Responding to User Feedback, V8

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Responding to User FeedbackEvery so often, we ask our users to let us know what they’d like to see in ROBLOX, then respond to some of the most insightful comments and pertinent questions. This time, John Shedletsky, ROBLOX’s Creative Director, solicited feedback via Twitter. He elaborates on a variety of topics, including a leveling system for ROBLOX, adding Robux or Tix to trades, messaging optimizations, a “stock market” and more. You can read previous entries in this ongoing series here.

Level-up/reputation system

@RBX_Zakary99: Levels inside ROBLOX. For example, you can be a level 10 ROBLOXian. Maybe you would receive a prize upon reaching a high level.

We’ve been thinking about something similar – essentially a “reputation system”. As users participate in the community in positive ways, their reputation score increases. A high reputation score would unlock certain benefits on the site – for instance the ability to upload sounds. Contrawise, users with low reputation scores might find their ability to leave spam comments on items greatly curtailed.

Including currency with trades

R$@Simonblox: There should be an option to include Robux and Tickets when making a trade, so you can enhance and/or balance your offers. This will decrease scamming.

The web team is currently working on adding the ability to use ROBUX to even up trades. I haven’t seen a demo of it yet, so it’s probably a month or so away. We decided to leave out the ability to even up a trade with tickets just to reduce the complexity of the transaction. Users can always trade tickets for ROBUX in the currency exchange, so this didn’t seem like a big deal.

Unread messages

@taylw006: Unread messages from best friends should stay at the top of your inbox so the most important messages are easily accessible.

Our Web Team lead, Isaiah Merrill, has a million ideas for how to improve the ROBLOX private messaging system, but this is a new one that I haven’t heard. Sounds incredibly useful though.

Spam filter for game chat

@ultrapheenix: A chat spam filter. If you send four messages in two seconds, you would be muted. And if you’re muted four times (or so), you will be kicked from the game.

As we discussed briefly on Twitter, I think the solution here is two-fold. First, the rate at which you can chat should relate to the number of players in the game. In a 100 player game, it probably doesn’t make a lot of sense to let people spam the chat more than once every 30 seconds or so. In smaller games, shorter intervals could be allowed. The second way to solve this problem is with a mute button for players, which I have seen in many other games.

Investing in ROBLOX games

@Rob498RBLX: You should be able to invest shares into a game/place. Depending on its popularity, you would make more money, based on your investment.

We have thought about doing this. The most realistic thing to do would actually be to allow groups to become “companies” and own multiple places and assets (shirts, pants, etc.). Groups make money based on these assets and can optionally pay out “dividends” to group members.

If this machinery were in place, it would be very easy to allow users to trade “stock” in particular groups.

If this is something you are interested in, please let us know in the comments.

Thumbs up/down on comments

@ydocydoc1ROBLOX: Thumbs up system on comments. Also, add in “delete” and “edit” options for comments. That way, comments would be more organized.

We’ve been talking about adding various ratings systems across ROBLOX. The first thing we might use them for is combating comment spam, but there would be other applications. For example, they could be used to rate people’s Game Passes (this is an upcoming feature), levels or models.

Ambient shadows

@RBX_Zakary99: All about the ambient shadows: tell us about them and how they work.

It’s really interesting actually. Maybe we’ll do a feature about it in the future.

As always, thanks for your passionate feedback. Connect with ROBLOX on Twitter to Share your ideas for consideration in future articles.

253 thoughts on “Responding to User Feedback, V8”

  1. I liked the add a stock market idea, for buying stock in places and groups. Would make the Roblox community more alive and interesting!

  2. Stock Market? LOVE IT! I’m investing in Apocalypse Rising!

    You know what I’d like to see for my ‘company’, Cloud Nine Incorporated, and thousands of other companies also?

    The ability to sell models and charge money, instead of them just being free. Also, if you were able to sell the model for your group (sort of like Group Places, but the money earned from the model is divided between everyone in the company. Who knows, there may be even a rank-based salary.

    I run Cloud Nine Incorporated, and it would be very precious to me to have it function as a real working corporation, with employees on the payroll, the CEO being able to fire people if they don’t keep up their quota of sales, and other neat stuff.

    I mean, ROBLOX is about Building, but Building isn’t a source of income, so many people don’t build. Quit spending all of your time on War Groups. Start focusing on Companies, like Pinewood Builders, Avanta Car Company, CF Motors, etc.

    If you could only sell models…

    A donation system would be much better than buying Donation Shirts. There could be a little ‘Donate’ button on the player’s profile, and you can put in how many ROBUX and/or Tickets you’d like to give that player, and when you do, that player gets a message from ROBLOX (System Message) saying “So-and-so donated you this many ROBUX and this many Tickets!”

  4. i think the leveling up system would be great to if added a ranking system to in which next to ur name u would have ur rank

  5. How about a feature that has a realistic lighting? Like a darkness feature and a light feature that lights up in the dark?

