Criticism of Roblox

ROBLOX has been highly criticized for many reasons. Many users from the ROBLOX community have constructed hate videos and posts about ROBLOX.

MSE6
MSE6 is an administrator on ROBLOX. The forums of ROBLOX, most so to the visitors and users of the Off Topic and ROBLOX Talk forum sections, have recognized MSE6 as a tyrannical ruler. She is often accused of abusing moderation power, banning users for invalid reasons, and performing bans that are considered as 'over the top', or beyond what the receiver of said ban recognizes as a fair punishment for their offense. She is also targeted as the admin who is responsible for all of the invalid bans, despite this not being true.

Roblox Testing site problems
On June 26 2013 RobLiu, a ROBLOX admin and forum moderator posted a message on the forums titled: "Paid Access Public Testing", that post led to a ROBLOX testing site which later found out that the site had viruses on the site.

In-game report system flaws
ROBLOX offers a system that allows one to report another user to the moderators of ROBLOX to review what the offending user has said in the chat. This service has been criticized by many, touting it as a near-useless service, as there have been recorded cases where users performing ban-able offenses have not been banned. However, often, said cases involve a user performing an offense that cannot be recorded, such as exploiting the game. It should be noted that rude or otherwise irritating behavior cannot be reported, including the deletion of another's work in a building game, and Spawn Killing.

Additionally, there have been many complaints of users being banned when they have not violated the rules in any obvious way, or without any reason at all. Such occurrences have led many people to believe that the in-game report system is merely automated and is programmed to ban any user reported of, literally, anything.

Community
ROBLOX is highly criticized for its relatively immature community. The community of ROBLOX has been known to produce a relatively unrealistic amount of complaints about changes made by ROBLOX and repeatedly criticizes it for being "greedy" without any sort of evidence (although on a few cases people give evidence to back up their theories, but the evidence is normally for other purposes in the actual ROBLOX game). ROBLOX's community tends to contain users that do not understand the fundamental concepts of acceptable behavior, and in many cases also do not understand basic concepts such as Internet hosting. During 2011, players have had some bad behavior, like threats from children. Jaredvaldez4 is one of those who are repeatedly threatened by the community for his notorious reputation.

Guests
Guests are pre-configured players like the rest of ROBLOX users; however they have a multitude of restrictions and differences: Guests are generally frowned upon, as they tend to cause more destruction to games than those that have a regular account. Many users have taken it upon themselves to spend tickets on ads and groups, simply to show their hatred toward these users.
 * They cannot speak except via an interface containing predefined phrases. This restriction is also present on accounts with the 'super safe chat' privacy feature. They lack the ability to see others speaking, making it impossible to communicate annoyances and concerns, without using a certain object that uses a GUI for chat, a normal chat robloxian may respond and what they say appears as a GUI.
 * They use the same look as ROBLOX's official account. An older version of guests would have a yellow head and arms, green legs and a blue torso. For a small period of time, when gear was released, guests had all of the gear that the official ROBLOX character had. Also for a short time, ROBLOX had TBC on it's account so it could enter BC games. Strangely enough, this allowed all guests to access TBC benefits, as well, meaning Guests could play on "BC only" games.
 * A guest's name will be "Guest", followed by a random number. Sometimes people will hunt for guests with rather absurd numbers, like 666, 1337, 9999, 2012, 69, 0 or 1.

Change of targeted demographics
Around 2010, ROBLOX started to change its advertising and graphics from an age 10-16 style of demographics to a 6-8 demographics With the new building tools, colorful bright graphics and partnerships with cartoons and movies for the younger market. Also, this is one of the believed reasons that people switched over to Minecraft.

Individual players or groups
Main Article: Controversial Players 

Christina8787
Christina8787 is a player in ROBLOX who is mostly known for the older user advertisements she had made. Her ads were insulting IronInforcer and his popular social game, Iron Cafe. Her place was then reviewed on YouTube by XiaoXiaoMan, otherwise known as the "Raging Roblox Reviewer". She then received numerous amounts of bad press after his video went "semi-viral". Sometime afterwards, LegoIsReal leaked a screenshot of Christina8787's chat with him, saying that Christina admitted to being a slut on gaming IM client XFire, where she was laughed at. XiaoXiaoMan even noticed this leak, to which he made a video on.

