Criticism of Roblox/Website Features

Ticket Removal
On March 15, 2016, Roblox announces that they will be removing tickets. This caused an outrage in the community, mainly NBC users, claiming that they cannot afford Robux and/or Builder's Club. Smarter players knew that non-paying developers would be in trouble, as they cannot develop games without the use of free models, also that they needed tix to make their game popular (etc. Thumbnails) Regardless, the removal of tickets also removed the ability for non-paying players to do many things such as buy items from the catalog and create ads. The risk of free Robux scams has also increased, possibly because of how difficult it is to obtain Robux. Users have also accused Roblox of greed after this change, especially as there were instances wherein players were banned after complaining about this controversial event. This became the most controversial event to ever happen in ROBLOX’s history.

Unobtainable Limiteds
The prices of many Limited items have been pushed to exorbitant amounts by those who own it, which frustrates users who want to purchase them but cannot afford due to extreme inflation, and even leading others to think that Roblox is greedy to push others to buy thousands of dollars for just a single Limited item. An example that demonstrates this fact could be the Darkheart, valued at 2,000 Robux when it was first released 3 years ago. It drastically escalated to a whopping 400,000 Robux for the cheapest listing, costing approximately 2,200 US dollars at the least to purchase with real money.

Third-Party Advertisements
Users without Roblox memberships are played ads while they wait to be loaded into a game. However, some ads have been criticized excessively for being inappropriate for kids or containing malware, but no evidence has truly been given to either claim. Very few people also claim ads to be "unfair" cause this gains roblox money over them.

TV Advertisement (2011)
Roblox's old TV commercial was criticized for: SharpTH Media released a YouTube video explaining why this advertisement was flawed in its technique of attempting to get the attention of some viewers.
 * Not mentioning membership features.
 * A user named "TimmyMcPwnage" nowhere to be found in the roblox website or in the game client, making the user non-existent. Though the remaining users that are mentioned do play Roblox, it's unknown if they had any involvement in the commercial at all.
 * The commercial using highly edited skyboxes, CGI, and staging to give the game a more professional look. This may be due to the targeted audience being more interested in exciting advertisements.
 * The "ROBLOX, It's FREE!" is criticized by some users because they believe the game is freemium, rather than free. It became a meme, with many people making fun of the slogan. What the ad possibly meant was that Roblox didn't require real money or using a virtual payment such as Bitcoin to create an account, or simply Roblox is free-to-play.

What Will You Build (2012)
Roblox's 2012 advertisement was also highly criticized by many for similar "offenses" in the past video, such as special effects and false claims: A YouTuber called Tzsara released a video about this advertisement and exploring its contents and flaws. However, despite the false advertising, this commercial was not as badly criticized as 2011's commercial.
 * From 0:16 to 0:19, all the models presented are CGI-animated rather than in-game.
 * At 0:20, a Minecraft TNT is very briefly seen among the debris of the exploded castle. This has resulted in high negative criticism from Minecraft players viewing the video.

Forums
Before its removal on December 11, 2017, the forums on Roblox has been criticized because of the amount of spam, useless posts, and highly inappropriate users on most of the forum sections. Moderators such as OldBaronMondo and MSE6 were also scrutinized due to suspicions that they were deleting posts and issuing out punishments to users based on their personal biases.

On December 4, 2017, due to the forums not providing a positive environment, getting raided and them being abused, Roblox announced that the Forums will shut down on December 11, 2017. The forums became read-only 7 days before its removal.

Notable Incidents
On April 14, 2013, controversy arose when a Roblox admin called MrDoomBringer made a post on a thread stating that ROBLOX Talk could possibly be deleted. After a negative uproar from the Roblox Talk community, moderator ChiefJustus confirmed that ROBLOX Talk would not be deleted via another thread. MrDoomBringer later said that they were not planning to do this, and it was just a side note in a meeting. MrDoomBringer also stated that they would NOT merge Roblox Talk with Off Topic.
 * On November 29, 2012, with the release of the Newshound gift, false rumors spread saying that commenting "Newspaper :D" would grant players the gift. However, Roblox stated in a post that doing this could instead give players a ban on spamming.
 * 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. However, in reality, to get the TL;DR egg, the player will have to find an advertisement banner that tells the user that he/she can get the egg by clicking on the advertisement to get the egg in question.
 * On July 2, 2014, the subforum Clans and Guilds leaked nude photos of an Roblox Talk forumer, and it very quickly spread into Roblox Talk and Off Topic. As a result, a few forumers kept reposting the link to their subforum. At least 30 people were banned, many of them were not from the Roblox Talk forum.