  6. Allowing Groups to become companies and then sell stocks would be a wonderful idea. Also allowing them to associate items for sale (such as models, shirts, pants, etc.) with them and perhaps even a group treasury would be ideal as well.

    How group profits would be split, unfortunately, seems like a formidable challenge to overcome for any of this, however. Obviously the group leader should not make a large profit while the members toil away for comparatively little to nothing, vice-versa, and obviously a Stock Holder’s profits would need to be kept within reason…

  7. I agree with the investing thing. Finally a way to make a lot of money somewhat easily. FREAKING AWESOME ROBLOX FEATURES FTW! But I do think the spam chat thing should be an option, not forced.

    P.S. Sorry if you said that, I’m not the best reader. :P

  8. Massive support for the Investing/Company system! This is what Ive been thinking of as well.

  11. well i think they should show us how to get their plug-ins so we can use them too, and they should make it easier to learn how to script

  12. Something not mentioned above that I heard the ROBLOX Team was working on was dynamic lighting, similar to dynamic lighting in the popular PC and Xbox360 game “Minecraft”.

  13. I think that roblox should add rain, you set where you want it to rain and when and what level of rain do you want from light shower to heavy rain.

  15. You should be able to report games for having misleading titles and images, such as half of the games on the front page.

  16. If you do manage in game spam, please do it through muting, not intervals. I can’t tell you how often I’ve had something to say or correct myself, and then, BOOM! Interval.

  17. I think a stock market would be a good idea, but it will take time to perfect. I actually hold stocks and trade so i know this may get a little confusing; mabye they should add an introduction video if the plan goes through.

  19. Whats up with the changing in game thing? Is it coming out or not? It been nearly a year.

  20. ::LOCAL LIGHTING::
    A very simple feature could add a lot of versatility to game design. Make Lighting a local feature instead of a global server feature. In this way, users could add dark, spooky caves, dimly lit rooms, biodomes, a foggy cemetery, varying fog of wars for players, and a lot more innovative settings for a relatively low cost roblox upgrade.

  21. Maybe you could add quests to Roblox. For instance, if you complete a quest you could get a certain amount of robux or tickets. You could also get a level up which gives you a new item.

  22. I sort of like the idea of the group investment system as a way to boost capital generated to fuel the group (buy technology, bases, or run ads, etc). But you’d have to be careful about how you have the money generated- or groups with tens-of-thousands of members would just become giant money machines. What then?

  23. Wow guys I love that you listen to us and understand our ideas! The first thing that comes to mind is the level up thing, I think it would be really cool if people would stop calling me a noob, since I’m a BC with a veteran badge! It should say above your robloxian, for example…

    level 5
    handsomeanakin
    (health bar)

  24. I really find the idea of a reputation system rather unneeded. Considering that users will use these levels to boast to other, newer users.

  25. Can I post some reccomendations? Well, I was wondering. Could we Send tickets to and from friends? I know, it wouldn’t be safe from scammers, and in fact would be worse towards them. But there could be like a password system you set up from your email that you have to type in in order to message these tickets. NOTE: I did not say anything about trading Robux.

  26. I Want it so group member can acociate their places with the group and then depending on their rank can be paid in “wages” from the popularity of the group acoceated places
    EX: four games make 100 tix all together and there are 4 members in the group then the lowest rank gets 10 the next 25 next 35 and lastly the remaining tix for all members like sharing the games income into “paycheks”

  27. The stock idea sounds great, and since I don’t have BC I could really use some extra stuff.

  29. I think that the scripting wiki should be much more informative, when I looked at it I had NO IDEA what you were getting at. So when I had a proffesional look at it guess what, they had NO IDEA, it’s kinda useless :/

  30. I like the stock idea, and the levels.
    An idea I have is ROBLOX should make ALL items tradeable, and the price value is what the item is selling for. If its an item offsale, for example, sk10r. I have no clue if it was a present or on sale. If it was a present, depending on how hard it was to get, it would range from 10-1,000 robux. If it was onsale, it would be worth as much as it was onsale for.

  31. Please, no thumbs up/thumbs down on comments. It would cause a lot of “Thumbs up if you’re reading this in 2012!” comments.

  32. Level-up/reputation system, Thumbs up/down on comments, and especially Investing in ROBLOX games I look forward to. Man, groups as businesses Would be AWESOME!

  34. The investing thing may be a little chaotic, since everyone basically knows which “companies” to root for.

  38. The stock sounds like a good idea but maybe individual players could own small amounts of stock and groups could own large amounts of stock so the people who don’t own groups wont be left out of the stock exchange. (if this goes through investing in base wars the land) oh wait but the stock for base wars will cost a lot (saving up robux)

  40. Why don’t you guys bring ROBLOX to Wii U™?It has the proccescer and building with the stylus would be a breeze!

    • Interesting. Not even necessarily the wii. Like Minecraft though, for roblox to ever expand hugely, it’ll need to be based off of other systems along with the initial website. XBox, Wii, Ps3 and so on.

