I personally think that if there ends up being no sort of “one size fits all” solution, then someone could spend time going through gear after gear and develop a model of sorts that would fix the broken gears whenever people who own them join the game. That would be labor intensive though.
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I think you’re missing the entire point of the response and the thread. This is not a good counterargument towards a response in regards to game security at all. You paid Robux for the gear so just use it as an aesthetic for your character just like you use hats.
Roblox has no reason to continue supporting a scarcely used feature. It’s a waste of engineering resources and time. A majority of games don’t allow user-bought gear in their game as it stands.
It’s not false. Roleplaying groups are still a niche use case to continue to support gear in comparison to the entire platform. “War groups” are not a significant part of Roblox at all.
The gear command is typically only used as a substitute when the developers are too lazy to make dedicated equipment for their places or, for whatever reason, want to use catalog gear independent of their games’ systems.
Games don’t use gear from the catalog raw. The whole point of my response was that developers recreate catalog gear or modify it in some way to have it present in their game.
Your intention was to disagree with me, but you’re simply supporting my point here. Developers create game passes to sell existing catalog gear and modify it to work with their games. They don’t just raw insert catalog gear.
Some (not many) games may still use “catalog gear”, sure, but not in the sense that they directly insert a tool from the catalog or tick off one of the “Allowed Gear” options. They use it as a reference point to refactor the code behind it or modify it, or just to use the mesh it has. See:
Not a significant enough reason to continue supporting gear, much less overhaul 20+ pages worth of gear in order to be compatible with current platform standards (including FilteringEnabled). It’s a waste of time and there’s more interest towards future platform prospects.
Please point out to me one game with a significantly large playerbase that uses catalog gear in the sense that an Allowed Gear option is ticked off rather than the gear being modified to work with game systems (e.g. Epic Minigames modifies tools to get rid of extraneous effects such as healing from drinks gears and changes swords to function with certain minigames).
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@zeuxcg It might be an easy shortcut for you guys but you can’t just remove this thing that half the catalog of gear uses! If you aren’t aware, some players still play with unmodified gear and have gear fights including me. The fe update already destroyed enough gear as it is, I can’t begin to count how many of my friends quit because they couldn’t use their favorite gear or play their favorite game after the fe update. You guys can’t keep taking these harmful shortcuts. Just because it doesn’t effect the most popular games doesn’t mean you can just ignore it, that’s unfair to your community. 
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They can remove it, they are going to remove it and they should remove it. It’s been deprecated for years. Preventing platform development for extremely niche cases is unfair to engineers and the rest of us waiting for engine updates.
“Some players still play with unmodified gear” isn’t a significant statistic or reason why this update should be held back or cancelled. Please read the thread for the reasoning on why this choice was made
The platform is going to continue moving forward and if your friends don’t want to adapt, that’s their choice. If FE broke their favourite games, it’s up to the game developer to update their game; you can’t lay it on Roblox for something that is not their responsibility.
This update is literally not a harmful shortcut, it’s a benefit. I would much rather see a long-deprecated functionality removed and unblock some paths in internal development over keeping the feature because a small section of the community arbitrarily allows gear in their games for whatever reason.
This isn’t unfair to the community. Games hardly support raw gear anymore, opting to make their own equipment or modify gears to fit their game systems.
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Why do statistics mean more than your player’s wishes? All these updates are taking away children’s favorite games and they don’t have any way to get it back, weather it’s because the developer isn’t active or it’s because gear won’t get updated. There are whole communities based around gear that go under the radar and are effected by these harmful updates and they never get to voice their opinion because their statistic isn’t large enough. Can’t you try and work out another solution or change so that it doesn’t cause more problems by trying to fix a problem? Ever since 2016 gear has been destroyed more and more and people like me have gotten effected by it. Any time we’ve tried to bring up the need for change we’ve just been ignored and this is a perfect example. I don’t want anything bad for roblox, I don’t want to make it harder for roblox, I just want my game back. 
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Not everyone’s wishes can come true. Accounting for the majority of developers and future prospects is much more valuable than keeping a deprecated, unsupported feature actively blocking internal development and expending engineering resources just to keep a small niche happy that refuses to familiarise themselves with platform updates (see: your thread on wanting to disable FE because you don’t want to learn it).
