User:Aleksiki2000/My thoughts about Roblox updates

First, if you assume this is a hate post; no, it isn't.

Roblox is great. There have been so many great updates. Shadow maps, Neon, Glass, Dark theme, and that's just stratching the surface.

However, I want people to understand that not every update is good.

As I said, I'm not here to hate Roblox. I'm just critical of it because I want to see it improve.

Let's get started.

Inability to look straight up/down
In an update that happened somewhere around 2014, the camera system was changed so that you cannot point it straight up/down anymore. The current limit is 80 degrees.

Now some of you might think "that doesn't even matter". I guess for casual and social games it isn't even noticeable, but when actual gameplay is involved, it is very annoying.

Another problem is that it affects Studio. It makes it difficult to build precisely at certain angles.

I've looked into the Roblox camera scripts. That's where I got the number 80. I decided to try changing it to 90. However it doesn't seem to handle 90 degrees angles correctly. Instead I decided to go with 89, which works fine and is much closer than 80.

If the reason for the current limit is that the camera doesn't handle 90 degrees correctly, why not change it to 89? It solves the problem and then you could look practically straight up/down.

Moderation
I guess this is the one most people will agree with. Roblox has a poor moderation system.

Now I understand moderators are humans and that they can make mistakes. For example I have seen several people get their assets deleted or even get banned when they haven't done anything wrong. Alright, perhaps it was a mistake. There's an official channel for that, which is the appeals email. The problem is that I've seen proof that appeals does not always do its job. They often give vague answers and in some cases refuse to unban people who were incorrectly banned.

False moderation has also affected Roblox themselves. Some official assets published by Roblox have gotten deleted, including one Studio template, being shown on the Studio front page for weeks.

And don't even get me started on the plugin & audio terminations that happened in 2018.

Obviously this is not something that can be fixed overnight. But a good first step would be improving the appeals system. Incorrect moderation happens all the time, and it is imperative that these mistakes can be corrected.

Terrain
First, I have no problem with the removal of the old terrain per se. Zeuxcg gave a reasonable explanation about why it needed to be done. (Overall, if Roblox gives a good reason for something, I won't complain.)

What I dislike is the conversion process, which wasn't as good as it could've been. for example, the 'Blue Plastic' material was changed to Ice, since there wasn't a smooth terrain equivalent. Colour-wise, it might've been a fair choice, but it had the side effect of making random parts of old games slippery for no reason.

Sound changes
At some point there was an update that replaced the Sound.MinDistance property with Sound.EmitterSize. The problem is that the MinDistance values weren't converted to EmitterSize values, which broke sounds in many games. Thankfully this was pretty easy to fix by pasting some code into the Command bar to do the dirty job.

Physical properties
Around 2016, Roblox introduced the Physical properties system. Basically, Metal parts became heavier, Ice became slippery, Wood became light, and so on. For people who weren't happy with the default values, a property called CustomPhysicalProperties was added. Good idea, but the problem is that this change wasn't backwards compatible. For example, a game with pushable parts broke because the parts were Metal, and this update made them too heavy for pushing.

Additionally, the update didn't respect the legacy Elasticity and friction properties, so any slippery parts in old games aren't slippery anymore. This also affected some Studio templates, meaning they had to be updated.

Why couldn't Roblox automatically convert existing Parts to use CustomPhysicalProperties values which mimic the old behaviour? An engineer recommended us to do so ourselves, even giving values that resemble the old system. If we can do it, why couldn't Roblox automatically do it, saving us time which could be used more constructively?

PGS
PGS is the new physics system which replaced the old Spring solver. Now, the Spring -> PGS conversion was well explained and thus I'm fine with that.

What I do have a problem with is that around 2017 some changes were made to PGS itself which broke some physics-reliant games. This also broke some of the Studio templates, which had to be updated.

Removal of non start places from Studio start page
When the Studio start screen was updated, the new one didn't have places, only games. This means we now have to use either the website or the Game Explorer to open anything that isn't a start place.

Stop giving us Games, we use Places.

Removal of ability to transfer places between games
This is related to my bolded statement above. I want better place management, not useless changes to games that do more harm than good.

I recall the reason for removal is to remove ambiguity for new developers. however this update had the opposite effect. Now it is much harder to figure out how to move stuff between games. Previously, it was only a few clicks.

If someone's trying to argue we shouldn't move places between games in the first place, sorry but I disagree. Roblox is supposed to be Powering Imagination TM. This goes directly against that principle. If you decide to change plans, it is now harder to actually change anything. It feels like you're stuck with your initial decision.

Sets
It was stated that Sets were removed because they weren't used a lot. Well, of course they weren't because Roblox made them unusable.

When the asset page was updated, the option to add the item to a Set was nowhere to be found. (The sales numbers were also missing, but I won't bother making a separate section for that.)

Sets were very useful for organizing our assets. Now everything is just dumped into our inventories.

Tix
Before you go 'get over it', I want to state that I agree Tix in its old form shouldn't return. Perhaps it would return as something that has nothing to do with Robux. It cannot be converted into Robux in any way. it can only be used to purchase stuff that is only available with Tix. It would have a real life value of 0.00 USD.

Anyway, if that won't be happening, so be it. The removal itself isn't that big of a deal.

What triggers me is that people use the argument 'Roblox was losing money bcause of Tix'. however this completely contradicts the Tix removal blog article, which, ironically, the same people tend to cite.

Additionally, the blog article doesn't appear to be completely factual. It has at least two lies. First one is the promise of a reasonable replacement. The post was later silently edited to not contain that statement.

The second lie is the infamous 'it was too confusing'. Well, most Roblox games have two currencies, such as 'coins' and 'gems', or whatever their equivalents are. It's two currencies, and kids seem to handle that just fine. How is Tix + Robux different? I don't get it.

R15
I'm being serious when I say R6 is superior. Yes. I see it as a fact.

Now, R15 might have scaling, fancy animations and such. As someone who thinks that gameplay > aesthetics, these features don't appeal to me.

Now, I will say why R6 is better.

R15 sucks when it comes to gameplay.

Horrible hitboxes aside, it has trouble with inclines, thin platforms and the like, making it a terrible choice for obbies and such.

This problem is exaggerated by the 'fancy features'. Scaling makes the characters perform even worse in the aforementioned situations, and animations affect the hitboxes.

Now, I know some features such as scaling can be disabled, which is reasonable. The problem is that the base R15 character isn't really better.

It has been stated that Roblox isn't trying to force R15. And for the most part it feels like it. I'm actually surprised the option to use R6 still exists in the first place. Some people say they are pushing R15, as animation packs and such only work with R15. As I already said, I'm more of a gameplay guy, so this doesn't annoy me.

What annoys me is the fact R15 is the default in Studio, and I have to manually se it to R6.

This is similar to how some years ago, the first thing everyone did was enable FE and disable outlines. Those are fixed, but they are now replaced with this R6/R15 issue.

What makes it worse is the fact I can't create a plugin to automatically switch to R6, as the property is RobloxScriptSecurity. I have two choices. First, i could place my plugin into the BuiltInPlugins folder, but it would get wiped whenever Studio updates. The second alternative is to use the Mod Manager, and I generally don't want to rely on third party programs.

Before I stop
If you decided to read through everything, thanks. It means a lot.

It's alright if you don't agree with me about everything. I'm not going to force you to change your mind.

But what I DO hope is that this writing gave you something to think about.

Thank you for reading and have a great day.