Christy's fights with XiaoXiaoMan ended, but tension still exists between her and other players. At one time, Christy copied Patacorow's video at the ROBLOX staff, claimed it as her own, and aimed it at the average ROBLOX user.

SONICTHEHEDGEHOGXX
Main Article: SONICTHEHEDGEHOGXX

SONICTHEHEDGEHOGXX is mostly known for his game "Live in a 5-Star Island Resort", later renamed to just "Island Resort". He has been criticized for making a place that is entirely made of free models, but despite this controversy, in late 2010, his games were very popular. He is also known as the founder and leader of the controversial yet most popular war group, F.E.A.R. However, SONICTHEHEDGEHOGXX has lead the First Encounter Assault Recon (  F.E.A.R. ) to become highly successful and renouned by many users.

Jaredvaldez2, Jaredvaldez4, and Jared2valdez4
Main Article:Jaredvaldez4

jaredvaldez4 is also known for stealing games and/or creating bad ones. An act of his was stealing Ajedi32's Ropictionary, claimed it as his own and called it "What am I drawing?", similar to a title for alexnewtron's old game (Alexnewtron's game was then changed to Ultimate Pictionary then to DrawSomething, a blatant ripoff of the popular OMGPOP iOS game). He once recorded a video of himself grabbing a box of Nestlé's Cheerios, grabbing some of the cereal pieces, and throwing them away into a sink, singing in a forced British accent, then blaming it on his grandmother. This video was edited with Team Fortress 2 sounds and voices for him and the Cheerios by SharpTH. He also had his profile description narrated by a friend of Ro-War Reboot's team member BlabVoid, to which the video was "YouTube Pooped" by TwiIightSparkle, more famous for his Roblox Off Topic Simulator.

When jaredvaldez4 was deleted, he said notably that 'he realized his mistakes of plagarism', yet he re-uploaded almost everything he stole from JV4.

Before JV4 was deleted, almost every video he uploaded was plagarized by other YouTube users. Today, the videos he uploads are him doing jokes and dressing up.

Jared also mocked RoWar: Reboot with a YTP named "Ro-YOLO: Reboot ". This has brought in negative critiscm from StudioARE and SharpTH fans.

StudioARE's reaction and warning
In early 2012, when Jaredvaldez2 created his "unoriginal" StudioJARE in the video website YouTube, BlabVoid and several members warned Jared that they would take action against him for stealing their name. His RoWar series (A copy of StudioARE's) was also removed due to a copyright claim by StudioARE.

Later the StudioJARE channel was closed. No reasons were given regarding the closing of the channel.

TV Advertisement (2011)
Roblox's new TV commercial has been criticized for being staged:

thumb|right|268px|TheSharpTHOfLulzs' opinion on the ROBLOX commercial

 * The mention of ROBLOX being free with no mention of BC or BC Features in the whole commercial
 * The advert was only partly made in ROBLOX, with edited skyboxes and effects used to clean up the footage. This is often the most cited criticism.

What Will You Build (2012)
Roblox's latest advertisement has also been criticized for the following:


 * At 0:12, a sniper first-person view is seen, which is not possible on ROBLOX (unless you make a script).
 * From 0:16 to 0:19, all the models are CGI-animated rather than in-game.
 * At 0:20, a Minecraft TNT is seen in the debris. This has resulted in high negative critiscm from Minecraft players viewing the video.

Forum
The forums on ROBLOX has been criticized because of the amount of spam of useless posts on most of the forum sections.

Roblox Talk
Main Article: Roblox Talk

Roblox Talk is one of the most criticized forums. Like Off Topic, it mostly has memes (things against the rules and useless post with little to no meaning.) Some forum posts will have things that are off topic like what they experienced today, telling people to go to their place or join their group, RT parties, stuff admins did and many other useless posts that have no meaning and should be in off topic. Also, there are some users people say are RTers who hang around and post on the forum all the time. It is unknown if the people they say are really RTers or not.

