As soon as I spawn into City of Rome, Italia, there’s a person waiting for me in some sort of militaristic get up. The stranger walks up to me and says, “where can I take you sir?” I’ve never been called “sir” in ROBLOX before, but I shrug that thought off. I tell him I’m here to see Juliane14, the creator of this place. “Right away, sir”, he fires back. We jump in a faded brown car and hit the freeway toward the capitol (within a capitol) of Rome.
The Elite Builders of ROBLOXia have been around since the advent of ROBLOX groups in 2009. Almost four years later, they boast a member count of … 93. In a virtual world where membership volume is often the sign of a group’s power and success, the Elite Builders of ROBLOXia appear to be a failure. But they measure success using a different metric: membership quality. Only the best of the best builders make it into the group’s ranks, and members have produced some of the finest worlds on ROBLOX. That’s the principle on which the group was founded and on which it exists today.
Currently, Builders Club members are able to create and sell their own clothing, including custom shirts and pants, on ROBLOX. Today, we’re giving groups the ability to do the same. That may sound simple, but with it come the possibilities of shared group money.
Before we explore the details of group clothing, let’s go over some of the interface changes it entails. Group clothing is available on two pages. First, the Groups page now features a “Store” tab, which shows you the top three most recently updated group items by default.
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Look at ROBLOX from a distance and you’ll notice a couple things: a lot of games and a large, bustling community. Look a little closer, and you’ll find depth: a complex building/game-development kit, a rich virtual economy and a social network that connects users around the world. Part of that social network is a system of groups, which allow ROBLOX users to join up, organize, communicate, form alliances and rivalries, compete, and execute grand building projects.
On ROBLOX, groups are another way we empower users. All Builders Club members have the ability to create a group that anyone can join – a sub-community that can function like anything from a fan club to a MMO guild to a game studio – for 100 Robux, and recruit members with various levels of access. Call it user-generated community: the other user-generated content.
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The ROBLOX economy is booming. Through all hours of every day, trades are in progress, virtual gear is being created and sold, users are marketing their content, groups are created and money is being managed. ROBLOX’s virtual economy is growing at the hands of our users.
The economy can seem like a daunting system for newcomers, so we put together a quick article explaining the overall aspects of our bustling economy. Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll go in depth on many of the sections of this article, for those who have already worked with our economy system.
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ROBLOX introduced groups in 2009, and, today, there are over 600,000 users in groups. While our community already uses them to organize, communicate, and battle, there are improvements we’d like to make and features we’d like to implement. At RGC 2012, Software Engineer Navin Lal premiered some of our ideas.
Groups are one of the features on ROBLOX that continue to garner interest and support from our users. Today, I’ll be outlining some of the plans we have for ROBLOX groups. We are, indeed, actively working on many of these features, while others are just ideas, so please feel free to leave any feedback in the comments section. We do not yet have any definitive release dates for the changes outlined in this article.
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