Blizzard has become a greedy and insidious org. I genuinely dislike the way they do business and implement systems to keep players playing their games as chores rather than for fun. They charge huge money for trivial things, and their support is entirely useless.

It's an LLM account, as you can tell from the hallucinated comment in the thread on Japanese penguins: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47816256

Hacker News is turning into every other platform over time it seems. More and more folks just see a headline and comment rather than understand that headlines are designed to mislead you for clicks.

These requirements make sense. They're additional verification steps in place for people trying to publish games for very young users.

I agree with you that the HN title is editorialized and misleading, but I disagree that these requirements make sense.

They only make sense if you think it's OK for kids to send face scans to scary faceless corporations. And even if you do that, you can't share your game with friends unless they also take a face scan! (cause that's what "Trusted Friend" means - it doesn't mean trusted by you, it means trusted by them)

(Yes, I would recommend a change of title.)

The step is a significant one, and Roblox has taken one other measure recently, restricting chat a lot for minors (https://x.com/Roblox_RTC/status/2043723470899437623) . I think this is a move to satisfy people concerned with child safety, not a cash grab. I think RB hq probably know they're making tradeoffs of keeping parents happy, while devs will be annoyed/fewer. But everyone can still make games and play them with trusted friends. Likely damages the network effect (Roblox's multiplayer aspect being one of its best parts), but oh well.

'Trusted friends' is the key term here. To become one you need to have a paid subscription and to submit a face scan or id, which is what most people here are against.

I for one will not let my child submit a face scan to Roblox in order to become a 'trusted friend', and so now they wont be able to play the games made by their friends.

subscription isn't tied to trusted friends.

age check via face scan or id for both parties is required, along with ~in-person pre-existing connections or parental permission.

From what I know, Roblox has a strongly invested Trust and Safety team.

I’d be curious if this change came out of their efforts, or whether this is was to deal with compliance issues.

Literally demanding the subscription? The headline is correct - you have to have "an active Roblox Plus subscription".

You need the subscription ($5/mo) to publish your game to users who are <16.

16+ audiences have no requirement.

Which is the majority of the users[1], even more if you count that any user without age-check won't be able to access your game either.

[1]:https://www.statista.com/statistics/1190869/roblox-games-use...

Kids doing their first obby are <16 and their friends are <16. It is not like roblox was cool for teenagers.

It is also that your game goes away when you stop paying. Which means, pay forever or you cant show it off anymore.

> These requirements make sense.

I think requirement 3 can make sense if we start painting everybody as potential criminal.

but requirement 2 never make sense to me. -- why need age check to publish to adult user?

No this does not make sense for the platform. Roblox has some of that old Flash feel, where anyone can just create a game, no matter if you are 14 or 88. If you read the comments, most people are fine with the ID checks ( i would not, but fine) but are completely against the charging of a monthly subscription to publish games. All the people that would do it for fun, wont anymore now. Basically, the corporate greed machine has now turned the platform into a "professional" platform, where you pay-to-build.

As a side note, if someone is working on something similar, then now is the time to start talking about it! ;)

This is totally unrelated so I have to assume that you didn't realize your post looks like it has a random Nazi dog whistle in it, if you were wondering what that other person's comment means.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteen_Words

Why is this flagged? These numbers in the middle of otherwise innocuous comment stand out like a sore thumb

Holy shit, thanks for posting this. I was extremely confused by the other comments as well. Had no idea

Its because of AI slop

I dont know Lua and never touched it, Claude was able to vibe code in pieces a whole 3D Roblox experience, all while I was working in domains I did understand in another terminal window

Taking the Apple approach makes sense as too many ideas guys are flooding the platform with vending machine slop

This won't fix the AI slop problem. If anything, it will make it worse.

Vibe coders are far more likely to be willing to pay to submit their games, because just like their $200/mo AI subscription, they see it as a necessary expense on their path to get rich quick. People who just want to make things for fun as a hobby are less likely to pay.

The serious ones, yes

Roblox is already an experiences cesspool and should have dropped the “every kid should be an entrepreneur” thing a long time ago. Roblox Studio is still accessible for tinkering.

Vibe coders are going to be a lot like influencers in that we're going to find out people aren't half as creative as they think they are, and no barrier of entry, like learning a programming language, will exemplify that.

With influencers, the old barrier of entry was getting a good camera and learning about lighting. Now that cameras are essentially shipped with a device everyone has on them at all times anyways, we see how low the low-hanging fruit actually hangs, as evidenced by most instagram reels which are insufferable.

In what way did you find the headline misleading from the actual content of the article?

But the term 'Roblox Devs' can also include other children. You seem to be missing the point a bit that kids used to be able to make games and share them with their friends for free. Now they need a paid subscription and a face scan to do that.

Yes it makes sense when you apply it to adults, but Roblox was made for kids to share and play with other kids. When you look at it from that angle it makes no sense.

>More and more folks just see a headline and comment rather than understand that headlines are designed to mislead you for clicks.

