ROBLOX's Incompetence

• 9 Janurary, 2026
• ROBLOX

ROBLOX recently pushed their age verification system world wide, and made it required to verify your age in order to chat on ROBLOX. This has severe, dire consequences for the entire platform and it's been on my mind lately.

I wanna quickly get across the immediate problems this update brings. Because of the way age verification works on the platform, everyone is divided into age groups:

• under 9
• 9 to 12
• 13 to 15
• 16 and 17
• 18 to 20
• 21+

You can only chat with neighboring age groups and your own age group. However, this system entirely fails to address predators and instead limits communication between friends. An 11 year old can no longer communicate with their 16 year old sibling, children under 9 can no longer play with their parents together, and more. There is no system on the planet, future or current, that will prevent predators and children from lying about their age. Age verification via facial scans can easily be worked around with children using their parents and guardians, and both parties can use videos of the target age group to pass. Even without the lying and deception, people who are of age are being marked as younger. Adults with young looking faces, especially those who are feminine, are routinely marked as younger than they are. This doesn't mean this system can't incorrectly mark adult men as younger than they are, because it happens a LOT with men who do not have the expected, square jaw line or facial hair, but to put this into perspective: youth, at least in the west, is highly sought after and idolized. The younger you look and the older you are tends to be rewarded and respected. This tends to target women more, as the beauty standards globally tend to be very harsh on women. Women are pressured constantly to look as young as possible, erasing any "ugly" feature like wrinkles, freckles, moles, and more. The smoother the skin, the more desirable the look and person are. This means feminine people on the platform will constantly be incorrectly identified as children. ROBLOX has unfairly targeted feminine people in the past, so this does not surprise me. In shallow attempts to remove sexual content on the platform, feminine garb is often targeted. Non-revealing bikinis, skirts, cop-tops, and mid-drifts have often been removed in the classic shirt and classic pants categories. Not only that, but feminine avatars often have been targeted and reset forcefully by ROBLOX. This isn't to excuse blatant sexualization that DOES exist on the platform, such as accessories that give a player's usually blocky avatar very detailed and large breasts. Large breasts aren't inherently sexual, but with how defined they are, the intent is for sexual gratification. I specifically am talking about casual, non-sexual feminine imagery.

Even worse, is this actively makes moderation and catching predators a nightmare for moderators, both official and non-official. Those who want to monitor their own games can no longer effectively keep an eye on predation outside of their age bracket, as any chat from age brackets you do not neighbor or are placed in is not shown. This, if anything, ENABLES predation, especially with the problem highlighted by age verification being easily exploitable.

This age verification system also has effectively killed many games on the platform. You have communication and teamwork based games, where the goal is to work with another player and communicate in order to complete a goal together. Effectively, this is no longer possible without the developers creating a system ROBLOX used to have years ago: safe chat. Safe chat was a feature that gave all players pre-defined phrases to use to communicate with other players if they were not able to chat. This was more or less removed in 2014 in favor of a blacklist and whitelist. The games MOST affected by this update, however, have no chance of return: roleplay games.

If you're not familiar with my history on ROBLOX, I primarily started making roleplay games. My most popular was The Epic Crossover (TEC), which has accumulated just over 3 million visits. It was a crossover roleplay centered around mostly videogame characters and franchises, and users would often hop on the game to roleplay as their favorite characters. When most people on ROBLOX think of roleplay, they often think of the sexual erotic roleplay, often shortened to "ERP." However, as someone who's been roleplaying for a very long time online, most roleplay communities on ROBLOX are not sexual. While TEC was shut down in 2020 and never had to deal with the limitation the age verification today imposes, many existing roleplay games do. Many of these games are underground and avoid publicity in order to avoid wrongful copyright strikes, as the usage of copyrighted assets are always used in roleplay games via fair use. I know of many roleplay games that no longer are able to function properly as a roleplay environment and are effectively dead in the water, because their communities are 13+. Bustling communities have effectively been turned into wastelands.

