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Thursday, March 27, 2014

A Rant on the Lack of Innovation on ROBLOX

Over the course of four years on ROBLOX, I've had the chance to work with a lot of people and a lot of groups, helping develop their products. Users like Crazyman32, YrrebRBLX, Mrsmith23, DrReli, and more: all prestigious and renowned for their contributions to the ROBLOX community.

But when you start to work at groups that are obviously ahead of their time: creating what people would dream of in the now, you start to realize that outside the walls of the gated community that original group owners build, there are other groups that try desperately to achieve the same thing.



This creates a lack of innovation, a lack of creativity, and worst of all, a fabricated community that consistently argues over who is superior.

Take 'The Slenderman Obby' as an example...
I'll start by presenting a few examples of the lack of innovation on ROBLOX. Please take note that I exclude mention of games, I've already had a rant against unoriginal titles on the ROBLOX platform. I've done plenty of ranting on the idiocy known as the "front page" where "talented builders and scripters" have their work featured for the whole ROBLOX community to see, of course, I must give ROBLOX some credit for improving the front page. This time, it's about the lack of innovation on ROBLOX in general, but it's merely directed at groups.

If you're pretty active in observing the ads on the ROBLOX site, you'll see a variety of ads (obviously), but you'll also get a decent idea of the seriousness of the lack of creativity on the site.

Clicking refresh a total of five times showed me three ads regarding clans and one regarding a game. For starters, that should get you a general idea of the mass of the groups on ROBLOX. It's clans. Now, I could likely start a huge rant about clans and everything, but lets save that for later. [minirant] They all do the same thing, they all go "lets fight eachother for no reason" and then they raid each others' bases and cry when they can't determine who won their petty little battle. Then persist in arguing about it for a little over an hour until someone who thinks they're really smart says "Hey, lets call it a draw!" Then everyone cheers and celebrates for an hour.

Had the chance to look-up the keyword "coffee" in ROBLOX groups lately?

Starbucks®If you take a look, the group "Starbucks" owned by user Cyrogenix has a little over 7500 members. Below that, you'll notice a few other groups similar to Starbucks, most notably, "Fabrication," with about 6000 members. Below that, you'll see a few other "coffee groups" with about 2000 members.

The amount of coffee groups is getting a little silly, and it's even better that the first four coffee groups have essentially the same logo; an awfully drawn circle with similar text styles and logos. I give the exception to Starbucks however, for taking the laziest logo crown for copying a brand entirely and using the actual corporation's trademarked logo. But I mean, I don't mean to stir the pot, but hey I'm about to. 

Fedora Coffee®Would it kill you, Fabrication and Costa Coffee to come up with an original logo? Don't think I forgot you either, Fedora Coffee, Lux Coffee, Queens Coffee* (* -Sorry, I'm picking up a grammar mistake there guys) and Futuro Coffee, oh yeah, I almost forgot! Plus all those fake Starbucks groups (you know who you are). I mean, you've already had the audacity to attempt stealing this entire "coffee community" [since there is no industry on a virtual game] - from Starbucks: the only ORIGINAL group in ROBLOX coffee. You're all guilty of copying from Starbucks: you're all guilty of modeling your entire community after a single group, a very dangerous thing to do. So I gotta give it up to Crown Coffee for being the only two bloody groups within the first two pages of the keyword "coffee" for having an original logo and original brand name. But I will say, none of you are innocent of an original idea. Starbuck's group ID is 950346, look at ANY FRONT PAGE SELF-DECLARING COFFEE GROUP and you'll see all their IDs fall after Starbuck's. Don't believe me? How about I just write out the group IDs, I'll order them based on their member count after Starbucks: 985426, 994716, 970692, 980889, 971920, 977619 [gg copier], 1009810.

Is that enough validation? Better yet, lets use another example real quick, how about ROBLOX's aviation community? In aviation, there are about 200 groups now It's heavily segmented. The one with the most members being a group called JetÉire, but we're going to use a group called "RoAir" to make our point here. It's more recent than JetÉire and is highly regarded for it's ongoing contribution to aviation.

