen to your community?

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They only care about the big games that make money. It’s obvious they’ve given up on smaller communities and niche games, leaving them out to dry (Ig saves server costs?).

They also seem allergic to new developers, given how restrictive the Team Create terms are. This will only severely reduce the chances for new or smaller games to grow, leaving space for only the big players and those will eventually die out too, either because they get bought up and filled with microtransactions, or because people simply get tired of them.

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Improving moderation, having non-AI support tickets, and actually taking down bad games :cross_mark:

Forcing everyone to scan their face to speak. Destroying 90% of the games in the process, meanwhile preds can easily bypass the age verification through buying a kid account or scanning a younger relative. :white_check_mark:

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Requiring playtime for chatting privileges still sounds like a horrible solution. All that would do is now add a monetary value to ANY stolen account that has more than whatever minimum playtime threshold there is for a black market (just like how this current solution adds a monetary value to any stolen account that is age estimated as any group <13).

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If roblox really wants to go through with this ai age verification update atleast remove age groups, not every 20 year old is a pred. Then i would be more inclined to support this update. But at its current state its not looking too well especially for rp games where you need chat to talk with people. Or maybe only having to upload your id to use voice chat

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