Please provide adults with a way to filter out children in multiplayer VR content

[FutureShock_]

This is a massive problem that I don't believe Meta is taking seriously. 

I enjoy a lot of multiplayer VR and many of the games I enjoy (Onward, Breachers and others) are crossplay or have become crossplay. Despite these games being rated 13+ or 17+, it isn't abnormal for the average age in a game lobby to be 10-12 years old which means lots of screeching and other forms of immaturity. Players aged 13-17 aren't always a huge improvement. 

The community for all of these games have engaged each one of these developers about this problem as it can be bad enough to render these games borderline unplayable for adults the vast majority of the time. The common retort is that "you can just mute them", however, a lot of these games are social or teamwork-oriented so we feel that muting everyone ruins the experience. This negatively impacts gameplay as well because small children often aren't capable of playing games like Onward properly, which means that they resort to griefing, teamkilling, and goofing around instead of playing the game as intended. This was not a problem when games like Onward were PC-only. 

Some of these devs have implemented complex reporting features to help crack down on some of the bad behaviour but despite these systems being in place for quite some time, there has been no perceptible improvement in these communities. 

I think the solution lies in Meta taking action themselves and identifying children using their parents' accounts (there are countless ways to do this), flagging them, then passing this to the developers via the API so developers can then give users the ability to filter out children under a certain age (ie: a "filter players under 18" checkbox in the server browser).

I know there's no silver bullet solution but if something isn't done, I fear VR will be seen as something that is exclusively for children as it's already gaining that reputation within the sphere of gaming. I'm sure this isn't what Meta envisions for its platform. 

[Hiro_Protag0nist]

All good points, and will it get worse over the coming months with the minimum age reducing?

[nalex66]

At least the new 10-12 child accounts can be blocked from playing games rated 13+ or higher, if parents use them.

Age ratings of games are now enforced for regular accounts (they used to be just guidelines), but only if the user’s real age is entered when the account is set up, which is dependant upon parents making that choice.

[FutureShock_]

I can't imagine it getting worse as it's already pretty common for the majority of players in an Onward Uplink lobby (the main game mode) to be under 12 with some being under 10.

I think this just means we'll have a harder time reporting people for being underage to Meta but I'm not sure they were doing much about it anyway. 

I don't think it will improve until Meta either does something or the Quest suddenly starts becoming popular with adults again. A lot of parents treat it as a babysitting device. 

[FutureShock_]

The problem is that most of them use their parents' accounts. 

A lot of kids in Onward, for example, will literally have their mother's or father's name as their username (firstname.lastname). Many will have an alias that it's obvious they didn't choose, which is pretty much the same thing. 

I think something needs to be done to ensure kids aren't using regular accounts then it will be easy for developers to block them from multiplayer or limit them to only playing with each other.

It shouldn't be hard for Meta to figure this out without even being too invasive. Something like ToxMod (which is third party so they could develop their own). 

[BlueberrieSmoothie]

Hey hey! I just wanted to chime in here since it sounds like you have some ideas for how something like this could be implemented to keep children from using their parent's account. I know the engineers and developers are always looking for suggestions and feedback from users, and the best way to get these seen by the right teams is by posting on the Ideas Board here in the Forums. I'd recommend posting there!

[FutureShock_]

Thanks for the tip, I made a post here.

[dagoth.is.ur.daddy]

Parents should just stop allowing their mongrel kids to melt their brain cells on VR. They need to hurry up and have it so there’s adult only servers or something, make it so kids can go screech about who’s willy is smaller in a kids only server 

[Charmeds]

It is not so bad that there are children, but the bad thing is for themselves. At such an age, glasses will have a rather negative effect on the child's vision. The problem is also with the parents who do not pay attention to their own children at all. There are children who behave more maturely than people who are much older than them. And adults who behave immaturely like children.