RoAir
Nice logo by the way
RoAir has 2814 members, it was created in early 2009, then made a group in December 2009, taking up group ID 59622. Following the events of RoAir's creation, it's clear that the inspiration that RoAir made caused aviation to explode. Even JetEire, a more recent group, came after RoAir, and is a direct product of the genius of RoAir's owner, YrrebRBLX. Look at any aviation group today, and their ID follows those of RoAir, and bet says that YrrebRBLX has likely made their planes as well... [Yrreb makes planes for free now! You can read more about it on his profile! Make sure to thank him for his contribution to the community.]

Listen, I've got nothing against capitalism, but come on, hasn't someone got an original idea for a group? People just appear to think because something is in real life that it should automatically be an element on ROBLOX. This entire sort of thing where marketing a product that is actually real as a "ROBLOX brand" is almost as stupid as the amount of exploiters we had under the age of 10 in 2012, when exploits were happening in every game imaginable.

If there's anything you should take away from this, it's that you don't have to make something that has already been made to be successful, and if you plan on making something make sure you take a thorough look to make sure someone else hasn't beat you to it before making another petty group to fragment the community into groups where all that will be caused is consistent arguing and ongoing idiocy, and eventually: the heat death of that entire community, or worse, the decaying of quality in that entire community.
                                                                                                                                                                   

Written by Darwin12 and edited by arbirator

About Darwin12:

Darwin12 joined the ROBLOX community on November 8, 2009 after hearing about it on the game "ChallengeYou." After joining, ongoing contributions to the community landed him places at several ROBLOX groups, including a success in growing his own group, R.S.A, to over 3500 members. He later went on to influence elements of the ROBLOX travel community by implementing his ideas and groups into creating travel groups based on aviation, buses, trains, boats, and more. Although he has recently departed from aviation, he continues to work on developing games, travel, and more.

Darwin12's ROBLOX Profile
www.twitter.com/FUTURTOPIA
www.instagram.com/FUTURTOPIA
http://futurtopia.me




4 comments:

  1. Wierd. My coffee group was made seconds before Starbucks.

    http://www.roblox.com/My/Groups.aspx?gid=950338 <--

    ReplyDelete
  2. Seattle's BEst is not original. It's a USA coffee

    ReplyDelete
  3. Agreed. This type of increativity and plagiarism is a direct effect of so many greedy people trying out their "Get rich quick" schemes to lure younger players into playing their games, diverting their attention from games where real effort was put in, and stealing their money. This angers me so much I started to learn Lua so that I can show up those good for nothing lazybugs

    ReplyDelete
  4. Never thought darwin was this agressive, but I absolutely share the same opinion. You can't go to the front page without seeing this: "The slenderman obby" or "Feed a noob!" about twenty times. When I visit the games section, I always dismiss the default games option and I go straight to the recent games because most of the games on the default game options have shoddy design and are in general displeasing to look at. Just look at this. And I quote "survive a plane crash". And the tags? Its not pretty.

    Ghosts,Darkness,Zombies,Town,Military,Shooting,Guns,Fighting,Paintball,skydiving,water,waves,fun,obby,speed,football,baseball,NFL,MLB,basketball,soccer,swimming,neighborhood,dodgeball,free,sale,kestrel,clothing,tiger,wolfram,jason,chucky,michael,myers,freddy,night,camp,christmas,thanksgiving,easter,halloween,scary,space,astronaught,adventure,black ops 1,black ops 2,open source,nbc,bc,
    ,bunchbunches,survival,angrybirds,RUN!,eat,kill,die,flying,running,Creeper,Bowser,Kirby ,Mario,Steve,what does the fox say?,Link,Zelda,Brawl,SSBB,cart ride,Mineblox,minecraft,Mobs Gta Koopa Survive the disasters,Justin Bieber, boys and girls hangout,kohls admin house,building,all gears allowed,The hunger games,
    noob,cool,Epic face,Swords,Luigi,Orange,R.


    My thoughts exactly. WHAT THE CRUD?!? This is total insanity. How many times have you seen this happening? Seeing a copy of disaster survival with more tags than numbers you can count? This is insanity.

    ReplyDelete

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