Just my two cents as someone who has frequented that category:
The fact that many of the threads made were selling assets made by someone brand new to Studio and in under an hour, with other devs quoting for prices that were literally for fractions of cents, yea good riddance.
And considering serious and high quality offers were still incorrectly quoted with laughably low prices, as a professional dev I found the entire thing exhausting and insulting.
Lately ive been seeing so many free modeled or stolen assets being sold in the category. Im guessing that’s why it got removed.
Personally though, I think the category should either require threads to be manually approved or have thread creation be locked to regular members only.
Interesting viewpoint, though I highly disagree. Regardless of whether or not an asset is deemed as “high-quality”, the creator of it deserves to at least have the opportunity of selling it; whether it’s bought or not is ultimately in the hand of a forum member who looks at said asset. For one to get rid of this chance altogether is something which I truly cannot understand, if no one purchases it then no one purchases it, no harm is done if that item is not bought or if it’s deemed as subpar.
In regard to your second point, even if a high-quality asset is incorrectly quoted with a “laughably” low price, the creator of the asset should at least know a price range for the asset they’re selling, so that their work is not too undervalued.
I legitimately loved the asset marketplace and found it to be one of the best sections of this forum. It was fine and wonderful the way it was and any change that might happen to it need not be implemented. Also, this is in regard to @InstanceChanged’s point, wouldn’t it be cruel if the marketplace was restricted to regular members as most members probably have a sufficient amount of robux whilst new members are the individuals who need it the most, thus needing the marketplace the most?
To sum up nicely, please Roblox, keep it how it was.
If you think about it logically, buying/selling from the asset marketplace was the most easy scam for both parties.
Usually if you are requesting a custom product from a developer, they aren’t going to spend so much time making it for you and then not give it to you: especially if it’s a specific logo that nobody else would want to buy. However, the asset marketplace had a lot of general things that could easily be re-sold over and over again which is why there was a ton of scambait.
Even in the rare chance that there was a fraudulent post that was made with the intention of deception, majority of the time it was called out and activity on the marketplace resumed to normal.
It wasn’t “rare”. In fact, I felt like I was flagging quite a few posts a week. Also, we don’t really know what went on behind closed doors and just how many people DMed DevRelations that they got scammed from the asset marketplace. However, I’m pretty sure that this is intentional.
I definitely admit that last week didn’t look too good but in the marketplace’s entirety, at least from when I joined the DevForum, there were healthy conversations and good posts. You could be right that people may have got scammed, but again, that’s just an assumption which you’re making. For all we know, we don’t know if that’s true or not.
It’s also possible they removed in temporarily until they find a permanent solution to avoid most of these scams such as manual approval or something.
I can sort of see why the asset markplace was removed because there was lots of low quality discussion surrounding it. First off, ever since the marketplace was introduced people started asking for support on pricing and rating there assets out of 10 a lot more than before in the support categories. Secondly, lots of people were undervaluing other peoples work by making posts saying, “this is too expensive and should be sold for X amount.”
For some people they were just misusing the category by not using it for its original purpose. First off, every time I went there I saw loads of posts selling assets that took well under an hour to make maybe to make a quick buck. Secondly, people were using this category as a place to give and receive feedback when actually this isn’t allowed in this category.
I think the main reason why it was removed was because it was putting too much pressure on the DevEngagementTeam because of the amount of maintenance it required. I think people were flagging a lot of posts there and messaging the team about issues regarding scamming and other issues.
This is very disappointing. I was trying to sell a rebel X-wing. I have only just checked and my post had vanished.
I agrees with the reasoning for the removal of the category, however I feel redesigning it so only full members can create posts would make a lot more attractive to people looking to buy assets.
If they were to put it back up they would need to make it so only verified members can make posts.
Other than that, I think it’s justified that it got removed. So many low quality assets and people not even selling their own work (not even talking about scamming) is what brought the entirety of it down.
The asset marketplace was my least favourite section of the devforums, and severely decreased the quality of the site. Mentioning what Aotrou said, people would sell stuff for literal cents, which probably cost more in electricity or internet to make the post itself than sell it. Good riddance.
Simply more reasons to use the asset marketplaces for other game engines (Unity asset store, Unreal, etc) because Roblox provides a suboptimal service. It’s also disappointing that whoever operates this forum isn’t willing to put into the effort into making an announcement instead of simply removing things. You want your forum to be “professional” (ironic when most the user base is <16) but you aren’t willing to put in the effort to open an effective line of communication, it’s truly just a joke at this point.
Hey guys, thanks for all your answers, my opinion is that it should be back but remade so only verified members can post stuff there, and I am sure there’s a way to prevent people from selling low quality stuff for cents.
Perhaps I’m just plain ignorant, but what’s wrong with selling low-quality items for cents? Correct me if I’m mistaken, but isn’t there absolutely no wrongdoing if a user attempts to sell a low-quality item?
The wrongdoing is a massive amount of forum spam on a forum that is meant to be a semi-professional development conversation space. We’re better off without all the noise, arguing for the sake of arguing and random feedback about quality or prices of offers.
Thank you for the response and you have a very fair point, but by the same logic, shouldn’t #help-and-feedback:building-support be removed too because it’s plagued by the same issues which you’ve described above? To be clear, I’m not saying that it should go but I feel that the same logic could easily apply.
No, #help-and-feedback:building-support is only filled with these posts asking for prices because there was an asset marketplace.
#help-and-feedback:building-support should be used to get feedback on builds. The issue was that people used it for other reasons, such as asking for prices.
Since the asset marketplace was removed, there will be much less (if any,) posts polluting this sub-category.
We’re looking at other ways to improve the level of posts in the support categories, one of them is trying out a StackOverflow-style layout for scripting support topics for example.
Asset Marketplace was beyond saving – highly inconstructive, mostly non-development related (mostly random arguing about IP, quality and price), and basically none of the topics were useful for anyone above the novice skill level. As mentioned above it had a negative effect on the rest of the forum too because people would use other categories to ask for pricing information.