Statistics matter because they help show a feature’s use and drive decisions behind it (see: genre sorts removed because of declining use and failure from developers to set game genres, as one could not be set by default). Almost no game with a significant playerbase uses the Allowed Gear setting. There’s no point to supporting gear. It’s relegated as an aesthetic.
Again, the removal of LoadLibrary is not harmful at all, please read the OP for information regarding it’s removal. Your posts are more focused on a specific use case rather than addressing the context of the thread. If there are communities based around gear (which I don’t know of any), then it’s up to them to fork gear and modify them to work in their games.
LoadLibrary will only cause a problem for games that are, for whatever reason, still arbitrarily allowing gear use in their games (I will concede for social gears in places like showcases, but AFAIK those don’t use LoadLibrary). It otherwise has benefits in terms of removing barriers to internal development and dropping support for a feature that’s been deprecated for years. You should not be using deprecated items in your work and use of LoadLibrary has warned of such deprecations.
You keep bringing up this point about the update being harmful or you’re being ignored but you aren’t actually bringing any legitimate points to the table. You can’t be ignored if your initial statement wasn’t a question or request, nor if you haven’t spoken about this widely before; your first post was instead a complaint about gears breaking because of FE and LL’s removal despite those being beneficial.
How is this update harmful? What non-niche cases will it actively break across the platform that cannot be solved by
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Forking copies of the libraries in the OP or Roblox GitHub repository and replacing LoadLibrary with requires on those modules
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Learning how to make your game FilteringEnabled instead of finding workarounds
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Integrating gear with your game systems (see: Epic Minigames, as well as the above point)
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Not using catalog gear and scripting your own equipment for your games as wanted
?
Sorry for my brevity but someone’s gotta tell you: you’re fighting a losing battle. Engineering will be following through with LoadLibrary’s removal as scheduled in the OP and it is almost certain gear will not be repaired without significant cause for doing so. Engineering resources are best placed elsewhere, not on a feature that is hardly used.
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Ok I first of all, that topic is about simulating removal, not actually removing it. Second, I know how to script fe and I have a game that I’m working on for proof. Third, like I said, the players can’t do anything about it because the developer may be inactive and unable to fix the in-game gear.
The players matter too. There are games that allow gear, and people play them almost daily, I can even link you a few if you don’t believe me. The problem is that it breaks the game for unsuspecting players who just want to have fun on roblox and they end up quitting. FE actually made sense because it both helped the players and the developers by protecting from exploiters but this is just to make something easier for the engineers.
EDIT: Also, if you aren’t aware, the reason I believe this is harmful is because some games and gear use loadlibrary in their scripts to function properly and when this is removed, they won’t work.
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The concept is the same and if it was possible, it would be the same as just outright disabling it.
If a developer isn’t active and doesn’t fix their game, then that’s the end of that. It’s not your business what a developer does to their game - whether they want to continue supporting it or not. Play something different or pilot a fan remake project of the game if you’re really passionate about recreating an experience.
No one said players don’t matter, but it seems like my point is sinking right through. These communities are extremely niche. Its not worth expending resources on a feature scarcely used by the greater majority of Roblox (see: games page).
If games break because the developer isn’t maintaining the game, then that’s a completely isolated circumstance that has very little to do with Roblox’s decision to improve the platform. Roblox makes the decision, up to the developer to adapt or drop support for the game’s development.
Even if this update is solely to make engineers life easier, how does that matter? Update your game and leave other developers to update theirs. Engineering (in the context of platform development) and development (itc. game development) are one of the same: making life easier. Engineers remove features that are not being supported or deprecated; developers apply frameworks, libraries and other utilities in their codebase to make development easier and accessible. The concept isn’t any different. You should make things as easy for yourself as you can.
You’ve made this crystal clear. So has OP and so have I across several posts.
