> https://archive.ph/6V4RI Archive.ph made me solve 5 captchas before I gave up. VPN isn't even on. Anybody got a different link?
Same problem. Moved to Chrome from Safari and that fixed it.
Roblox is minting teen millionaires
281–290 of 312 posts
Re: Roblox is minting teen millionaires
#282Roblox turns a blind eye to child exploitation (whether being creeped on by adults, or being exploited by teens/adults to make games) and makes a fortune out of it. If it weren't online, it'd be illegal and people would be in jail. Also, Roblox's favourite thing - other than sitting back and rolling in the cash that their playerbase generated for them - is puff pieces in the news talking about how people who make gam…
> They pay a lot less than it costs to buy Robux I don't understand why that isn't regulated to hell by all sorts of securities and banking laws, with reporting requirements and background checks and eKYC and mandatory reserves and all that. If the poker chips can be transferred and then cashed, I don't think that's allowed in most gambling laws. That's way past gambling.
Are you using gambling as an example here? I don't fully understand the relation. There isn't any way to gamble Robux for more Robux on the platform, and in the cases which are arguable (such as on-platform item trading), the money must be transferred through Roblox's Developer Exchange programme, which can't be done for Robux not earned directly from experiences.
If I understand what you mean correctly, then any Robux transferred between 2 users wouldn't be able to be cashed or exchanged for fiat for the same reason as above. If they can try to fake it by selling avatar items or experience products to another user, they would immediately be hit with the usual 30% marketplace fee, then have to attempt to get through manual DevEx review with what is very obviously a suspicious set of transactions.
The reason they're not scrutinised by security and banking laws is because the Roblox platform and economic system are carefully designed so that such abuse is neither profitable nor feasible, and as such there's nothing to uncover in any potential investigation.
Re: Roblox is minting teen millionaires
#283Roblox turns a blind eye to child exploitation (whether being creeped on by adults, or being exploited by teens/adults to make games) and makes a fortune out of it. If it weren't online, it'd be illegal and people would be in jail. Also, Roblox's favourite thing - other than sitting back and rolling in the cash that their playerbase generated for them - is puff pieces in the news talking about how people who make gam…
> Robux - has very, very different exchange rates, depending on whether you want to buy Robux from the company, or you want to get a payout and convert your Robux to real money. Wtf? That should not be legal.
The point of the discrepancy between purchasing Robux and converting to fiat is to allow Roblox themselves to be able to pay for the infrastructure and support they provide to developers. If the rates were equal, there would be an effectively equal amount of money going into the platform as going out of it, which wouldn't leave enough to pay for their expenses.
This system is known as the Developer Exchange programme https://en.help.roblox.com/hc/articles/203314100>. The differing exchange rates are a necessary part of how the platform works and should 100% be legal. Analogues to "company scrip" or the like commonly used to unjustify the system are propagated by people that don't have a coherent enough grasp on the platform's economic system.
Re: Roblox is minting teen millionaires
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
I made a roblox game years ago with no more than like 2 concurrent players at a time. The game's ideas were immediately copied by a much bigger game (this turned me off the Roblox platform for good). I still got enough robux to DevEx just from premium roblox subscribers playing the game. (If I cash it out i would get a few hundred dollars. Which is nothing for me today but absolutely a lot of money for an aspiring te…
Is there some other platform where ideas aren't copied?
I think game ideas can get copied everywhere but it happens much faster on Roblox and there is almost no recourse for the smaller developer who got copied.
The platform doesn't care when someone makes a copy, there's no way for players to push back and actually hurt the developer making the copy (unlike Steam where trying to do it will get you bombarded with negative reviews and buried by the algorithm), and superficial visual quality and marketing attracts players more than actual gameplay quality.
Re: Roblox is minting teen millionaires
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
visit this page and click the bright blue, prominent button labeled "Convert to Robux": https://www.roblox.com/my/account#!/billing you will receive the exact amount you would get from the equivalent conversion rate of the closest "package"
Assuming this works like any other tiered package system, wouldn't this make you still lose more money due to the lower tiers being less efficient?
Not really. The lower tiers are only less efficient on platforms that require purchase through an app store or other payment processor that takes a large cut. Buying through a gift card or through the Roblox website or non-Microsoft Store PC app gives more Robux for the same price https://www.roblox.com/upgrades/robux>. These increased rates are also balanced to prevent the lower tiers from being less efficient: the package for 800 goes to 1000, whereas 10 000 goes to 11 000.
Re: Roblox is minting teen millionaires
#286Roblox is slot machines for kids Games are filled with loot boxes that drop exquisite items on chance. It's a repeated cycle of charging robux only to spend on another slot machine. US regulation is far behind protecting children from such scheme. Japan disallows many forms of such loot boxes due to addictive nature.
>Japan disallows many forms of such loot boxes due to addictive nature. Crazy to say this when they've basically pioneered and perfected gacha games.
Both things are true, though.
The fact that gacha games are so popular is _why_ they had enough attention to explicitly ban the most toxic patterns at the time. [1]
There's an interesting question of how far to push the bans, though - "in theory" your goals should probably be "don't let people prey on addictive behaviors" and "minimize people impulse buying more than they can afford", but the latter especially is...very hard to make an empirical rule for, and then you get into logistics like people just making additional accounts to get around it...
