Ugggggh Roblox hrrnnnngh

ceres

Apparently my son's friends are playing Roblox. I've made an account and I cannot begin to describe how much fun this does not look. I'll let him do it, but ugggggh. I'm going to have to pay attention to what he does, how he's interacting, what the point of it even is because I do not know. I run linux on my PC and apparently I can use wine for it but my browser wants to do it and that's not even the point of this, I can do it on my phone.

I don't know if he'll like it, he spends the bulk of the time he's allowed with a PC game on City of Heroes which is obviously such a superior game to play, but this would be with his friends who I know he misses a lot.

Help me out here, what even is the point of this thing? Why is it fun? I haven't been able to play any of the games yet, just tooled around with my avatar a bit. I know it must not be just for kids because there are horror games on there too. It just looks like a whole bunch of cheesy mobile games but made by kids and you have to buy most of your inventory with real money like fortnite, which I actively loathe.

I know I'm probably being really uncharitable here. So many people seem to use it that there must be something there. It looks like there might be achievements? Those can be fun sometimes. Does anyone have any experience with it on your own or playing with your kids?

Jam Warrior

My kids like it, mainly because there's just such a range of stuff to play and that's what they want at that age, flitting from game to game as the novelty lasts. And there is a huge variety, from platformers to roleplay simsy stuff to what are essentially 3D cookie clickers, the list goes on. Some of the 'hide and seek' or 'floor is lava' type games I've seen them play seem legit quite fun.

We've turned off chat. You can't stop people being able to send you friend invites but they've been told to just ignore those unless it's verified outside of game as a friend they know in real life.

We've also given them 'the talk' about how real money purchases in Roblox are a complete waste of time and they aren't getting any full stop. They're fine with that because as mentioned before they flit from game to game so often that they get that spending real money on any one of them would be silly.

Nothing individually in Roblox is that high quality but it's all for free and kids are easily pleased so it works out.

Ranlin

I haven't really been able to get myself interested in it either, but my kiddo enjoys a lot of the games in Roblox.

We let her use chat after repeatedly explaining what is and isn't okay to talk about and why, and what to look out for. Other than that, we've mostly just turned her loose, while checking in on anything new she sticks with more than a little bit at least. Much like when she played WoW with me, her typing and spelling/reading skills have grown immensely.

We also explained that we wouldn't be spending money to buy Robux or whatever they're called, so instead in the only game or two it was ever tempting for her to want to buy something, she's become a shrewd trader...after being scammed a couple times, which is a lesson that just never really sinks in until it happens, and virtual goods with little to no real attachment is a much better avenue to learn it with than in the real world.

It's also turned her a bit into a little activist, which is equal parts amusing and concerning, though it's all turning out well. Socially, I think it's been a boon in a lot of ways I wasn't expecting, especially for as young as she is, but different kids might not have quite the same positive effects from it, and you'll want to monitor them pretty closely at first if they haven't earned the appropriate trust/maturity.

The wide breadth of games available helps to let them find their own interests, even if most of it is pretty poorly constructed. It's usually simpler versions of other games/activities to sample, which you can then pursue with them with the real thing. That's the best part about it, honestly. It's a hub for them to explore all sorts of simplified versions of genres.

And let's be clear: those horror themed games are also appealing to small kids, whether you think it's appropriate or not.

Oh, make sure you've got an email associated with the account for recovery, if you don't spend any money they won't do anything at all if you forget your password and don't have a recovery method set up. It's bizarre you're allowed to not have one, really, which led to us having to make a new account at one point.

Jam Warrior

Very true on the password recovery! After a forgotten password incident I had to spend excruciating hours trying various variations of passwords and filling in endless captchas before we got that set up.

A big part of the appeal is definitely the multiplayer. It's usually just my two kids playing with each other and shouting across the room to each other, and we sometimes set them up in video chats on a phone with their friends while they play on PC, but I imagine even the mute other players wandering around add a lot the feeling of a shared play experience.

MichaelLC

Thanks for asking this.

Daughter had been asking about signing up too.

ceres

Yeah no way is he getting real money to do this. That's a rabbit hole I'm unwilling to jump into. I got his dad to set up an account to check it out too, and my son seemed interested.