New Forum 'Update'
On July 27th, 2017, an 'update' was made to the Roblox Forums. The update removed several subforums, leaving only 6 left. The subforums that remained were Roblox News and Discussion, Help, Clans, and Guilds, Let's Make a Deal, Game Design, and Scripters. This update was very controversial, since lots of different subforums, including the entire entertainment section, All Things Roblox, Roblox Talk, and Off Topic were removed. Some players thought this update was caused due to the recent forum raids from YouTuber QuackityHQ.

Builders-Club Only Places
Near the end of 2010, Roblox introduced a new feature called Builder's Club Only ("BC-Only") that allowed Builder's Club members to limit the users who go to their places to Builder's Club and higher only. Unsurprisingly, the community took a new function very negatively, most of which who spammed comments of BC-only places, created hateful threads and even went to videos. Users XiaoXiaoMan and TheAmazeman both created videos explaining the downsides of BC-only places and XiaoXiaoMan also pointed out false claims, this time on Roblox's side of its currently dubious "free" nature.

Most of the negativity came from former admin Shedletsky (then named Telamon) made one of his ever-so-popular brick battling game Sword Fight on the Heights IV Builders Club only, and despite the very clear woe he created from the choice, Shedletsky even went so far as to making a small post in the Roblox Forum which not only belittled the outraged users with his statements "It's my game, and I'll do what I want" and to see if there would be less "newbs" in game, but also explained that by doing so not only made "a ton" of tickets, but can also ban the main accounts of exploiters, and finishing it off with "Trololollolll" as a "reason" as to why it's BC only. Not long after creating the forum post, Shedletsky deleted it. However, user XiaoXiaoMan has a video where it is featured. The video in question can be found here.

In July 2011, a user called seth1823 made one of his places reach the front page of games section with a stolen copy of the user Ryanmacd 's "Private Clubhouse." It was a BC-only place and he made over 33,500 Robux from converting the tickets generated from the visits into Robux. He has since taken down the place but user Ryanmacd is still trying to get the copy of the place back.

As of July 2015, BC-only places have 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 free Robux and Tix scams. However, BC games still exist. There are still a few game creators who want BC games back on the front page. They have been accused and condemned by many users for making successful free-to-play games and then make an exact copy of the game as a BC Only in order to maximize their profit, since it requires relatively few players (often less than a dozen) to make the highly visible "Front Page" section, as opposed to free-to-play games needing often hundreds just to be in the same spot.

On November 1, 2017, a new update was announced on the Roblox Dev Forums. It said that the "BC Only Games" would be removed in a few weeks.

Lifetime Builders Club removal
On August 4, 2015, Roblox removed the lifetime and 6-month payment options for BC, TBC, and OBC, leaving only monthly and annually as a payment option, which sparked a large amount of criticism from players, and which made many players think that Roblox is greedy.

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

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 to the play solo test. Also, in July 2012, Roblox.exe was updated, removing the ROBLOX Browser and sending the user to the default browser set on their computer 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, which was difficult to do in the original Roblox browser.

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 that are of the 4th generation and beyond, they decided to only have support for the 4th generation of iPhones and the iPod 5. This has received criticism on the forum because a lot of players do not own an iPod 5. Some users have even theorized that the Roblox staff couldn't add support for iPod 4 because the device doesn't have enough memory. Also, Roblox Mobile is known for being really laggy, crashing all the time, and draining the battery really fast.

NBC Restrictions
On December 12, 2012, the day the Full Play on mobile feature was released, Roblox announced that Builders Club users could play all games but NBC users would be limited to a rotating, curated selection of games. This was met with a large amount of criticism from the Roblox mobile user base due to Roblox's decision. However, despite the criticism, Roblox never repealed the restrictions until recently.