  41. Hey, I’m the one who suggested the ability to upload sounds! Anyway, if you did that, I would be so happy!

    • they have the audio thing in the catalog. but i dont know how to put it in games, and what you do with it

  42. That group business thing would be cool. I could start a business and people that are in the group could get payed easier.

  43. As a Robloxian scripter, I would like to see new classes, methods, core functions, properties, etc. added. A good idea would be a BindableClass method or something which you can define it with variables (local var = {Name = “NewPart”, ClassName = “NewPart”}), as well as completely custom events. I have been finding ways to make my own events for a while and it has been eluding me, so it would be nice to have those available to the public for making. I have many more ideas that I posted in the past, but they didn’t get chosen to be featured.

  44. ROBLOX for Linux please! I have a dual operating system on my computer (Windows and Linux) and it would be really cool to get ROBLOX for Linux so I could be on Linux all the time! Pretty please with sprinkles on top, could you look into it?

    • As of now, I have to be on Windows all the time and only be on Linux when I’m bored of ROBLOX, which isn’t very often :(

  45. I like the investment thingy or I think it’s invest. Because it would be much better then having only one tix(s’) when your game deserves 30 tix or even more. But the problem is that people can scam it by making various accounts and making the invest high in all of them so then you’d be very rich. Maybe add a feature that you can only have one account and it would know by checking if the email is used already. Maybe 2 if you want a alt. and they should add a feature were the alt has the same things as your main and you can enter the username from your main but the other account must approve. ~freezone2000

  46. Investing in ROBLOX games – I FULLY SUPPORT THIS!

    It’s a great idea considering alot of people on roblox nowadays have groups and would like to expand them using shirts, tshirts & other accessories this would surely improve the group world on roblox and then i will probably considering buying OBC for awhile :)

  47. Since the first day I was old enough to understand stocks, I thought it might be cool if ROBLOX had them. But little kids won’t understand it, people! And also, you’ll probably make it BC only, which is something else I’ll have to miss out on til next summer. So, thumbs DOWN for stocks.

  49. The “Stocks”sounds like a great thing for nbc’ers with lets say 30 robux.They invest in catlog heaven.They recive 60 robux every time catlog heaven is a major hit thourght the week.If you invested on monday you could recive your 60 robux every week or how much you put in.Add a negative robux and tickets so if your “stock”is failing you lose 60 robux……Or you could do this feature for bc only which would be kinda sad cause it seems like a good thing to have an easier way of making money not by trading nor using 100 tix for 10 robux

  50. Just like YouTube, I think comments should be reviewed before before actually being ALLOWED into the public.

    • If a game gets REALLY popular and it gets a lot of comments, this will take a lot of manpower to moderate. It’s just not that sensible, although I do see what you’re saying.

  52. i have a idea i would love for you guy to add a mute button on the game menus because some times there is music in the game but i am trying to listen to YouTube and i can hear both when i only want YouTube it is so annoying please make a mute button on the game menu please it would help alot

  53. I would like too see the market fee to not be 30% because its is much too high, I would go with around 5 to 10%.

    • It won’t happen. The reason it is there is to prevent inflation (EX. Buying a hat for 100 and selling it for 1,000 robux and getting 900-950 back. That would make each robuck less valuable.)

  54. I love the Leveling up idea. I think it would be a fun challenge, and also get the community more active.

  55. I would like to add something! You should put in realistic water affects for sinking ship games! It would be cool, and not just see water go through walls :/

  58. My idea is a app for roblox that has the front page games for free but like a few more of your countries currency(euros, dollars, etc.)for the next page, and eventually a building premium for it so you can actually go onto your place in build mode as well as having play mode when you first get it for free.

  59. I’m very interested in the companies thing. And maybe you could make each rank have a different percentage of the income. Also can you keep us updated on dynamic lighting?

    • Actually it would make more sense on how much you paid for the group, like REAL investing. The more money you put into the group, the more shares you buy, and the more money you make off of it! The “ranks” idea is pretty stupid, broski.

      • It’s just an idea. Don’t call it stupid. It actually makes more sense than using real investing. It would be easier for younger users to understand if it was based on ranks.

  60. Linked accounts via email confirmation on both accounts. My alternate account could use some items I dont want on my main.

  64. I want all of these updates! This would reduce scamming a lot, and you should give ranks for learning how to Script. This could be measured by going into “Edit” mode the first time, or making your first Script Model. This would give Scripters like me an idea of who can Script, and who can’t. This would allow us to identify who to teach. You could add a separate leveling system for Building, Scripting, and just general ROBLOX community stuff and skills. However, the leveling system might segregate players even more.

  65. The idea of investing is a brilliant idea. It’s one that I’ve considered myself for a long time. I do think, however, that it could be taken a step further. Groups, like real companies could start out private, and once they get popular, they could go public. Have an Initial Public Offering!