The features announced in this thread are fine in a vacuum, positive even. Nothing but love for the teams who worked on these features. But I really think this Guilded push is moving the platform in the wrong direction.
These efforts to integrate Guilded servers into Roblox Groups and vice versa really have me pessimistic that we’re ever going to get a proper update to groups.
Some of us have been waiting an entire decade for basic new features to be added to Groups, which have had next to no improvements since they were first released early on in Roblox’s history. (I chose that particular Devforum thread to link to because I remember seeing it many, many years ago and was excited when the thread’s author became a Roblox employee, though it seems she no longer is one and her ideas for Groups were never added.)
Finally, after all these years, Roblox made an amazing change that allowed us to post eye-catching announcements that even support images! But it’s not actually a new Roblox feature, it’s a feature of a separate platform that Roblox wants to promote because they’re the parent company. More customizable announcements should just be a feature of Roblox, not something you can only unlock by signing up for the struggling platform Roblox bought out.
This new marketplace integration being announced here is great news for everyone who’s happily using Guilded, but let’s be honest, the reason why this feature was made and this announcement was posted is because not enough people are using Guilded and Roblox is optimistic that they can convince people to switch over with enough shiny new features, even if it means gatekeeping features that should be part of Roblox behind Guilded. And let’s not forget when Roblox made it mandatory to use Guilded in order to participate in the official RDC Game Jam. I think we all recognize just how hard it is to abandon one social platform in favor of another (e.g. the many attempts at creating an alternative to Twitter). The one feature Roblox can never add to Guilded is our friends, and that’s the one thing that decides what platform we stick to.
Again, huge props to the engineers who worked to make these features, they’re all on paper nothing but positives. But I think Roblox has their priorities misplaced and it’s to the platform’s detriment.