Advertisements
Roblox Mobile has been known to have an excessive amount of ads that don't pop up on the computer. Usually, some games have ads that pop up only when you join the game. Some creators have started to make their games have ads that appear very frequently.

Removal of vital Lua functions/properties
During 2009 and 2010, Roblox broke 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 users claim it "doesn't make it as good as before" and it sometimes goes to an infinite updating screen when they try to play a game (sometimes unfixable). 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). The only updates that have been changed after user feedback since then was Player points. Player points were hidden mainly because it caused competitive controversy and had no use, as well as the fact that people were buying lots of player points or going to places specifically made to farm Player Points to boost their "skill level".

Roblox 2017 New Logo
Since January 9, 2017, the Roblox logo has been changed, causing lots of controversy towards the change. Some say the tilted O that has been used in place of the R looks more like a Cheez-It, Domino's Pizza logo or Bethesda Softworks' logo rotated due to its shape or the red end of the Domino's logo. This caused it to become a popular meme. Some say the logo is ugly and prefer the older logos. Many people have expressed their criticism through Twitter, YouTube, and the forums.

Default Clothing
Further Information: Default Clothing

On June 16, 2017, Default Clothing was added to Roblox. However, this change has sparked lots of controversies, claiming that players were no longer able to wear classic outfits (like the Roblox 1.0 default Noob outfit). This affected all players who had one skin tone for their whole body, and are not wearing pants nor a shirt. However, this change can be bypassed by wearing clothing that has been Content Deleted, or by using the 'Advanced' body color feature to change individual body parts. This was also never announced.

Temporary Server List Removal
On July 13, 2017, the Servers would only show what server the player's friends are in. This caused a major uproar in the forums as players are no longer able to see all servers for good and sometimes are forced to rejoin the same server or the server their friends are in, repeatedly. The website went into maintenance that day as well, but it didn't revert the Servers list back to its former glory. On July 14, however, the developers have responded to this case. Click here. On November 1st, the servers returned as “Other Servers” but the users shown in the lists are displayed as "A Roblox Player." You can't view their profiles unless they are your friend.

Anthro Update
The Anthro Robloxian is a new form of an avatar that Roblox will most likely add in the future. Many older players have expressed dislike or even hatred of this new avatar, with many claiming that the new body shape encourages online dating. Users were also worried that the Anthro avatar type will replace the R6 and R15 avatar types, though this has already been proven false.

Removal of Guests
On October 3, 2017, Roblox removed guest mode. Nightgaladeld, the Roblox admin who founded The United States of America, confirmed that they removed guests to "increase in registered users will drive more visits, increased revenue and player engagement in your Roblox games" and "encourage first-time players to use our social and interactive features with other users". Many players were happy but others thought that Roblox was greedy, which sparked a protest in the forums to re-add guests. Also, other users believed that it only increases the number of bacon hairs (male noobs) and nothing more which leads to even more criticism.

Removal of Game Genres
On October 26, 2017, game genres were removed from Roblox. This has caused major outrage in the forums. However, it is possible that it was a glitch because the genres are still listed on every game page and still exist in the Catalog. There's currently no forum post on Roblox's developer forums related to this update, however.

Experimental Mode game restrictions
On July 4, 2018, two hackers injected an 18+ script into a game with Experimental Mode on and virtually performed inappropriate actions on a seven year old girl's avatar. Her mother saw the incident and reported it publicly on her Facebook profile, which became viral, caught media attention, and spread over the news. Roblox responded by permanently banning the hackers and putting the game of the incident Under Review.

On July 13, 2018, in order to prevent further incidents like this, Roblox blocked users <13 from Experimental Mode games, unless they are friends with the creator. A majority of the <13 users complained that they couldn't play their favorite games anymore.

However, on July 20, 2018, Roblox extended the restrictions and blocked all users from Experimental Mode games, unless they were friends with or are the creator. This received a massive backlash in the community, as they could no longer play any older games. Veteran developers of old games were either inactive, meaning that they wouldn't turn off Experimental Mode, or wouldn't accept random friend requests from the games' players.

