Infrastructure at Roblox
corp.roblox.com
corp.roblox.com
I have two young children, a boy and a girl. They both love playing Roblox, and I play along with them too, and their friends join in as well. Yes, they both always want more Robux, but let's look at this from a different perspective:
They create their own worlds - often amazing, it's not like they can run out of LEGO pieces, their creativity is their only barrier. In COVID lockdown, they could carry on playing with their friends, despite not being physically together. Humans still monitor and care for the "game", yes, some bad actors might get through occasionally, but on the whole, it's a safe and well-controlled, fun place to be. I used the concept of a Roblox Avatar to gently explain to my children, that people online might not be all they pretend to be - after all, in some games, I'm a super weight-lifter with a six-pack, and I have wings too :-O We all laughed. It's already taught both my children some genuine life-lessons - working in a pizza shop and doing deliveries, earning money, deciding how to lay out their dream houses (and Theme Parks!), and so on - plus, the importance of locking the door to keep the "bad guys" out.
All this, whilst having fun. Roblox is a force for good - if you pay the odd time for some credits, then so what, developers and us creatives also have to keep the roof over our heads.
For tech literate parents, setting a spending limit is easy enough and we understand how these games are engineered to be addicting. But for the normies, they don’t know how it works and how to set appropriate limits. Personally, I think kids games with such heavy monetization should be outlawed. The pseudo-gambling aspects of these games is also highly problematic and we see this playing out now as sports gambling and crypto speculation are off the charts in our society with young adults.
Since you are so nice, would you please reimburse my daughter for the 300€ she spent without authorization? I mean, the Robux were bought at 11 PM, all in a burst, as a typical addiction pattern. She didn't even get to use them, since I got a notification about the money being used via the phone company (of course, she never had to steal a credit card, she found one of the infinite ways of siphoning money for bullshit virtual money; but no, it's the parents' fault for not realizing there is yet another backdoor allowing kids to spend money they don't have; and don't worry, the phone company hides them well enough that even if you try to enable all sorts of parent controls, there's always an extra option allowing them to be overridden, and in the most discreet way possible).
(By the way, I already tried to ask for reimbursement, but then Roblox says it's Google Play's fault; Google says it's the phone company's fault; and the phone company says it's the parents' fault for not disabling the hidden "allow spending 20 times the monthly bill on bullshit" checkbox that's locked with the "allow EU roaming"; so if your kid ever needs to cross the border, and can still call you for free thanks to EU rules, you'll still need to let them enable "spend 300€ out of bundle" because the law forgot about this loophole, so of course the phone company used it.)
Oh, wait, maybe this is part of the genuine life lessons Roblox is supposed to teach children?
That's kind of a weird flex.
> we now predict capacity needs up to two years in advance
Those two statements taken together are mind boggling
Roblox is like the #1 cesspool for bad shit going down with kids on the internet. Social media is bad as well, and my kids do neither. No, Roblox is not the end of the world, but there’s no real compelling reason to open up to it.
They play with their friends on XBox Live, with voice chat limited to friends we personally add.
Only some of Roblox is trying to get children addicted to gambling.
Roblox currently has a massive event going on that was hit with a huge controversy. They picked over 1000 games to be advertised and someone accidentally (or not) picked a child romance themed game to put on the list. Without explicitly having sex, people have figured out how to game the system by letting players use emotes to do normal things but really they are intended to role play sexual activities (pushup emote while over another player laying flat on a bed for example). There's a specific term for these games but I can't recall it at the moment. It was called something like "condo games", the genre that refers to these romance games. The people who make these games do it intentionally, some of them make literally dozens/hundreds of these games, all aimed at children. Some of the game developers absolutely need to be investigated by law enforcement. Look up the video on youtube called "How One Developer RUINED Roblox's Biggest Event Overnight" and skip to around 2 minutes and he explains this in detail. This developer made children themed romance games that gained a quarter BILLION plays.
As an adult that does occasionally enjoy some Roblox experiences, there's no problem for me. Stick to the front page, featured stuff and you're fine. The problem is solely with kids/teens going where adults don't realize and getting caught up with this predators.