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It matters because by taking a short cut to “make their lives easier” they are making other people’s lives harder. Gear fighting is my favorite hobby and it has been since I joined and it keeps getting broken due to these updates. You say that we should recreate games if we really care about them, but you wont be able to fully recreate them because theft of scripts is literally not allowed in the terms of service. Neche or not, you should still at least try and help out some of your smaller communities that play your game. Gear isn’t even cheap, I’ve actually spent hundreds of dollars on gear for it just to be broken and not be updated. I probably sound like a broken record at this point but taking shortcuts that cause bigger problems than they solve makes no sense.
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Would it be possible to allow some trusted volunteers to update the gears, similarly like some users are able to create UGC items and sell them? If staff moderation time would be an issue, some of the top contributors on this site could moderate the fixed gears.
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Absolutely no one suffers from this update except players playing games that, for the fourth time by now, allow arbitrary unmodified gear to be used in their games for whatever reason, which is not a whole lot and not a significant number to justify making a huge commotion about gear scripts breaking.
I’ve stated everything I’ve needed to in several posts now and the OP has made it clear what engineering’s stance on gear and LoadLibrary are. I’m not going to bother discussing this further since it seems, again, that my points at just sinking through and this conversation is derailing the thread.
Gears are akin to hats, just with functionality in them. You can literally treat them the same way.
This isn’t a shortcut and it’s causing no problems. Actively trying to make it a problem isn’t going to go anywhere either. Gear hasn’t been updated for literally a few years and only now because LoadLibrary is going suddenly it’s a supposedly huge problem.
I’ve said my piece. I rest my case. I won’t parrot myself unnecessarily. 
P.S. That GitHub repository isn’t being maintained. The last commit was 2 years ago. Make sure to check dates.
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People are making a “huge commotion” about it because they don’t want their items to be broken. A gear that says it does something in the description and then doesn’t work in-game because of these updates is literally false advertising and in some ways could even be considered a scam since it requires real money. You clearly acknowledge that people don’t want this update and the fact that you don’t even consider making a change for the better good frustrates me.
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Last commit was almost 2.5 years ago FYI, I wouldn’t expect it to get merged.
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Honestly, I think the only way to fix this is by modifying the line LoadLibrary() (of a gear that uses LoadLibrary) by getting the asset via Catalog and put it in the ReplicatedStorage then change that line to :Clone() that asset from the ReplicatedStorage.
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Is it possible to rewire the LoadLibrary function to use require behind the scenes? Theoretically that would allow you to dump whatever it’s doing now, and these libraries could be required from the Roblox account instead. Doing this would mean existing code in games, tools, and other systems wouldn’t need to break at all.
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We’ve considered this but this doesn’t work from the client side. Require by asset id doesn’t work, so the script must be in the game. We can’t just put these scripts into every game, that inflates download size. So we’d need to make the function fetch the script on demand using a special client-server lazy loading mechanism that doesn’t exist. This mechanism would be possible to implement, but of course there’s two extra issues with that:
- This would mean that LoadLibrary will yield (for the duration of the initial client->server request, which can take a second or more for players with suboptimal connections). It does not yield right now and hasn’t yielded for many many years. This alone may break scripts for various reasons.
- This would mean that exploiters can trivially, through officially supported means, inject RbxStamper even though it isn’t supposed to be used in-game.
So we’d be replacing one insecure fragile mechanism with another - not a great tradeoff.
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tbh, i agree with both sides here.
The game does need to move forward but i do find it a bit silly for the catalog to keep selling broken gears. It is technically false adverting since you’re still selling gear for a lot even when you fully know well that the majority of them are broken.
Honestly, they need to quit selling any broken gear once this update comes out. Thousands of players still do buy gear today so it would be quite wrong to not put broken items offsale. ( Especially newer players who still think all gear is functional. )
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If they did, it would still kinda be unfair for the people who know about the gears and still want to use them. Also let’s not lie, if they did the whole catalog would be offsale before anyone knew it.
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When you buy gear, you do not buy it because its a “aesthetic for your character” because it isn’t. Its called gear, not aesthetic gear, gear. When you open the gear it promotes that you can add this to your game and earn robuxs! Also telling you that you can use this in some games, when you buy this in a game you expect it to work, if it doesn’t you feel like you where scammed but no its just because roblox didn’t want to fix it.
I think you misunderstood what I was trying to say.