On July 25th, 2018, Roblox removed Experimental Mode and all Experimental Mode games were set to Filtering Enabled. This brought rejoice from many, even though some former Experimental Mode games broke as they were coded without Filtering Enabled.

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

List of known reasons: On February 4, 2013, ROBLOX released a post on the update. [1]
 * 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 (it became visible in the 2014 update of studio when you right-click a part or if you press Ctrl+D)
 * No way to get the older Roblox Studio until after the incident

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, possibly because of their behavior.
 * No links to outside websites (such as YouTube videos or profiles), due to users linking others to shock sites and malicious pages. (Since 2012, users are now able to post YouTube links in their posts, partly ignoring the rule that is mentioned above, so long as it doesn't link 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.
 * No inappropriate places such as the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Nazis, the execution of the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, ISIS executions, and places containing adult content. They recently added pubs and bars to this list, but many places like Club Boates And Club Insanity still contain a bar, where a few of the drinks can leave your character drunk or wasted.
 * No discussion of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic in Off Topic And Teen Titans Go (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). That sparked some controversy.
 * No swear words (Some users are very unclean that they couldn't use swear words in the game).
 * If a swear word is typed into chat, it used to appear as hashtags (#) instead, with the same number of letters as the swear word to others. (or as EverythingIsMacrabe called them in "ROBLOX Forum Simulator V4Ever", "group of symbols"). It was changed to "[Content Deleted]", but now it appears as octothorpes again. Before hashtags were first used, the whole message a player sent is seen completely blank in-game.
 * Some players may alter swear words, by either replacing certain characters with symbols or letters, removing certain characters, and adding new characters, just to bypass the filter.
 * Some words, such as "[dang]" and "hell", are not filtered, which allowed many users to get away with using the unfiltered words toward others.
 * Most filtered words are solely English ones, leading to some players swearing/cursing in a different language. However, this is bannable.
 * No politics or anything related to 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.)
 * No Ugandan Knuckles or anything related to it. (They consider it racist)
 * No depictions of romance, including shipping works (This may have been an attempt to combat online dating. However, much user-created content depicting romance before the rule was imposed are still up.)
 * No copyrighted music (which is frankly uncool). They did this because they could possibly get a copyright infringement, from a music company, like Sony/ATV, or Universal Music. All copyrighted audios can't be playable in the website. If you play a copyrighted audio, it will play music that was offered by APM Music.
 * No going to 3rd party sites that offer Robux. This has caused a lot of hate, since that was the only way for freemium users to get some robux. An example of somebody being banned for this is LandonRb, Poke, and more.

New Roblox Building Tools
Roblox has released new building tools The new tools Roblox has releasedExample of the bricks and other building tools that Roblox released that many users say are limiting the creativity of many games because of the limited variety of new blocks and the fact that it is often very difficult (and sometimes impossible) to use any other tools, free models, decals or even the user's own items. There are also many complaints that the new blocks are not compatible with the classic bricks. Also, some of the tools have been criticized for glitches and not functioning properly.

There is also mass criticism from many players for getting rid of the Studio Mode button and sometimes sudden cancelling Roblox Studio when building (believed to be a glitch). Many users look down on this update because they do not have an option whether they can choose between classic tools and new tools. Instead, it is now necessary to use a model in order to get the old tools back, which is extremely difficult.

Many users accuse Roblox of trying to copy the look of the popular game Minecraft. Some users believe that Roblox released to update to be more similar to Minecraft in order to make more profits. Users have said that it takes away from the uniqueness and the original purpose of Roblox, which was to provide a free, creative environment where users would not be limited to a small variety of square blocks since due to the new update they are often unable to use other bricks.

As a result of this update, many old, experienced players quit Roblox, causing a rising amount of new, inexperienced players, who think that the new tools are normal and build games out of the new blocks, causing a slow phasing out of the old, classic-brick type games. Users have accused Roblox of trying to achieve this phasing-out, claiming that Roblox's motive is to make more profit, at the sacrifice of creativity and the quality of games on Roblox.

November 2010 Newer tools
Moderate criticism occurred when the new layout of tools was released because the copy tool doesn't function properly and jumps around, and the paint tool removed half of its colors and some on which they're important.