Reimburse users for Gears in the catalog that are now broken

Since the removal of LoadLibrary many Gears relying on the function have completely ceased working.

Now to stop any assumptions from rising, this post is not intended to request a fixing of Gears, heck even a callback for the LoadlLibrary I am aware this would be near impossible and a serious waste of resources.

What I am requesting though is a reimbursement from ROBLOX part to any user that bought a Gear which is broken. Although Gears still serves an aesthetic purpose, the functionality part of it is most likely broken.

There is utterly no information regarding Gears or a Gear being broken (besides Devforum) on the ROBLOX website. So even though the older community and Devforumers are aware of the risk of buying gears, the younger audience does not and will not be given any warning regarding the deprecasy of Gears.

Not to even mention the fact that the description of many Gears still mentions the functionality of the Gear even though that Gear most likely, will not work. This is a deceptive practice and goes against ROBLOX own TOS.

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Additionally, we have some data about developers allowing catalog gear to be used in their game from this discussion post that I made some time ago.

https://devforum.roblox.com/t/does-anyone-still-add-catalog-gear-to-their-game-page/431713

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This makes catalog gear 100% aesthetical since you canā€™t use them in the vast majority of games. However it does come into question whether the price of catalog gear is based purely on aesthetical and visual purposes or had also considered the actual functionality, though Iā€™m pretty sure Roblox is aware of this.

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Even though this topic is almost 2 months old now and bumping is frowned upon, Iā€™d like to re highlight this issue. Gears are a legacy part of Roblox and due to the reasons Iā€™ve stated above it only serves as an annoying thorn.

Younger audiences, the main audience ROBLOX targets are still vulnerable to the mistake of buying gears to use in games. It would be reasonable if there was a mention of the deprecacy of gears on their respective catalogue pages.

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They should just say all gear is now cosmetic only.

  1. Remove all code from existing gear items.
  2. Offer to buy back any gear items from players for a limited period of time (60 days?) Maybe thereā€™s a button in your inventory to sell back items if you want.
  3. Remove ā€œadd gear to gameā€ feature
  4. All new gear is cosmetic only

This would actually be great for Roblox because it would let them sell a lot more gear.

my 2c

I donā€™t think itā€™s a focus area right now, just something nice to do eventually as basically code cleanup.

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If gear is made solely cosmetic, then yeah definitely they need to do a buyback program. Canā€™t just take away features of a paid-for product like that without offering something in return. I highly doubt theyā€™d ever, because it does against the ā€œRoblox metaverseā€ vision and itā€™s a little anti-nostalgic.

IMO, there should be a per-place option make gear cosmetic only. That way you can still buy gear, still have it to show off, and sometimes have the ability to use it. The understanding that you canā€™t use your gear in every place is already understood, so this would actually provide more value to gear items by allowing you to at least bring it into some games that still opt-in.

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Yeah that would be nice, but keeping the gear code from bitrotting is actually a fair amount of work over time. Itā€™s also never been the case that selling gear has been a huge money-maker for Roblox. So itā€™s a fair amount of work for something that isnā€™t that great that doesnā€™t make a lot of money either.

The best thing to do is to get it to a point where itā€™s not a constant drain in terms of dev time and user experience.

Maybe itā€™s a lack of imagination on my part, but I donā€™t see any real path that involves doubling down on gear and making it awesome somehow in a world where most Roblox content isnā€™t controlled by Roblox.

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I agree with removing scripts from gears and making them cosmetic, but I think they should be given interesting character poses / animations instead that both affect your profile and the in-game emote wheel. Take your gears in-game and do a cool emote/animation with them without any other side effects, they wonā€™t show up on your avatar in-game otherwise. If games donā€™t want it, they can simply turn off the emote wheel. For legacy gear, they can just make a batch of ~10 poses/animations and assign one that looks the best for each one, that way they donā€™t need to spend a major effort making unique content for each of these.

If gears were turned into interesting cosmetic items like that, and Roblox eventually makes it possible for community creators to make them (similar to hats right now with UGC program), that might be super lucrative.

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Support. There are already gears which have let you have a custom pose. The Periastrons, for example, have this feature. Hereā€™s a video from a while ago showcasing some of them (from a Youtuber I absolutely adore ahem Sharblox :shark: ).

The thing is, most of them are ridiculously expensive, and I do also feel that more gears should have this effect. Maybe even let users have a custom ā€œprofile pictureā€ pose. (Wish I had :robux:. T-T)

Animations would also be very cool. There are already custom animations with certain Rthro bundles, (see this video by, again, the coolest Sharkblox). For example Udā€™zal, or Mr. Toilet. (Of which I wish I had more robux to buy. o(T惘To) 恏恅)

Maybe they could even have custom effects, passively? Check out this article with a list of many accessories with passive effects. (You know what Iā€™m going to say here.)

Without even having the gear in-game, just applying the effects of the gear in-game would be cool. That way allowing gear could be turned off but we could still have those sick effects.

Just my two cents. ćƒ½(āŒ’āˆ‡āŒ’)ļ¾‰

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