The gamepass is the same thing as the gear, coming from a normal 200-250 player point on weekdays and 200-300 player count on weekends, what I ment is you see the speed coil gear and gamepass, if you wanted a cheaper speed coil but only fgr that game and not all games that allow it for 250 robuxs,
Well the copy could break at anytime adding to the fact, if it’s so easy as forking it and it never breaks, then there’s no point to remove it, or it could be auto-forked when the function is used.
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Sigh.
I don’t know what’s so hard to understand about what I’m saying. If what I say is going to sink through because you’re unwilling to accept changes or developer-driven assets, I don’t know what to say to you anymore. It’d be better to let it go and stop replying knowing that Roblox doesn’t have any intention to go back unless any major part of the platform actually breaks and not a scarcely used feature.
@Humanagon and @moo1210, the both of you are appealing to emotion and nostalgia rather than making any actual argument as to why gear should be updated or LoadLibrary should not be removed. LoadLibrary is globally affecting platform development and you want it kept because one thing will affected that hasn’t had any additions for a year, let alone been updated for even longer.
According to the catalog, the last updated gear was Skeletal Scythe in 2018. For further perspective of the matter, BC Skateboard was last updated in 2010. Skateboard platforms were deprecated for longer and it’s incompatible with FE. It is very clear, with empirical evidence, that engineering resources are being better placed into other features that are actually used widely by the greater part of the platform, not a small amount of people.
There also seems to be a lot of ignorance towards what I’m posting. There’s a reason your posts haven’t been responded to but a later post was. Formulate better complaints and address actual problems, not niche use cases. Roblox doesn’t necessarily acknowledge niche uses without significant reason. This is the same with Feature Requests.
It has been stated several times now that only a small portion of games arbitrarily allow gear and not even for an actual cause. Games that incorporate gear tend to make modifications to the base item and sell it as a game pass rather than make the actual catalog item available. There is no significant cause to keep gear updated nor to continue supporting deprecated items.
@moo1210, in your case, you linked Pinewood Builders Compute Core’s store page. This is another example of a niche use case. PBCC doesn’t arbitrarily allow gear in their game, only select gear is permitted which is by extension of the Add Gear configuration feature. These gear don’t use LoadLibrary so they won’t even break; I doubt you checked the source code for this. Good try but in vain.
Developer-maintained gear is just as prone to breaking as Roblox-maintained gear; the only difference is that Roblox-maintained gear breaks site wide for games that still use the Add Gear feature or arbitrarily allow gear into their game, whereas developer-maintained gear only breaks for their specific game and typically receives much more instantaneous maintenance than Roblox gear.
In the case that Roblox gear breaks, developers are easily able to fix and make such gears compatible in their games or release them out via Community Resources. I mean, that’s a pretty good idea in itself - feel free to start a “Gear Project” Community Resource or something where you post fixes to gear and developers can use those to sell as game passes in their games or whatever.
Gear is aesthetic for your character. It just has scripts that allow it to perform certain actions in games. Some hats have this as well (special effects scripts, e.g. Rbadam’s Smokestack Top Hat) and yet they are still aesthetic all the same. Any item from the catalog is a customisation aesthetic for your character and always will be.
If you guys continue to ignore information like this, fail to understand the platform’s updating dynamic, retain lack of understanding on terminology and allow that to affect your responses or appeal to your own emotions rather than addressing real arguments and concerns about features, then good luck to you honestly when the platform continues to evolve and outdates features that haven’t seen support for many years.
Roblox is a developer-driven environment for the most part. It is up to game developers to keep up with platform updates and ensure that their features are staying in touch with current platform standards. Gear is something that has long since expired and is not actively used in games anymore, save for very few games. These games are just as easily capable of salvaging existing gear, creating their own versions of gear or better - something that games already actively do (see: Monster Islands - if you own some gear via the website, you can use it in-game but it’s rescripted to fit game systems: for example, owning Bloxy Cola gives you an enhancement tool to add to your loadout that boosts EXP gain).
This complaint has overstayed its welcome and is continuing to derail the thread. You’re free to respond to my post but don’t expect a reply back. I won’t be entertaining ignorance or complaints that don’t properly justify why overall platform development should be sacrificed for an unmaintained feature.
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