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Ugggggh Roblox hrrnnnngh
ceres
When the last moon is cast over the last star of morningAnd the future has past without even a last desperate warningRegistered User, Moderator mod
When the last moon is cast over the last star of morningAnd the future has past without even a last desperate warningRegistered User, Moderator mod
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?
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?
And it seems like all is dying, and would leave the world to mourn
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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.
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.
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.
Daughter had been asking about signing up too.
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.
3DS: 1289-8447-4695
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."
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.
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.
Although I just heard him say "I ran over a girl, it's the best way to get money!" and uhhhhhhh
Sort of off topic but City of Heroes is still a thing?
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.
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
I can has cheezburger, yes?
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.