[1] - http://www.vg247.com/2012/05/18/kompu-gacha-freemium-systems...
Re: Roblox is minting teen millionaires
#287Roblox is slot machines for kids Games are filled with loot boxes that drop exquisite items on chance. It's a repeated cycle of charging robux only to spend on another slot machine. US regulation is far behind protecting children from such scheme. Japan disallows many forms of such loot boxes due to addictive nature.
I would, I think, probably argue that the problem is less that they're gambling and more that they involve actual money.
I think exposing people to addictive mechanics with guard rails is probably useful for teaching you how you respond to them, before you go to Vegas and blow far more than you budgeted.
In particular, I don't think you're going to ban addictive things faster than people can build them, and I know you can't rely on parents having conversations with kids, so I feel like all you can do is try to remove the whirring buzzsaw of real money incentives and let people learn that it's sharp, but foam sword sharp, where you can't ruin your life permanently (easily) with it.
Re: Roblox is minting teen millionaires
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
>The problem is that the external platforms that the children progress to generally have much laxer protection systems than Roblox does, and thus end up more vulnerable. So? Discord is a problem too. But they aren't finding the kids on discord because Discord is not a social network that links pedophiles with children. Roblox is that. >Meeting IRL is a problem as well, it just makes up fewer of the cases. Again... an…
> But they aren't finding the kids on discord because Discord is not a social network that links pedophiles with children. Roblox is that. If being more open and public correlates strongly enough with "links pedophiles with children", then yeah, true. I expect Roblox to do plenty to improve its platform safety with their track record. The recent introduction of their ID verification system to prevent communication be…
>If being more open and public correlates strongly enough with "links pedophiles with children", then yeah, true. I expect Roblox to do plenty to improve its platform safety with their track record. The recent introduction of their ID verification system to prevent communication between users outside of specified age buckets, solely in the context of improving child safety, is working and significantly reducing cases of child exploitation both on and off of the platform.
What are you, their PR agent?
>I don't agree that it facilitates this kind of behaviour.
It doesn't really matter if you agree that it does. It is a fact that it does.
Re: Roblox is minting teen millionaires
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think a fair number of us here got into computers because of playing computer games as kids. The issue is setting limits. Now obviously banning is easier and lower friction but limiting to an X time per day routine can also help with self-discipline. Depends on the person. Kids can have the same issue with TV. I had an issue as a kid with books . My parents had to limit my reading time because I would stay up all n…
There is a big difference between games now and games then. E.g. an SNES game was made to be fun, but not to be intentionally addictive, you would never buy a new game if it was. Many online games are designed to be as addictive as crack to extract as much revenue as possible. Our kid is in the typical video gaming age, almost every kid of her age is stuck in Roblox and some in Fortnite. Setting limits helps, but mor…
I think the reason for that is less that they didn't want to do it and more that they hadn't polished the mechanisms for it.
I've said before that the analogue for these sorts of games is arcade games - where you had to put in currency per unit time of enjoyment, and they had to try to guesstimate play time versus amount they're willing to pay for it and then would go in person to "test" arcades with early versions of games to see if they were wrong.
The internet reduced that feedback cycle to minutes, so we speedran evolution on it.
TBH, I don't see monthly fee games as even in the same category of concern - at least, not in a vacuum. Games with microtransactions, yes, absolutely, but that's true whether it's nominally a pay-once game or not, I think.
I said in another comment, I don't hate the idea of allowing microtransaction/gambling-style mechanics in games as long as they can't involve real currency on either side, if children are the market - not because I think it's great for kids, but because I think you're not going to manage to ban everything that's the same addictive "shape" as those, and allowing people to be exposed to that in a venue they care about, but with foam sword padding so you can't blow actual money on it, is probably a reasonable risk/reward balance.
(You might reasonably argue that this is just going to lead to kids being primed for addictive behaviors as adults, but the only thing that's going to help that is being mindful about it, e.g. education, and nothing short of people the kids respect reinforcing that is going to change that whether the games allow this sort of soft pain or not...and being exposed to something like Vegas naive or primed is going to, I think, have the same outcomes either way if you're not mindful about it.)
Re: Roblox is minting teen millionaires
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But they aren't finding the kids on discord because Discord is not a social network that links pedophiles with children. Roblox is that. If being more open and public correlates strongly enough with "links pedophiles with children", then yeah, true. I expect Roblox to do plenty to improve its platform safety with their track record. The recent introduction of their ID verification system to prevent communication be…
>If being more open and public correlates strongly enough with "links pedophiles with children", then yeah, true. I expect Roblox to do plenty to improve its platform safety with their track record. The recent introduction of their ID verification system to prevent communication between users outside of specified age buckets, solely in the context of improving child safety, is working and significantly reducing cases…
> What are you, their PR agent?
To clarify, no https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47334849>. I don't have any affiliation with Roblox Corporation, and I hope this will be able to make clear to you that my intention is to debate this matter in good faith.
> It doesn't really matter if you agree that it does. It is a fact that it does.
This isn't particularly constructive. Roblox publishes monthly updates on their safety status including statistics on the whole platform https://about.roblox.com/newsroom>, and more in-depth statistics are also available for specific experiences https://devforum.roblox.com/t/4028415>. There isn't any similarly concrete evidence to claim that Roblox directly facilitates links between child sexual abusers and children, so the difference between opinion and fact from that side of the argument is moot.