There is a fair amount of damage in the relationship between the company and Roblox so I personally won’t celebrate too early about this. We’ve been told several times that our feedback is important and it’s great to have this notification, but I want to see action more than words in the coming future.
It’s great to know that the Team Create update has been rolled back so far, but what does that mean? Will it be attempted again in the future with new changes, potentially even silently once it’s left everyone’s minds, or have the teams involved in it realised that sunk cost fallacy does not need to be subscribed to and the work towards this is being scrapped? This post still doesn’t have enough detail that would help me be at ease about the future of these updates.
The last time I communicated on the Team Create thread, I pleaded for a response that wasn’t damage control and was an actual response on the decisions behind all of this. Despite this seeming commitment to hold the developer community’s feedback at heart and the changes were rolled back (which is good), we are still in the dark about the long term decision-making and planning that went into why this feature was even considered at all. That is still something I want to know.
Given that this response says that the team is determined to engage us and keep us informed about the rationale behind decisions, a good place to start is the Team Create update right here and now on this thread. It received an incredible amount of backlash and genuine concerns not only for our workflow but for the platform’s health. Recognising the issue with the update is one thing, but I want Roblox to do more. Still tell us why that was attempted, what went into it, and what the team plans to do with that update. Somehow I don’t believe this is the end of that and it’s worrying. The dismissal of an update should not equal the dismissal for the need to discuss it.
The relationship between developers and the company has deteriorated terribly in the past few years and I want to know that we can have a lasting commitment on restoring what we once had together as Roblox, the platform and its developers. Words are feel-good for the short term but I don’t want to celebrate early only to get smacked in the back a few short months or years later. It’s just that bad now that I can’t share the same joy some of my fellow developers have about this response. It’s a first step but it’s just that; a first step. There’s nothing to say that Roblox won’t just stop at the first step now as they’ve done so many times in the past, promising some and being difficult more.
It might be a bit harsh to expect so much out of new leadership but I want to know that there is going to be a genuine attempt to repair the symbiosis we have and that this won’t be enshrined again as yet another attempt at damage control before attempting to beat us down again. It hurts when Roblox does this to us in spite of what we do for them. I don’t want to have a transient feel-good post; I want a genuine, visible effort to restore the value of community feedback like so many years ago.
It should take less - or better, no - unified outrage from the community for the teams to recognise that there was a misstep. More needs to happen at the drawing board and less after the fact. My personal view is that I am willing to wait for a lot of features that I want and have them take longer to deliver as long as they are well thought out, productive and help us instead of making the platform more difficult to use or trust going forward. A strong product is more important to me than having a lot of features yet not being able to derive any joy out of developing on Roblox.
Please make sure to hold this commitment dearly this time instead of just saying this for the duration of our anger. The Team Create update is only a small portion of the prevalent issues between the company and the developer community. There is still more work to do.