What has Roblox done right, what has it done wrong.

Let's all be honest here, we all love Roblox dearly (or at least I'm inferring that from your reading of this Roblox fan-blog), however, we all know things that Roblox has done wrong or has yet to accomplish. You might not see some of the things I see in this article, and I might not notice the ones you do, so please leave a comment if you want to make me aware of something I didn't talk about.

Of course, before we talk about the goods and bads of Roblox, I have to mention that this is my personal opinion and that you do not have to agree on it (I hope you don't take my word 100%, I don't want to brain wash you). Also, I'll be talking about the pros and cons from a semi-experienced Roblox player's point of view, so you won't see things such as "this game has lots of lag."

It is courtesy to take a look at the good side before I dive into the criticisms. So let's get started!

As you all know, Roblox is a place for kids and teenagers to both have fun and express their creativity, programming skills, design skills, and economic skills. And Roblox nails these quite well, on a basic level at least.

With regards to creativity, there seem to be two types that exist in the game. One which is outside the game, like customizing your character, and one in game, for example, building a dream house. While in-game creativity can be expressed well because Roblox does not have too much competition (Minecraft does not allow scripting), the out of game one is not done well.


Character creation and customization alone is not enough to satisfy my personal hunger for expression. Let's compare this to a similar game (on the "out of game" side at least) Neopets. 

Many of you might have heard or even played this virtual pets game. Although it is aimed at young kids with its adorable art style and cutesy flash games, there is a large adult community present (I would estimate 8-12% of the population is ages 25+). 

The reasons for this could be many things, however, I am here to examine what this game has done right that Roblox has not done. For one, Neopets actually supports communities outside of the actual game; meaning that fanblogs (like this one), forums, and many user designed things actually get frequent spotlights to bring more attention to them. Roblox's not supporting of user-generated content outside of the official game means people are more likely to quit the game, as they have no strong community to fall back on (I don't consider groups strong communities).

Character customization is equally strong in both games, just with different styles. This is one part Roblox has done right: regularly releasing hats. 

The next part I feel Neopets has done that would make Roblox a better game is the economy. For one, Neopets has a stock market, but I don't feel it would be a great addition to Roblox anyway because of the randomness and easy profits (inflating the economy). 

Preview of crafting from
Roblox's blog.

But one things that does need to be in Roblox is the addition of "tradeable" consumable items that can be redeemed for "non-tradeable" hats/gears. This would add tons of dynamic economical shifts to Roblox (something it lacks dearly) and make playing with the economy more interesting and ultimately more profitable. 

The above could be solved with the introduction of crafting though. Soon™

Last thing that Neopets does is having a great deal of community interaction/involvement. It frequently hosts art spotlights, HTML spotlights, etc. while Roblox has NONE of these. The lack of these does nothing good to hold the community together, instead, it makes the community feel non-existent, void, empty.

Overall, I think Roblox is a really strong game that benefits from its unique game engine. However, it really needs more features added  to improve the community around it as well as the economy that drives it.

-yomamadude6

edit: Spelling

P.S. More place reviews will be coming ;)