Notable Incidents

 * On November 29, 2012 with the release of the Newshound gift, they were many posts about how to get the gift with people saying how to get the gift and then spamming Newspaper :D on the posts which Roblox then said on a post saying that could get you banned.
 * On April 1, 2012, when ROBLOX got hacked, the users posted forums telling about the events, the truth and many other posts.
 * On March 26, 2013, when the egg hunt just got started, users made topics saying "This is a thread discussing the TL;DR egg. This egg can be obtained by writing a long post or thread on the forum." over and over again until the user got the TL;DR egg.
 * On April 14, 2013, controversy arose when MrDoomBringer made a post on a thread stating that Roblox Talk might be deleted. After an uproar from the RT community, moderator ChiefJustus confirmed that Roblox Talk will not be deleted via another thread. MrDoomBringer later said that they are not planning to do this and it was just a sidenote in a meeting and they are not merging Roblox Talk with another criticized Sub-Forum, Off Topic.

Off Topic Forum
Roblox's Off Topic seems to be a wild place. Swirling with trolls, bonus-makers, and alts, things can get crazy. People on Off topic may be random. Common topics may include news, as well as ID topics. People have the daring to post bad words, as well as extremely inappropriate stories, called "bonuses." Also, people may love to spam. Trolls often spam with hatethreads, and  flamewars are extremely common. Flame wars between Off-Topic and Roblox Talk are common, and forumers test their bravery by actually posting links leading to porn sites or such.

Artists on ROBLOX
Roblox has a user advertisement feature, of which some users make visually appealing ads as a series of comics. These people include Patacorow, BlazerC, Vego, and BL00XER. These users are victims of ad plagarism. Patacorow and BlazerC have had their ads copied by users, mainly by "ajhockeyfan", who not just stealing the ads, but also claiming the ads as his own. Patacorow now includes watermarks in his ads, but ajhockeyfan later released an ad of one of                BlazerC's comics, adding beards on some of the user's faces.

Many people on ROBLOX have scammed other people into thinking that they can draw well, by using Google images/others' work to "showcase" themselves, then selling drawings. Some may overuse anime templates from DeviantArt.

Most of the people have been Criticizing people for copying some Amazing Artist (Bethanyfrye, etc.) and claiming themselves to be famous, even though they're not.

The sad fact is that  LunarEden won this type of ad in the Best Advertisement catagory in RGC 2012.

Builder's Club Only places
Near the end of 2010, ROBLOX introduced a new feature called BC Only that allowed Builder's Club members to limit the users who go to their places to Builder's Club and higher only. This sparked many hate posts from Roblox, and videos bagging the feature on YouTube, even from XiaoXiaoMan and TheAmazeman, who put BC Only places in one of his Fail of The Week sections. This feature was clearly not wanted.

In July of 2011 seth1823 made the front page of games with a stolen copy of the user Ryanmacd 's "Private clubhouse".It was a BC only place and he made over 3352 Robux. He has since taken down the place but Ryanmacd is still trying to get the copy of the place back. As of June 2012, BC only places has been removed on the games page due to players trying to maximize their profits by making both BC and NBC places, and also due to the massive criticism. (Though BC games still exist) There's still few who want BC games back on the front page; Those are the ones who tried to make a game that is successful and then make an exact copy of the game as a BC Only game just to get more tickets, as all you need is a few players in a BC game for your game to be found from scrolling through the BC Games area.

ROBLOX Software
Roblox's software has been described as slow and buggy on some computers. It has caused blue screens on Windows computers, and even made computers crash (w/o the BSOD). Jazman111 once reported RobloxApp.exe to security company Symantec, (home to their Norton range of software for home users), and the report was accepted.

Also, sometime around 2011, Roblox removed the feature to go into Roblox.exe and into Build Mode to access Roblox Studio, but was still accessible in the Roblox Studio.exe until 2012 when Build Mode, both in roblox.exe and roblox studio only had the new building tools, which have been criticized for creating less creativity for many users. As of now, only edit mode has access to Roblox Studio, and the only way to have Roblox studio with a character is going through the play solo test. Also, in July 2012, Roblox.exe was updated, removing the Roblox Browser and sending the user to one of the main browsers such as Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Internet Explorer and no longer needed the player to download the browser to play games. This received some criticism from some players, saying it was slower, but there was also features that users wanted like copying and pasting URLs.

Lack of iPod 4th Generation Support for Games
On December 7 2012, when the Roblox Mobile app on the Apple App Store was updated, Roblox received criticism for instead of having support for the iPod and iPhone 4th and up, they decided to only have support for the iPhone 4th generation and the iPod 5. This has received criticism on the forum because a lot of people do not own an iPod 5. Some people say that the staff couldn't add iPod 4 support because it doesn't have enough memory.

