As a Roblox Developer, it is difficult to reward players outside of my game.
Currently, badges are the only asset that can be granted to a player. (going into their inventory) The Badge feature has been around for a very long time on Roblox, but has not received much additional support since its creation. Due to their declining use in games, new users may be unfamiliar with the term “Badge” and what it entails.
Short Term Proposed Solution
Consider renaming Badges to Achievements. A new name with the proposed refresh below could bring new life into a legacy feature. New users will likely understand “Achievements” more than they will “Badges” from any off-Roblox game experience. (Xbox Achievements, for example)
Confirmed: this is already a thing!
Allow badges to be added to a Universe, so that they can be rewarded to players in any of its sub-places.
For backwards compatibility, list “Universal Badges” and “Local Badges” where badges are detailed in the Game Details screen.
Long Term Proposed Solution
Connect prize items (hats / accessories / bundles / animations / etc) to Achievements (Badges) in your Game.
Developers can pay (x) ROBUX to add an Item to their Achievement (Badge). Anyone who acquires the Achievement (Badge) now also acquires this Item.
The Achievement (Badge) asset page would display what items can be earned from achieving it.
Potential Flaws
If an accessory prize is added to an Achievement (Badge) AFTER someone has earned it, how can they earn this new prize?
A) You can only add items to new badges. This does not allow backwards compatibility with existing badges, but also avoids new APIs.
B) Rework BadgeService API to attempt to reward all items attached to a badge every time it is prompted to award said Badge (Assuming currently if you own the badge, it does not try to give it to you again.) This allows for backwards compatibility, and could utilize Notifications to update players on new prizes; however, this still would require much more engineering time than Option A.
How do you avoid Developers uploading bad/unoriginal/stolen content, thus polluting the pool of items on Roblox?
Make the price to reward assets very high. Having an item of your choice that someone can wear in any game is sorta a big deal. Why shouldn’t it come with a high cost? You can’t limit how many people this developer is going to give the item to, because you can’t determine how difficult their Achievement (Badge) will be. Moderation resources are not unlimited, so a high price point would give those resources more time to investigate the eligibility of items.
In the long term, I envision players earning packages of items created by Developers for achieving (really pushing it here!) things in their game. You defeated the final boss? Here is a bundle that is his armour, a gear item that is his sword, and an animation of his evil taunts.
Is this still the case? I’m pretty sure that hasn’t been an issue for some time. As far as I remember Egg Hunt 2017, 2018, and 2019 were able to award badges across the same “universe”.
As for the other main point, awarding items, that appears to already be in the works according to the UGC post here.
While it doesn’t outright state badges as being used, I figured badges being used to award the UGC items would be the case since that’s how they’ve awarded event items in the past, save for a few odd exceptions like the EH’10 eggs. I could be wrong and they could be working on a new feature for it entirely, giving reason to highlight that badges could be updated to work better with awarding UGC items rather than making an entirely new feature and abandoning badges.
I also think that allowing us to prompt players to join a group would be beneficial towards creating a community and rewarding players that do in fact join that group, such as special challenges or special rewards for group only members.
True, suppose with Roblox being so vague about the case there’s no harm in bringing up ideas.
I do feel it’d be good to have the game award the item if the player re-visits, rather than if the badge is prompted to award again, since there could be cases where the player can’t re-earn that item in-game. I could’ve sworn there was at least one Roblox event in the past where due to the main game tying that badge awarding to something you can’t repeat a second time in-game, deleting the badge would make it unobtainable.
I do worry on the cost of rewarding assets. On one hand, it is important to make sure the idea of awarding items is a special one which is used in moderation. On the other, it still needs to be open enough to support cases where larger amounts of prizes are important, such as egg hunts.
