This is Nick and Tian - the new Engineering and Product leadership for Creator at Roblox. We want to take this opportunity to introduce ourselves to the community and address a few things.
As we move forward with exciting opportunities and a clear vision, we are committed to keeping you informed. We’ll engage with you more often so you know not just the changes coming, but also the why – why we are making decisions and how they will benefit you. We want to collaborate with you, understand your feedback, figure out what’s important to your workflows, and ultimately work together to make this platform better. This is a collaborative journey, and we will be listening and using your input to improve Roblox for all.
Therefore, starting today:
We are rolling back the recent “Team Create is the default for new experiences” beta. Thank you for your feedback. We will work to improve Team Create based on all of the concerns you have raised.
We are committing to ongoing support for our file formats like .rbxl and .rbxm. We know you all rely on tools that depend on these formats. We will need to improve and modernize these formats over time, but we will do it in lock-step with this community, supporting tools that you rely on, or giving you an equal or better alternative as we go.
We are going to do a better job explaining our long-term plans, our thought process, and addressing concerns to not leave you guessing. This will give us a chance to have better conversations with you on the future of the platform.
This is just the beginning, and we want to continue to hear from you.
This community is the lifeblood of Roblox, and every experience every user has had on Roblox is the result of your imagination and hard work. We want to empower you to bring your creativity to life, and to help us achieve our shared vision of connecting the world with optimism and civility.
It is so wonderful to see such a clear and direct response to community feedback. This is the way it should be. It is acceptable for the company to have different views than the developers, but it needs to be clearly communicated and discussed along the way so that we can collectively find good solutions that match our needs and our futures.
I hope Roblox follows through on this commitment, and I’m excited to see what this will bring. Big props to Nick, Tian, and the team!
This is something we have been asking for a long time and I am glad to see it happening. I hope this promise will be kept. This could be a real game changer.
We’ve definitely been lacking a lot of ‘why’ when it comes to product roadmaps and feature prioritisation, so it’s good to hear that this will be something that you’ll look to address in the future. It’s hard to always know how exactly product managers or development teams come to certain conclusions that don’t sit right with us, and oftentimes it comes down to a difference in perspective or a mistake in judgement that lies deeper than a single product announcement. I hope that there can be an increase in - and tightening of - developer feedback loops, and that more than a handful of people can feel like their views are heard. We need to know that we’re not talking to a brick wall in the short term, and we need to see the effects of our changes in the long term, and right now it does feel like Roblox is under-delivering on both.
These seem like good first commitments to make, and I’m liking the direction that this is headed in. I’ll continue to be vocal and actionable with my feedback, and try to ensure that we can hold up our end of the bargain by being responsible and constructive. Here’s hoping you can hold up your end better in the future too.
Thank you! We NEED an open file format spec for rbxm, and this would definitely be a step in the right direction. We wouldn’t have to reverse engineer everything, and the community could improve it!
Things such as how attributes are handled in rbxm need to change; there should probably be a dedicated ATTR chunk with key/value entries with a chunk length to fall back on for unknown format ids.
Tools such as Rojo will become much easier to maintain, and it’ll improve so many workflows for everyone.
Glad to hear that ROBLOX is taking some action on Community Feedback, which is a critical aspect & we expect that you’ll be able to keep us up to date by keeping that promise
I personally hope, that this process can continue onwards to establish better transparency towards us as Developers; and that we’re not left out in the darkness due to a huge lack of proper communication/transparency, which results in negativity over time Communication is key!
Hoping for the best from Nick, Tian, and the rest of the Engineer Team!
This is great to hear, the last few major updates to the platform have had some issues, and transparency should help everyone who uses the platform have a better experience!
Also, I want to share my thoughts about transparency. You all should be more open to smaller creators, more like the bigger ones because we make up half if not most of your community, and we’re being treated like crap.
Immensely grateful for Roblox rolling back changes & listening to the community when it comes for critical pieces of feedback.
Bit of a side question, would it be possible to know what happened with the official Roadmap? Will there be plans to bring it back, or will release notes stay as the main form of information pertaining to new updates?
I want to deeply thank you for listening, it’s great to actually get a response to these matters.
Ultimately Roblox needs to understand why these tropes exist regarding offline use and I see that here. All three points today are great steps, but more deeper and long term change is needed to stop the intense battle between devs and Roblox. Ideally Community Feedback should be part of the decision making process so that these problems are solved during the decision cycle and not after resources are put into rolledback ideas because you didn’t get a team of devs into the proccess.
Looking forward to see where the team goes with this. It’s highly beneficial to be given access to this information, even if it is subject to change over time. It’s much more difficult to work with no information vs some information!
Hopefully more details with regards to these high-level keynotes will come soon. There’s a lot of areas where we are left guessing and I would love to see these voids filled via collaborative & open communication.
I hope this isn’t just a move to shut up the developers that will get rolled back silently internally. Keep your commitment to this, its not a good idea to keep your main profit drivers in the dark, because they will move elsewhere given the choice.
Roblox needs its developers if they want to stay afloat.
Let us have a say in the decision making process behind features, I mean thats what the #roblox-surveys channel is for, use it!
At the moment, the binary format does not respect versioning and may change at any moment. Notably, it recently gained support for zstd compression but there was no indicator of that anywhere in the format. It has not yet been a problem for Rojo or the related ecosystem, but should Roblox begin utilizing that compression outside of their own models, it may be.
I would like an assurance that this will not happen going forward. Whether it be that we are given a chance to comment on major changes of this sort or that we are simply given notice, it would be greatly appreciated if we no longer had to reactively update our implementations of the file formats.
I would also like to know how far Roblox’s commitment to supporting the community in this manner goes. In the future, would Roblox be open to hosting an up-to-date spec document for the file format, including binary blobs such as Attributes and Terrain?
Regardless, this is good news and I’m looking forward to Roblox carrying through with their promise.
THIS RIGHT HERE! THIS IS THE POST I NEEDED. I’m glad you guys at Roblox actually still listen to the community and care. I cannot wait to see what we have for the future!
Communication is key!