Jam Warrior wrote: »

A big part of the appeal is definitely the multiplayer. It's usually just my two kids playing with each other and shouting across the room to each other, and we sometimes set them up in video chats on a phone with their friends while they play on PC, but I imagine even the mute other players wandering around add a lot the feeling of a shared play experience.

Where would I see other players? It just looks like a game selection menu and then you click on the game and it puts you on your own server. Then again I'm doing this on mobile, maybe it's different on a PC. I had some trouble with the game I picked, hopefully that's just me being bad at touch screens. We'll set him up with his own account, I'm just trying to get a feel for it so I can help if he needs, but maybe he won't need it anyway.

Jam Warrior

Not sure what you managed, but all the servers my kids go onto are always pretty full.

premium

ceres wrote: »

Yeah no way is he getting real money to do this. That's a rabbit hole I'm unwilling to jump into. I got his dad to set up an account to check it out too, and my son seemed interested.

Jam Warrior wrote: »

A big part of the appeal is definitely the multiplayer. It's usually just my two kids playing with each other and shouting across the room to each other, and we sometimes set them up in video chats on a phone with their friends while they play on PC, but I imagine even the mute other players wandering around add a lot the feeling of a shared play experience.

Where would I see other players? It just looks like a game selection menu and then you click on the game and it puts you on your own server. Then again I'm doing this on mobile, maybe it's different on a PC. I had some trouble with the game I picked, hopefully that's just me being bad at touch screens. We'll set him up with his own account, I'm just trying to get a feel for it so I can help if he needs, but maybe he won't need it anyway.

Most games that my kids get into have like 12 to 30 other players on the same server. When you're going through the games list it shows how many players are playing that game right now. When you're in a game there's a player list that shows who is on the same server as you. The mobile version connects to the same servers as the PC version for most games.
I've played with my kids and can confirm that not all the games are terrible, some are a legitimately fun distraction even if they aren't something I'd go out of my way to play.
One other nice thing about roblox is that the chat filtering is heavy handed and makes it pretty difficult to send personal information.

DoctorArch

My son is into Roblox and I made sure to utilize the parental controls that lock down everything to a large degree. It causes a little bit of consternation because he will want to play a game he saw on YouTube kids that isn't in the kid-allowed game section but that's the breaks.

Personal opinion is that Roblox is the bottom basement of cotton-candy junkfood garbage shovel ware one can play, but I'll still play it with him because it's time spent with my son. I just can't help but think "son, the Switch is right there and I have a bunch of games for it and would love to play that with you instead of Roblox."

ceres

Well, he does love playing City of Heroes with his dad, so whether or not this works out time with dad is covered and that's a good thing. It's more the time with his friends, who he never sees or talks to anymore.

I was playing that restaurant game that crops up on the home page. I like that kind of thing, I know it's meant to be multiplayer, I'm just not sure how.

I guess the other factor I might need to take into account is that I have no idea what his friends end up playing. I doubt I'll find any of it objectionable considering their parents, but I am concerned that he'll somehow end up running into something they're doing or playing that he would need to pay for and they've already done it.

djmitchella

Our younger kid (he's 10) still plays Roblox a whole bunch; he's played a lot of the cookie clicker-style ones, some are obviously better than others (Bee Swarm Simulator, for example, has a bunch of other mechanics beyond just click-and-numbers-get-bigger + prestiging) and some are pretty dumb.

The in-game chat is heavily filtered -- I don't think you can type in names, or numbers, or locations, or cusswords, or an awful lot of things -- though you can say enough that he's had a lot of enjoyment from going into a game, having someone that's been playing it for a while just randomly give him much-higher-level hats or pets or jewels or whatever so he can skip the grinding, and then he pays it forwards once he's got lots of spare in-game resources to new people.

Some games are multi-player just because there's lots of people doing the same thing at the same time; there's a couple of "survive the volcano / earthquake / tornado / kraken" games where all the players are on the same small island and have to dodge that incoming whatever-bad-things; some are multi-player because they're paintball / collaborative defeat-the-zombies / etc.