Sounds like the problem is the lack of parental attention, and like many things, that isn't a problem with a technological solution, but requires parents to actually pay attention to what their children is doing.
I'm not seeing any evidence that the bad actors are a proportionally larger problem, or just the fact that more people on the internet. E.g a city with 1 murder out of 100k and another with 100 murders out of 10M are just as safe.
The former implies that rblx has some attributes that are conducive to child predation, which would be worth teasing apart out of scientific interest, while the latter is a very general problem, as (I dare take this as self-evident) any place that has greater than 0 child predators has more than there ought to be.
> The stuff you're describing doesn't really seem much different that any popular internet spaces in the 2000s
I think there is a big difference to some of the examples they gave, because of the uniquely young age demographics on Roblox. The only example that seems comparable was Club Penguin.
Now, I agree that there is interest in teasing out whether there are problems with Roblox specifically, or if it is just a problem with having an online space with such a high concentration of kids in general. But that high concentration of kids does make it much more of a concern either way.
But this can be a problem wherever kids are online. Discord also has huge problems with child predators. And any platform that caters to children should be held to very high standards of child safety.
The games that I think shouldn't be held to such a high standard are games like World of Warcraft. That game is not targeted at children, has far fewer children players, and therefore it is unreasonable to hold them to as high of a standard as Roblox. (Although they do still have some responsibility to make sure their platform is safe.)
Well there’s four words I never expected, not wanted, to see arranged like that. :S
https://hindenburgresearch.com/roblox/
edit: some quotes from the article, attributed to concerned employees -
“You’re supposed to make sure that your users are safe and but then the downside is that, if you’re limiting users’ engagement, it’s hurting your metrics. It’s hurting the [daily] active users, the time spent on the platform, and in a lot of cases, the leadership doesn’t want that.”
“You have to make a make a decision, right? You can keep your players safe, but then it would be less of them on the platform. Or you just let them do what they want to do. And then the numbers all look good and investors will be happy.”
What do you think that leads to?
Before anyone comes in accusing me of unfairly pointing fingers when Meta (Instagram reels) and Google (Youtube shorts) are just as bad, truth is the latter two just haven't managed to make their algorithms half as addictive. I'm sure they'd love to, there's nothing inherently better about them, but so far they haven't cracked it.
If this was a game that had a subscription fee or where you had to buy the new version every year, that might be true.
These games don’t work like that, though. They rely on maximizing the take from each individual player. They’re designed so that the sky is the limit. You pay 5-10 bucks here, then you’re enticed to pay 5-10 bucks there, then you’re scrounging or begging for another 5-10 bucks for the next thing.
Children, especially pre-teens, don’t have access to credit or money without their parents consent, and a pretty easy way to limit the amount of money your child can spent on Roblox is to just make them have to ask you to buy the in-game currency.
There are problems with the game but the amount of money going into it is something a parent can and should 100% control.
They don't work like that, though. They rely on maximizing the take from each individual child. They're designed so that the sky is the limit. You pay 5-10 bucks here, then you're enticed to pay 5-10 bucks for another toy, then you're scrounging or begging for another 5-10 bucks for the next toy.
Would you let your children go nuts at a casino? Or online with sports betting or crypto slots?
The problem isn't the $5-10. It's the psychological manipulation.
Where do the gambling tricks come in?
Teach kids that it’s the same kind of manipulation as in their games (and how to spot it) and perhaps they will be better equipped to not get fucked by adult life.
Fortnite is way better and safer.
amazing infra challenges, just a shame is a cesspool.
We usually do routines - while in the car, at home - "What are our online protocols?", "What if someone, even if they seem like a tiny kid, asks you for anything personal?" "If someone told you that it is one of our family or relatives, what are the challenge words and codes?" etc.
Right. Company's finance is based off on 1) letting game devs sell loot boxes freely to children. It's a legal slot machine for kids 2) paying developers with their own currency which then can be converted to tangible currency
These should be illegal
And Roblox has decent parental controls. You can disable any chat outside a curated group of friends, and not sign up for micro transactions.
IMO public chat should be disabled by default for U13 accounts, not the other way.
The games are pretty additive though, and the fake money becomes real money pretty fast.