NBC Restrictions
On December 12 2012, the day the full Play on mobile was released, roblox said that BC users could play all games but NBC users would be limited to a rotating, curated selection games. This was met with some criticism saying that they gone too far. This coincidentally mirrors the same criticism given to the Minecraft Pocket edition released in 2011. The only difference being that the Roblox Mobile was criticised for different reasons.

PardonMyFrench's Eric Frenchman and ROBLOX
Blogger Eric Frenchman (owner of TypePad blog PardonMyFrench) had criticized ROBLOX's site and game with [http://pardonmyfrench.typepad.com/pardonmyfrench/2009/08/is-roblox-safe-for-kids-not-sure-so-i-blocked-it.html this blog post. ("Is Roblox safe for my kids? Not sure so I blocked it.")] He complained about the fact that his security program was flashing "like a Christmas tree" and saying that ROBLOX is not parental-safe, and also dubbed World of Warcraft as being safer than ROBLOX. He got many replies, mainly from ROBLOX defenders attempting to get his children back on ROBLOX, parents saying their experiences with ROBLOX. Builderman replied to Eric Frenchman, to which Eric made a [http://pardonmyfrench.typepad.com/pardonmyfrench/2009/10/revisiting-roblox.html new post about. ("Revisiting Roblox")]

Removal of vital Lua functions/properties
During 2009 and 2010, ROBLOX has broken many games via changes in their Lua programming language.

In 2009, ROBLOX secured the Source function on the Script object. This stopped model compilers and Script Builder tools from working. In 2010, this was brought back, but later on, they stopped global variables. Both instances were frowned upon by scripters.

Updates
ROBLOX's updates have been criticized because people claim it "doesn't make it as good as before." Though people have suggested that the administrators undo the updates, Roblox has stated it will never undo an update (unless temporary, such as the Egg Drops), and as of 2013, they have not done so. This has led to many hate and quit videos from users.

ROBLOX Studio 2013
In February 2013, ROBLOX released ROBLOX Studio 2013, which was extremely criticized among the Roblox community for it being more harder to build and how they released it.

List of known reasons On February 4, 2013, Roblox released a post on the update. 
 * ROBLOX Studio 2013 was updated by force without any notice when the player started it up
 * Multiple items are difficult to select
 * Certain items don't save
 * Certain features don't work
 * Studio 2013 crashing when started
 * Duplicating bricks feature being removed

Rules
ROBLOX rules have been criticized for various reasons because community members call it "unfair." These reasons include: Though it is a website intended for children to play, many older users are unhappy with the rules.
 * No links to outside websites (such as YouTube videos or profiles), due to users linking others to shock sites and malicious pages. (As of 2012, users are now able to post Youtube links, as long as it doesn't go to an inappropriate video or channel.)
 * No talking about religious or political content, due to the violent 'flame wars' that are generally sparked by the discussion of it.
 * No debates and rebellions. ("What the mod says, goes.")
 * No discussion of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic in Off Topic (Moderators were more than aware that the popular Brony fandom will reach Roblox, so they edited their rules to tell Bronies to visit the Movies/TV Shows/Books forum, yet Off Topic's community rebelled against this).
 * No swear words (Some users are very unclean that they couldn't use swear words in the game. They also think that they could get away by using fake letters like * or @ but they could still get banned for it).
 * If a swear word is typed into chat, it will not appear to others, and you will not be banned either.
 * Some swear words are not filtered, which allowed many people to curse others without getting banned.
 * No Politics (The political discussions may sound like an argument but really if someone is interested in politics to talk about it, they should be smart enough to know what they're talking about.)

