That’s pretty much the antithesis of online gaming. You’re not ONLY playing with other kids you know.

Edit: There’s two problems that need to be solved. Parents need to not offload all their responsibilities to a multibillion dollar corporation and hope it works 100% of the time. And corporations need to prioritize safety more than they do now. It dumbfounds me how many times I get called the N word on Xbox and nothing happens after I report it. It’s almost 2026, it’s not that hard people.

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PunchyHamster 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> That’s pretty much the antithesis of online gaming. You’re not ONLY playing with other kids you know.

That's how online gaming looked for us back then, played in school over LAN or in local small town's "ISP" (which was just a bunch of ethernet cables strung together between apartment blocks).

It was fucking great.

And if choice (with parents not wanting to risk wider internet) is "play with your classmates/grade" and "don't play", it's far better option

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robot-wrangler 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What important aspects of gameplay are destroyed by age-restricting DMs?

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darth_avocado 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Parent doesn’t talk about age restrictions on DMs and nor do I. We are talking about physical keys and only being restricted to peers that you’d know from school for online play.

	▲	robot-wrangler 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I'd say TFA and thread are both talking about this. Quoting the article- > Understanding how attractive Roblox would be to predators, the company long ago could have blocked unrestricted contact between adults and minors. Contact here seems to be about DMs or equivalent, since I don't think grooming and kidnapping preparations are happening in public forums? So with or without involvement of a physical key-exchange, I'd say that curbing private personal contact is the crux, and it's easily doable without effecting other aspects of the game

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mghackerlady 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

hell, the argument that it's needed to allow users to collaborate is dumb. Just have a list of specified phrases and severely limit other forms of communications, we figured this out with club penguin people it's not that hard

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bossyTeacher 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Parents need to not offload all their responsibilities to a multibillion dollar corporation and hope it works 100% of the time

Hard habit to kill given that so many also offload many of the responsibilities to schools