My personal policy is I don't click links I consider clickbait. I mean things that are intentionally misleading and vogue. But I sometimes check HN comments - I never comment about the post itself (since I didn't read it), but I sometimes respond to other comments (like I do now).

In the case the article's actual headline is "New Publishing Requirements & Evaluation Process for Games". The clickbait headline was supplied by the person who submitted the article to HN.

Your policy will lead to missing articles that you might have found worthwhile someone did a poor job of submitting them.

I'm not sure I understand, as every word in the title is true.

One of the "requirements" you refer to is possessing an active subscription. The age-cutoff is 16, but Roblox has historically been based around kids making games for other kids, which isn't feasible if a subscription becomes required.

This seems like a useful reference when asking AI to create content for you, despite the irony

This article is kinda bogwater. Repeating the same points, writing as if it were LinkedIn, pretending to be technically competent while obviously not. Over and over and over, reiterating the same points but ultimately getting nowhere.

Changing requirements ad-hoc throughout the article, picking and choosing ideal matches rather than objective ones, etc. basically trying to make the data fit the problem by force.

Author, over time, gets more desperate to be "the one that found Satoshi" and loses the plot entirely.

I mean, what the hell is this bullshit?

""" Adam Back: I did a lot of talking though for somebody, I mean … I mean, I’m not saying I’m good with words but I sure did a lot of yakking on these lists actually.

To my ears, it sounded like he was saying that for someone who preferred code over words, he sure had written a lot of words. Implicit in that was an acknowledgment that he had been the one who wrote the quote. In other words, for a few seconds, Mr. Back had let the mask fall and turned into Satoshi. """

> > The experience is strange; you aren't able to grasp any common human aspects because there are none. You can't reason with the human, because the human isn't doing the reasoning. You can't appeal to it, because the LLM behind it is in direct support of its own and the proxy's opinions and whims.

I've sometimes wondered if the chat context is why some people think LLMs are intelligent, it being divorced from their usual experiences, and they need something like this to feel the cognitive dissonance before they can notice LLM shortcomings.

I've been calling them "meat condoms". In the workplace, it's one or two warnings before completely ejecting them. On social media, instant block.

Seems to be becoming more common, even for folks that are otherwise quite pleasant to deal with. Perhaps social and workplace pressures causes people to opt for it, much like LinkedIn is a cesspool of bullshit

That's terrific lol thanks for the link BTW!

> "the DEAN threatened to kick me out"

So when did the clickbait title apply? The author is honestly, from this article, quite a horrible person.

Absolutely agree. No care about how their platform is being used, chooses to laugh at the almost instant presence of bullying and gossip, takes no responsibility, infringes upon the institutions name, etc. Ends with ego.

The universities reaction was over the top.

The author also needs to improve their grammar. The occasional capitalisation is diabolical. Either do, or don't, and at least if you don't it's obvious you're a child.

> The author also needs to improve their grammar. The occasional capitalisation is diabolical. Either do, or dont, and at least if you dont its obvious youre a child.

* Either do, or don’t, and at least if you don’t, it’s obvious you’re a child.

I deserve that correction. Have an upvote.

I don't think the capitalization is what's tipping people off this kid is a child.

This kid is an adult.

Only legally. The posted behavior is not adult behavior.

It is if you somehow can get away with it. Typically, people higher up in society tend to have an easier time doing so.

"If you can get away with it" does not signify being an adult; it signifies being a sociopath.

Guess what kind of person has an inherent motivation to gain power and has the traits necessary to do so?

Let me guess, a sociopath.

I couldn't make it through the whole story because the hum... "writing" (?) gives me a headache. He's a horrible person just for writing like this.

Aw come on man, do you really think that im horrible for writing like that?

My first reaction on seeing the title was that it was some anti-Trump/anti-ICE site with the typical over-reaction to censor it.

However, copying people's personal info and then making it available without them having any say is abusive. Letting anyone then comment on anyone's profile is a recipe for further abuse. Not taking down a profile when someone is getting abuse because of it is not surprisingly antagonistic and abusive.

You may not be a horrible person, but what you've done is horrible and abusive. I think it's absolutely correct that the police were involved as what you did is not acceptable at all.

I hope you learn from this to have a bit of respect for other people.

It's worth a read, at least the first half, just because it's really fun.

Exactly what a SWE would say.

I'm not a Single-Wombat Entity if that's what you're accusing me of. I do, in-fact, have multiple wombats making up my person.

If they did, we wouldn't know. Those that do/did know would be dead.

I suppose this joke only works when you've read it. I should take my meds, else I'll forget.

You can’t forget to take class W mnestics. Not unless someone prevents you from taking them.

Just took mine. Please take proper quarantine measures when reading back these comments then, or you'll put us all at risk.

Log entry: Tried building a wall out of hard drives, but Gate walked around them and kept coming. Walls of information ineffective. I've forgotten my name, so I suspect this may be my final entry.

Remember to check your pancreas regularly.