I don’t think monopolizing is going to be a major issue. Most ROBLOX users won’t remember who made a hat, and going further they’ll really be looking for what looks “cool” to them, or otherwise personalizes their avatar in a way they like. Specific hats will appeal to specific audiences, however I don’t think it’s necessarily possible for someone to monopolize a single audience on ROBLOX unless they make every single possible concept for that audience. The major issue I’m seeing here is that the easiest money-printing concepts are being taken up and the market is being flooded with recolors of a single hat.
This could fairly easily be solved by just promoting any new accessory that comes into the marketplace, or promoting accessories that are trending for a specific time window, that way new developers do have the chance to be promoted when it inevitably opens up.
I feel like this is crux of the entire argument around UGC as a concept. Developers feel betrayed that they outright don’t have the opportunity to be a part of something that a large number of people have been wanting for a long time. Honestly, I feel that it is entirely justifiable to feel betrayed in this way, as ROBLOX hasn’t displayed any way to get into this “testing” period besides that they’ll “eventually” add more people to the progam in waves, and these people will always be from select groups who have either worked with ROBLOX in past or are recommended as trusted individuals.
With that said, I don’t think it is justifiable to take out the frustration on the developers who were accepted into the program. Rather, energy should be put into advocating for ROBLOX adding some sort of application system, or dedicating more resources towards finding a solution for the problems they are facing. I understand it is incredibly difficult to create an algorithm that can check a mesh for inappropriate content while also ensuring it isn’t duplicated across the site, however I do think it is starting to drag on in such a way that developers feel they are being ignored or overlooked, and that is not what ROBLOX should be striving towards.
The point here is that ROBLOX should be more open with us about the development process behind UGC, such as updating developers on how the feature is progressing more frequently and letting us know if there will be an opening for more developers to enter the UGC testing phase.
The system ROBLOX is trying to implement is incredibly difficult, to the point wherein I can’t even think of a method of solving the various issues around checking and verifying meshes. ROBLOX needs an automated method of checking if a mesh already exists on the site in such a way that someone can’t upload a mesh maliciously to block others from uploading while ensuring that uploaded meshes are kid-friendly.
Now, I’m not entirely sure how they could solve that using mesh data on a large scale. They can’t just change the AssetID system without breaking a large number of games, scripts and assets, and they can’t just change data types on a whim. This is going to be a difficult and long process, and I think ROBLOX needs to be more transparent about their progress and potential solutions to these problems so that developers can either contribute their knowledge (we have some incredibly talented coders here) or voice potential security concerns should they arise.