It seems fairly harmless; my older kid used to play roblox a lot as well though he's moved on to fortnite, and he _did_ at one point wind up giving his account info to some sort of sketchy user "that promised me free robux", which I only found out about because he asked if we'd changed his password for him -- we hadn't, I asked what was going on, the whole story came out, and at that point at least we managed to recover his account because it had our parental email set up as the parent contact or something like that. And hopefully that should have given him some sort of future resistance to more serious online scams, too.

ceres

Kid is playing some car game with his dad that looks like a very blocky GTA with no prostitutes (I hope.) The setup involved a lot of cursing. I guess we'll see how much entertainment he gets out of this.

Although I just heard him say "I ran over a girl, it's the best way to get money!" and uhhhhhhh

Jam Warrior

You can restrict the account to only access curated ‘safe’ games. This does also cut out lots of perfectly fine stuff but should remove stuff like that I imagine.

ceres

I thought it did that automatically when I put in his date of birth, I may need to go through his settings more carefully.

Lilnoobs

You can make your own games and your own assets for others to use, which seems nice. The company I work for thought about using Roblox instead of Minecraft, but Roblox doesn't have moderation and control to the extent that owning a Minecraft server does, so the company couldn't take that risk.

Shadowfire

ceres wrote: »

Well, he does love playing City of Heroes with his dad, so whether or not this works out time with dad is covered and that's a good thing. It's more the time with his friends, who he never sees or talks to anymore.

I was playing that restaurant game that crops up on the home page. I like that kind of thing, I know it's meant to be multiplayer, I'm just not sure how.

I guess the other factor I might need to take into account is that I have no idea what his friends end up playing. I doubt I'll find any of it objectionable considering their parents, but I am concerned that he'll somehow end up running into something they're doing or playing that he would need to pay for and they've already done it.

Sort of off topic but City of Heroes is still a thing?

ceres

No, City of Heroes is again a thing! The three of us play together when we can and I still love it.

I think you have to pay to put your own stuff in? I might be willing to do that if he really gets into it with his friends I guess. They used to play Minecraft, not sure if they still do. He probably needs another day to get into it,I want to get a few more things sorted out before I let him loose.

Ringo

Shadowfire wrote: »

ceres wrote: »

Well, he does love playing City of Heroes with his dad, so whether or not this works out time with dad is covered and that's a good thing. It's more the time with his friends, who he never sees or talks to anymore.

I was playing that restaurant game that crops up on the home page. I like that kind of thing, I know it's meant to be multiplayer, I'm just not sure how.

I guess the other factor I might need to take into account is that I have no idea what his friends end up playing. I doubt I'll find any of it objectionable considering their parents, but I am concerned that he'll somehow end up running into something they're doing or playing that he would need to pay for and they've already done it.

Sort of off topic but City of Heroes is still a thing?

There's a City of Heroes thread over in the MMO subforum that explains more stuff, but it turns out the game had been smuggled out before shutdown and some total jerks kept it as their secret clubhouse for six years before being exposed last spring.

Now City of Heroes is live again for everybody, though not actively distributed by NCsoft so no links provided on these forums per The Rules

JaysonFour

You still need to be careful, even when you think they're safe. My niece got a rather nasty surprise while playing today with a friend- they checked out a new game or place with some kind of audio streaming in the background, and both eight-year-olds got their first taste of rather hard-core gangsta rap, with swear words and everything. They both got out of it and told their parents; as a result, her friend is no longer allowed to play- but my niece got praised and told she could still play- but let one of us look at anything new she wants to try out first so this kind of thing doesn't happen again.

Inquisitor77

With Roblox it is unavoidable. People can essentially make their own "games" within the game. Letting your kids play in there without any supervision is basically guaranteeing they will be exposed to something at some point. It's not unlike Youtube in that regard.

ceres

He's been playing with his dad in the evenings, he's really only allowed to play for so long a day, but if he came across something untoward his dad would be right there.

There are a number of sites we use right now including youtube and Netflix, and my kingdom for the ability to whitelist. It seems like it should be a very, very simple thing to set up, but setting them to "kids" is essentially worthless to me and it's exceedingly frustrating.