User blog:Aeothem/My Thoughts on Giftsplosion 2013

It's the Holiday season, isn't it? Thanksgiving wasn't that long ago, and as we all know, it always spirals into a frenetic frenzy of festive preparation as Christmas approaches, doesn't it? I'm sure my families aren't the only ones who refuse to put up the tree until after Thanksgiving, and I know for a fact that the beautiful decorations only come up in the few weeks before the 25th of December. For the younger children, the Advent Calender is a surefire way to get them riled up and ready for Christmas. For those of you who don't know, an advent calender is merely a special calender used to count the days towards Christmas, starting on the 1st of December (It is called as such as the days towards Christmas always overlap with the Christan holiday Advent). These calenders usually contain little chunks of chocolate in them or other small treats to help celebrate the approaching days.

ROBLOX's version of this is known as the Giftsplosion. 2013 marks the seventh year ROBLOX has done this event, and it works very similarly to the typical Advent Calender - Every day, a new gift is released to the public. There are a few catches to this, though: You have to buy the gift from the Catalog unless you meet a certain set of requirements prior to the gift's release. If you meet these requirements, you earn the gift for free. Some of these can span from simply subscribing to the ROBLOX Newsletter  to using the Developer's Exchange (Article: Developer Exchange) at least once. If a player doesn't meet the requirements for the gift, as said earlier, they can always buy the gift from the Catalog for a varying amount of ROBUX (15$R has been the cheapest recorded, to a massive 50,000$R)

I would like to make it clear that I had not paid much attention to the Giftsplosion events until this year, but when I did some research, I was rather disappointed with how it turned out. Recent years have turned out to be very expensive, and this year has proven to be the same. An unrealistic amount of Gifts had required you to pay out of pocket (Buying a game pass (Varies), uploading sounds (1,250$R), owning limiteds (Varies), et cetera), and the public sales of the gifts were massive. Only three gifts were put on sale up to 100$R, and another three were under 1,000$R. To me, this felt like a cop-out in the sense that the Black Friday sales had already went by. In hindsight, I feel as if the Giftsplosion gypped people out of one event for the sake of another. While one person could have had the funds to participate in either one of these events, he or she could not take part in both without having to pay externally for extra ROBUX.

Another observation that bothers me is that this year catered to players with more resources and time rather than the majority of the community. Uploading sounds required a person to have some form of membership and 250$R a sound. Selling game passes required membership. Access to the Developer Exchange required Outrageous Builders Club and a well developed place to earn the 100,000$R minimum to use it (Practically speaking). Getting 100 thumbs up on one place required abusing the service with friends and sockpuppeting or decent developing skills. Two gifts required earning all the acheivements listed (Which would be nigh-impossible if a person's system could not handle the games or couldn't find time to play due to the nature of some badges) and the final three required being at the right place at the right time. Coupled with the high prices for the majority of the gifts, these requirements made it an unrealistic and perhaps a silly endeavor if someone wanted to collect all the gifts.

What the gifts revealed is not a topic I wish to discuss, since that would be entirely based on my opinions of the items, and as with all opinions, they are never agreed upon by the entire community. Nor am I going to bash the ROBLOX dev. team in any way shape or form. It is not my game, and as such, I cannot make demands. But this year's Giftsplosion has fit with last years in the sense that it greatly shafted the non-paying, non-developing part of the community who simply don't have the time and influence to meet most of the requirements listed. But Giftsplosion 2013 was a poor example of promotion. It hardly meshes with Black Friday sales, and it simple didn't have the average player in mind. This is a bad decision on any level of business, methinks. Shafting the majority means choking out potential. And in terms of ROBLOX - a game that was designed to bring out the potential and creativity of people - this is a horrible, horrible way of going about promoting features or your game in general.

/endrant

EDIT: Minor grammatical and spelling fixes. I also went by and filled in links for the sake of clarification.