ROBLOX is, as it stands, actively aiding predators. It severely depresses and angers me how much this platform has degraded because of the company's incompitence and intentional neglicence. Reporting has stopped effectively working circa 2016, and the focus on company growth has actively taken priority over the safety of its players. It's come to a point where censorship and fascist tactics are being employed to save the company's own ass, and it makes me so upset. I can't help but think of the people who make a living on this platform, those who make games and have given so much to the platform to only be treated like this. The players, who actively boosted ROBLOX into popularity. The worst part is to me, it is so easy to reverse all of this damage, but ROBLOX entirely refuses to.

My approach

My approach to age groups, while not perfect, I feel would do a lot more than ROBLOX has done in recent times. In my mind, there are three age groups: under 13, 13 to 17, and 18+. Those under 13 will not be able to chat freely but will be able to see chat in general. They would use a safe chat, much like the old ROBLOX feature. 13 to 17 are able to speak more freely, but cannot use swears. Adults can use swears, but they will be censored to anyone under 18. The most important part is everyone can see what one another is saying, making it easy to moderate and report bad behavior. Unfortunately, this does rely on reporting actually working, which ROBLOX seems to instead want to replace entirely with AI. This makes moderation harder, as sometimes people are taken out of context to seem bigoted and hurtful. For years on ROBLOX, saying "gay" at all was enough to get you censored.

When it comes to user-created games, I feel there was some interesting steps that are in theory good, but executed horribly. For example, age-rating games on the platform. This is an excellent idea, but the way it works is it entirely hinges on the game creator being entirely truthful. This obviously fails with explicit games that make their way on the platform, where the user intentionally makes them for all ages to groom children. To me, there's an easy fix, but this once again hinges on active moderation on the platform: a group of designated age rating reviewing moderators. Upon the creator submitting their age rating for their game, the game is sent for review by a team. This team plays through the game for a designated time (i.e. 10 to 15 minutes), and afterward the rating is either verified or challenged. The only time a rating should be challenged is if the user submitted rating is LOWER than what the moderation team believes it should be. If the user wants their games primarily played by a higher age demographic, then that should be allowed.

The user submitted rating questionaire would also have to go through some changes. While the questionaire does decent, I feel like it does not do enough in terms of rating games that tackle heavier themes. Not every game that has smoking cigarettes or drinking is encouraging this behavior nor is it always talking about the heavier themes of substances. Not to mention there is a lot of culture clash when it comes to certain elements, like alcohol. In European countries, drinking is not always age-gated and simply relies on parental guidance and supervision. Nudity is also important, as there is artistic nudity and explicit nudity. Nudity is not sexualized in places like France, whereas in America showing too much skin in a swimsuit or sportswear is seen as sexual. I think a questionaire that takes into consideration other cultures and the intention of the game would be best, although this would require some more flexibility. I think a question allowing the user to explain the game's "summary" or purpose in their own words would be a welcome addition, and it does not need to be more than 300 characters (but that is always welcome).

With games pre-dating the questionaire, I believe they should all be accessible by default. This makes archiving history and revisiting old games much easier than ROBLOX just having to manually unlock the games for players to play. We have lost many ancient games because of how underground they were and how unpopular they are.

The biggest problem ROBLOX could easily address is just straight up banning predators on their platform. It took MrObvious, a known predator, YEARS after being exposed to be terminated from the platform. We've seen with Schlep how ROBLOX takes no action until it is PUBLICLY revealed certain users are predators and have been arrested, and even then! It is baffling how ROBLOX just actively refuses to do anything.

Conclusion

David Baszucki has to be some sort of predator with how he's pushed for 17+ dating on the website, actively calling predators on ROBLOX an "opportunity," and people like Matt Kaufman having badges from games created for explicit and sexual purposes, some games even being up until the Schlep controversy. The platform's higher-ups are actively covering for predators and it makes me violently ill with how easy they could just fix things.