As a Roblox developer and player, I have noticed that Gear items are currently pointless. Back in the day, many games allowed you to bring in purchased gear items and use them in the game. However, nowadays very few front page-level games allow them, preferring to go for custom items and weapons which is understandable for balancing reasons.
If this issue is addressed, it would improve my development experience because with more cosmetic items, games could potentially introduce more opportunities for immersion and interactivity within the game. Even further, as an animator it could potentially lead to more animating opportunities and opportunity to be a part of UGC if the following ideas were put in place.
Now that forums and comments are gone, even the cosmetic appeal to gear items isn’t really there because it’s only displayed in your profile, which will only be visited so much.
Ideally, users would be able to get their money’s worth out of every item they purchase, but gear items currently don’t live up to this expectation. That’s why I propose gear items would be converted into their own category of accessories called “Props”.
Others have suggested allowing players to wear them in game at all times, but I believe this could cause problems with accessories that already exist to fulfil those purposes such as sword-packs. It could also look odd or have overlapping issues if the item was placed on a part of a body that already has an accessory being worn there (a problem that we can already observe with unfortunate combinations of hat accessories since three are allowed at a time.)
Props wouldn’t be equipable in-game as gear would be now, or like other accessories by being placed on the character, but instead would fill in an emote slot as a “prop emote” that would use the gear in its animation. With the many gear items that there are, similar items would use the same animation with slight adjustment at most. Unique animations would be used for the more iconic and popular gears, as well as newer “props” made from that point on if it needed one. Prop emotes would be entirely cosmetic and not interact with other players, objects, or environmental features in any way to prevent unintended advantages to using the emote.
Another opportunity for props would be pet/follower props that already exist as gears. They would be cosmetic and follow the player, but also have prop emotes where the player pets the animal/minion, high fives it, or some other sort of interaction.
Vehicle props would be the most difficult, due to their size and nature. Perhaps they would ride in it for a second (but not move) or spin around in circles while riding/driving the vehicle, which might cause problems as well.
Gear permissions would be replaced by settings for developers to decide what categories of prop emotes they would want to allow. Pet emotes and pet followers would be separate options in case you might not want pet followers but want to allow the emote associated with that prop. There could also be a setting to disable emotes with “moving parts” or emotes that generate sound if said emotes were to exist.
This would be a great improvement from a player stand-point, because gear purchased with hard-earned robux or earned by spending time playing events would finally be able to reach their cosmetic potential since any in-game usefulness for gear items have been mostly eradicated since the original conception of gear items, which haven’t adapted much with the changing preferences of developers since then. It could also open up a new opportunity for UGC, as Prop accessories would be easier to manage than allowing creators to upload gear items in their current state.
From a developer stand-point, it would again be a good UGC opportunity, as well as allowing more interactivity and liveliness in your games without having to implement your own systems similar to this. It could be a down-side in certain scenarios, which is why developers would have full control over the categories of prop emotes that they prefer to allow in their games.