New Roblox Building Tools
Roblox has released new building tools that many users think are limiting the creativity of many games due to the limited amount of bricks and the inability to use any free models and decals and even the user's own items and that the bricks are not compatible with the classic bricks. Also, some of the tools have been criticized for not functioning properly. There's also criticism from many players present for getting rid of the Studio Mode button and sometimes cancelling Roblox studio when building in Roblox studio, They could not have an option whether they can choose between classic tools and new tools. Automatically, they need to use a model in order to get the old tools back. This makes ROBLOX seem more like Minecraft which may have made ROBLOX believe it'll make it more fun for their profits, but really, it takes away from the original purpose of ROBLOX. As a result, many of the experienced players got fed up with all the changes and quit ROBLOX altogether; which caused a rising in the amount of new players (or "noobs" for short) to where this is what they think is normal. Many ROBLOX users also hate how the stamper tool has the appearance of the classic "Insert Tool" where any user can insert their own models and/or decals which caused a rising in "Insert Games" where some got creative and turned their insert games into games resembling the game "Scribblenauts" by company Fifth-Cell where a player can make anything. The thing that really angered hundreds of thousands of ROBLOX players was how they purposely "destroyed" the Insert Tool and tried to make it seem normal to owners of Insert Games; only models or decals owned by the place's creator will work in game, which as another result: A few more hundred thousand players quit.

Legal issues
In 2007, Roblox released a visor which read the "Got Milk?" slogan on it. It's been said that Hood got involved for copyright, in which the visor was taken off sale (This, however, is only a well-known rumor). It was put up for limited sales in 2010 and only has 4312 buyers.

In early 2009, Roblox changed the old circle studs to the new square studs because ROBLOX was concerned that the old studs may cause a lawsuit to LEGO, due to its resemblance.

A similar instance happened in late 2009, when Roblox released a Devo hat for 50 tickets. A few days later, it was said Roblox was informed that they cannot sell it due to copyright infringement of the band called Devo. The hat was later changed to the "Impossible to Obtain Red Wedding Cake Hat" and was taken off sale. It had 2866 buyers before it was taken off sale.

Since these instances, ROBLOX only sells items if they have direct permission (such as the Transformers Event, Hasbro's KRE-O and Battleships brand or Disney XD) or if they make an obscure reference or parody (such as the Mischievous Raccoon hat from South Park, an alien head that's very similar to the Reddit mascot Snoo or the Fluffy Unicorn that uses the generic colors of the My Little Pony character Twilight Sparkle).

Roblox 3.0 Body


In 2012, Roblox showed up the 1st, 2nd, 3rdexplorations, Preview and the Open Letter of the new prototypes bodies which their arms being similar to LEGO/KRE-O's arms, leading to Online Daters, or ODers, wanting to use it and many other users disliking it. Many parents of children players could be afraid that Roblox could force them to use the bodies and be sued by LEGO/KRE-O. If they released the new prototype bodies and forced all the users to use it, then Roblox could be sued again and many of the current players in Roblox may leave ROBLOX except for ODers. ODers will be attracted more into Roblox, but many parents of children players were afraid of ODers using the new prototype bodies and attempt to date with the children using the body. In July 12, 2012, the 3.0 bodies, Man and Lady, were released, and put on sale for BC Only and 25 ROBUX in July 17, 2012. Unfortunately, many players have criticized the new 3.0 bodies, many of them reacting to the bodies with disgust. On the day the bodies were put on sale, They were met with heavier criticism. The notable body wearers were Jaredvaldez2, Shedletsky, etc.

Terrain Generator
Since the Terrain Generator was released in October 7th, 2011, People started giving negative reviews on the terrain generator which the others thought the new terrain feature were similar to Minecraft's terrain and/or creating lag which people with non-gaming computers won't handle.

Exploiters use hacks to generate random terrain in servers which users call them as "cheat engine noobs".

Dynamic Lighting
As the demo of dynamic lighting appeared on gametest1 and gametest2, some users reported that the dynamic lighting was similar to Minecraft's voxel lighting.

So far, this issue is very minor, as it actually does not only resemble Minecraft lighting due to many other games using dynamic lighting, but due to it's release on May 9th, 2013, it is making more lag than the bevels did.

Loss of the Non-BC multi-place Glitch
On May 7th, 2013, ROBLOX fixed the non-BC multi-place glitch, causing most of the beloved popular games to become inactive, in which resulted in loads of users who love the games to bring the places back, but some who lost BC never got BC again.

Comment timer
Roblox recently changed the time when you can post comments in between from 60 seconds to 3600 seconds. It's main purpose was to prevent spamming, but many users got fed up with that. [Note : There is a glitch where in the comments where you just have to wait 1 min - 2 min in order to post a comment.]

Outlines
Outlines are tiny edge lines that appear on all ROBLOX bricks that were released on July 11, 2013, but it ruins C-framed places and models like cars, trucks, buildings, and other models. Many users are now protesting against it.