There were tens of thousands of posts on the forums complaining about the state of asset theft, complaining about games that were ripoffs, all manner of unimaginative games dominating the front page with no mechanism to guide players to new games they might actually like. (Content serving algorithms weren't much a thing back in 07, but they could at least have found ways to have the community promote interesting games in better ways.) There was the P2W aspect leaving sour tastes in people's mouths when Gear items were introduced, and the baffling decision to actually implement Builder's Club-only games after they first introduced Builder's Club. So much deafening silence, as they ignored the playerbase and moved forward with decisions that were supposedly to pay the server bills.
As a former addict to Roblox's forums (awful life decision) I genuinely wonder if I've ever seen the admins post on the forums or even acknowledge that it existed. Then, years after I left - poof, the forums were gone. They didn't want to deal with that cancer anymore. Good for them, genuinely. It was an awful place. One time I even read a completely random hatefic about someone where they were isekai'd and had to climb fleshy 'trees' that spewed 'white liquid' from the tip when he held on for too long. Fuck the forum.
I'd be remiss to point out that Roblox's admins are not entitled to respond to every single mindless concern that pops into the heads of random dirt-eating kids mashing their light-up Mattel toy keyboards. But then I have to ask...
Where did they actually interact with their community?
Why was there never any communication?
All their blog posts were so disconnected from what the playerbase was concerned with. Only ever about technical progress and Silicon Valley conventions.
Did they even know any, like... community trends, or community memes?? Like 1x1x1x1?
Let alone any attempt to actually foster a good, healthy community that was motivated enough to self-moderate.
Even techbros should have known that moderation and judgment was necessary for a good community - they had BBS, D&D, and all sorts of nerd shit forums back then.
But I get it, nobody wants to parent every snotnosed brat with an internet connection. But still, holy shit.
The soul was from the players and nobody else. You will NEVER extract soul from these horseshit fucking original admins.
The only humor the admins ever had was their own nerd shit. I have a hat that consists of a stack of papers there were all failed attempts to prove the Riemann hypothesis, and another hat that was a d20 that namedropped Gary Gygax. One admin had a small game involving a Nuke The Whales decal. And the most creativity I saw out of the devs around was when they had that Easter eggs event in literally every game, or that time (I have no idea when, maybe I glimpsed it more recently) when they introduced a lineup of catalog items about some original character alien creatures that nobody could possibly give a shit about. Korbloxians??? Creatively, that's like jangling car keys in front of a baby. Roblox is full of toddlers, not babies, so that won't work. That completely soulless attempt to create a kid-friendly story, a dogshit outdated tactic straight from the 90s. And these days, you get literal stolen internet memes for hats, like the doge hat. Good god. To this day, the admins are all still just soulless leeches.
The original devs are all clearly unimaginative asocial losers. They can't help it. Yet I can't help but let it infuriate me. Having the creativity of literal children drive their entire platform while they sat on their thumbs thinking of how to extract cash and grow the platform... Fucking Silicon Valley techbros. They weren't even beholden to shareholders at the time, they were a private company. All they ever thought about was growth from the very beginning, like this game we all loved was nothing more than a Frankenstein's monster they needed to tweak and fiddle with and codehack until it outputted more and more money for the sole purpose of continuing to hack away at it forever and ever.
There is a permanent MATI in my heart because of this shitty fucking block game.
Fuck.