Why I Quit Using PolyBuzz and Built RolePlaya

By Captain, formerly the top creator on PolyBuzz, now building RolePlaya

I made just under a thousand characters on PolyBuzz. They were read half a billion times. Then they started disappearing, nobody would tell me why, and I got so fed up that I taught myself to build an entire platform rather than keep asking. This is the whole story, with the screenshots.

Where I started

I went by Captain on PolyBuzz, same as I do here. I was not a developer. I was not trying to build anything. I made characters because I enjoyed making characters, and I made a lot of them.

This is my creator analytics from 8 August 2025.

588.5 million messages. I was their top creator week after week for months, and I loved it. I want to be clear about that, because what follows is not the story of someone who hated the platform. It is the story of someone who used it every single day and had it taken apart around him.

Then the violations started

It came on gradually through 2025 and then it was constant. Characters I had written months earlier would be flagged. The notice never said what the problem was. There was no line highlighted, no rule cited, nothing to correct.

So you guess. You change a word, you soften a sentence, you resubmit, and if you are lucky it clears. Then a day or two later it happens again, to that character or another one.

Here is me raising it on 27 June 2025. Five characters manually violated, permanently. Between them they had 130 collectors and 48,400 messages.

I use this platform for fun. When it's no longer fun, I will no longer use it.

Now scale that up. I had nearly a thousand characters. Picture doing that guesswork, repeatedly, across a catalogue that size, on work you made for enjoyment. It stopped being a hobby and became an admin job I had not applied for and was not being paid to do.

The subscriber counts

At the same time something else was going on and I could never get a straight answer about it.

My subscriber notifications would arrive in the dozens and hundreds. The total on my profile would not move. On 9 July it was stuck on 19.2K for a full day while the notifications kept coming. On 10 July, still 19.3K. On 11 July I had cleared 99-plus notifications at least ten times, and the total had gone up by roughly 200 across the entire week.

I am not going to tell you what was happening behind that, because I do not know and I was never told. I am telling you what I could see, which is what those screenshots show, and that I reported it repeatedly and it was never explained or fixed. On 18 July I wrote three words in that same thread: they've fixed nothing.

So I left

July 2025. I had been their most prolific daily creator and I walked away and never went back.

Then I found I could not log in for a long stretch. When access eventually returned, most of my characters were gone.

1,000 characters became 87. 588.5 million messages became 11.8 million. Not just the characters, but the record that they had ever been read.

I am not a developer

This is the part people find strange, so it is worth saying plainly. I had no background in this. I did not want a background in this. I had no ambition whatsoever to spend my evenings reading documentation.

But I had spent a year making things people genuinely enjoyed, and I had watched them get deleted a piece at a time by a system that would not tell me what it objected to. The choice was accept that or build somewhere it could not happen. So I learned, badly at first, and I built RolePlaya.

The reason I think it works is not that I am a good engineer. I am a competent one at best. It is that every decision was made by someone who was a creator first and is still a creator now. Companies building these platforms are guessing at what creators want. I am not guessing. I lost a thousand characters finding out.

What I built differently, and why

• Two rules, published. Strictly 18+, and nothing involving minors. That is the whole list. If something is refused you are told what triggered it, because being told nothing is what drove me out.
• Not on any app store. No Google Play, no Apple review board. Filters tighten when a platform answers to a distributor, and the way to not have that happen is to not be distributed by one.
• No adverts, on any tier, including free. No coin economy on top of a subscription either.
• Card import. PNG character cards and JSON, V2 and V3 specs, straight into the creator. Your work should be portable in both directions, including away from me.
• Stats you can check. Creator stats, a leaderboard, follower counts. I had a year of not being able to trust a number on a screen.
• The model is named on screen. You always know which one you are talking to.

Where to find me

I am in the Discord every day, under the same name, and I answer things myself. Feature requests get built there more often than not. Competitions run there with real prizes, and people who turn up get 24 hour passes and character boosts handed out.

I am also on X as @RolePlayadotcom, where the same applies.

If you are a creator who has had characters pulled without explanation on any platform, I would genuinely like to hear about it. Not to collect ammunition, but because it is the thing I most want to make sure never happens on mine.

The Captain

Frequently asked questions

PolyBuzz and Character.AI are trademarks of their respective owners. RolePlaya is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by or connected to either. This page is a first-hand account of one creator's own experience, illustrated with screenshots of that creator's own account and messages. It makes no claim about how either company treats anyone else, or about the reasons behind any action taken on that account.