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I must start apologizing for my english, but I'll try making this text as understandable and basic as possible.
(tl;dr - ROBLOX moderation and filtering is going beyond the limits)
I've been playing Roblox since 2008 (that's quite a lot of time, almost 10 years?), stoped playing it actively in 2012, when I've started dedicating my ROBLOX-time to group related stuff only (Roblox Japan genre, mainly). As you can see, that's a lot of time spent in this game.
Well, I'm a developer. And as a dev, we only go to the forums to do two things: complain about stuff or complain about stuff. So I'm here to do that. both.
In the past years ROBLOX staff has gonne into a campaign of "filtering" it's own community. I don't blame you, since kids are your target audience. But in that process they forgot about something: first of all, some old folks like me still play this game. We like to create, to imagine, to try new things with those Objected Oriented systems. As obvious as it may sound, those games in the first page (those which actually deserves to be there, at least) are not made by kids. They are made by people as old as me (or even older). Problem is, that campaign led to a massive unecessary moderation being done to every single asset being added to the game, and that includes the creation of our "so beloved" Text Filter.
In the past, when someone said something that was considered "bad", they would get a warning (or a ban) depending on the present and past occurrences. Now, that outdated process was overridden (maybe by parents pressure?) by our also "so beloved" hashs (###). The only problem with that system, else than it doesn't work right, is that it doesn't work right. We are experiencing ridiculously done filtering: words like "church" get filtered. Even some vowels and numbers when they are alone in the string do get filtered! Even group names and random words, really?!
The reason why I'm here pointing something that has been already pointed by thousands is because it is starting to affect us in irreversible manners: this abusive moderation (and I'm not talking about text filter only) is making older people leave the game. As some may have noticed in the past years or months, the community average age is dropping. As ROBLOX staff has started caring less about groups, so did groups start to die too without people to keep out for them. We must not forget that groups are (or were, before they got killed, eh) a main source of activity for this game as a whole.
The community is being overpopulated by children. That's not bad at all, but the main issue here is exactly the fact that people are being excluded from the community simple because they can't dev or even TALK like they could before. As an example, multiple groups have found a way to bypass those abusive filters and moderation by creating servers in separated softwares for their groups. What happens in the end? Everyone in the group just decides to leave ROBLOX at all and start playing something else. The same is happening to my group, since we're having ridiculous problems with filtering (stuff like teaming people, since ROBLOX obligated admin scripters to implement their filter and "j" for some reason is a bad word).
Why I'm so concerned if I could just start playing another game? Well, because I'm a dev. Again. I'm saying that because, there's no other game in the world (I'm not exaggerating at all, really) that allows me to unleash my creativity like ROBLOX do. We can do almost everything here: from creating 3D ambients, editing images for logos or clothes, scripting in an Object Oriented ambient, dealing with currency (even if fictional), et cetera. ROBLOX is, believe it or not, the basis for me to be currently pursuing a degree in Computer Science. I'm concerned because, if the community (the REAL community) of this game just vanishes, there will be nothing left for people like me here. And if that happens, maybe, one day, where there will be no people left to dev, ROBLOX will die.
I know I'll eventually stop playing this game. But still, it is now part of my experience (even considering all the memes. yep. those memes.), and I don't want to see such a thing happening to it just because we can't have moderation and filtering done right.
I'll quote some staff member who said this in a ROBLOX Blog Post sometime ago (it was something like that):
"We prefer to filter MORE than we should than LESS than we should".
I can only say two things about that quote:
1 - Stop treating kids like they have issues and can't be exposed to reality, this is still the internet and they ARE on it (believe it or not!). Trying to create a safe-haven for children is just a waste of time, really. If you have the data to prove me wrong then show us.
2 - A game must be made for PEOPLE, not only children.
I don't know if I can expect a serious answer to be given here, but I would be grateful if that did happen. |