was 'Old ROBLOX' really better?

today, i'm going to be discussing why everyone thinks "old ROBLOX" is better than new ROBLOX.

chapters:
00:00 Intro
00:43 Exhibit A: Games
02:18 Exhibit B: How Front Page Games Have Evolved
04:47 Exhibit C: Events
05:27 Exhibit D: Branding & Charm
06:08 Exhibit E: Moderation
08:20 Exhibit F: Community (tw)
10:14 Outro

music:

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[GroovyDominoes]

imo I think the charm with old roblox games are the fact that they were mostly just passion projects by individuals made for fun since there wasn't any way you could make money off your games.

[Laughability]

In old Roblox I could bully kids in Adopt and Raise a Cute Baby. Now I can bully kids in Brookhaven. I’m happy with both.

[SerinitySack]

The main thing I miss about early roblox is game discovery. It's so hard to find stuff to play now compared to back then.

[mixed]

I liked 2013-2017, but that's just when I joined. I think everyone feels nostalgic for when they joined, they were kids. Kids who were much more easily entertained and blissfully ignorant to all of the problems.

[ydarb]

One of the reasons why I enjoyed Roblox so much when I was much younger is because of how small the community felt compared to today. There would always be something new to discover on the home page and users felt friendlier. It may sound weird but I was a fan of the limitations Roblox had graphic wise, the blocky worlds and polygonal characters gave Roblox a personality. Nowadays its looks exactly like what you said, a cryptocurrency company lmao. And a huge reason that Roblox kept me coming back to their site was Tix. Logging on everyday would grant you 10 Tix, save up enough Tix and you could buy stuff from the catalog. As someone who's parents wouldn't spend money on strange websites, this was a great feature

[claysoggyfries]

I’d say 2011-2014 was the golden age of Roblox. It was a good blend of high quality games for the time while also having great events

[BryansStuffYT]

Yes and no. Old Roblox has a lot of nostalgia and good memories associated with it, but buildwise was pretty bad. The games don't compare to the ones we have today, but they were fun and top notch for the time.

[zy]

Old and modern Roblox have their own pros and cons.

Old Roblox had a really charming "art style" and early 2000s feel to it, the physics were a lot more wacky and unpredictable. It was a simple but fun sandbox game that's easy to get into. Due to its relatively small community, there was room for more interactivity between the players and the staff and was much easier to get your creations noticed.

Modern Roblox graphics wise is objectively superior, more polished, and has a lot more opportunities for game creation. I've always seen current day Roblox and classic Roblox as separate games, as its changed A LOT over the years. Overall, Old Roblox is great for its charm and simple premise while modern Roblox is great for its accessibility and potentional for game development.

tl;dr they're both just fine, just very different

[Maxatal]

Old Roblox really had it's charm. The oddities of the music, the community at the time, and the nostalgia it presents itself to many people. Regardless, it is still looked at with too many rose-colored glasses by everyone.

2012/2013 or so is when I see the transition from "Old Roblox" to a kind of Middle Ages, where the charm is still present to a certain degree, and random games can still pop up as you have mentioned, but in general the site and front page developed it's more serious atmosphere that remains to this day. The corporatism of Roblox became really prominent in 2016/2017, which I think is when the last leftovers of Old Roblox had died. Though this is impossible to truly pinpoint dates on. "Old Roblox" for some like Phirefox is 2009, while for others it is 2013, or 2015, perhaps 2017 for younger players, and the newest of them may even see anything pre-COVID as "Old Roblox".

I personally never see myself wishing that Old Roblox would come back. The nostalgia was fun, the simplicity is compelling, and the memories are vivid, but the truth is that Old Roblox was simply that. It is still very much possible to meet new people and form a community full of fun on Roblox, it's just simply that these communities are in Roblox now, since Roblox itself doesn't have a coherent community anymore. You simply have to look for what you like rather than follow the platform.

This new wave of communities within Roblox rather than Roblox itself being a community is arguably a good thing. The site is now allowed to grow in multiple directions, and developers themselves can get much more support and attention rather than the site itself taking all of the credit.

I am cautiously optimistic for the future of Roblox, and I am cautiously nostalgic for the past of it.

[braysfinds]

The biggest thing I miss is the front page. I've been playing since 2014 and I see games stay on the front page for longer periods of time and with more players. The "Front Page Dillema" as I call it, is similar to the domino effect. Brookhaven gets on the front page for a bit, new players start playing, and because new players play it, it gets more popular and the cycle continues. And because game discovery sucks, new users will only play Brookhaven and Adopt Me making it harder for new games to get on the front page and become popular. Brookhaven has over 100k players on it regularly and it is incredibly hard to find a server with players that know how to use chat.

[TheOneButter]

i just miss when the game felt less corporate, i also miss some of the old features they removed (tix, parties, unlimited friends and best friends, forums, multiple builders club tiers, actually good games page)

it reminds me a lot of youtube, they just remove random stuff you took for granted and once its gone it doesnt feel the same (at least on youtube mobile)

[Peeps]

The older we get, the more we cherry-pick our own past and see it through rose tinted glasses. It’s not necessarily bad, but we should also acknowledge the bad stuff as well.

[mjdxp]

I generally play RetroStudio, a simulation of old Roblox, more than I play modern Roblox. It's just a lot more fun to me. The community is a lot smaller, and it feels like you can genuinely make a game and have people play it and enjoy it. By comparison, modern Roblox is filled with professional development teams which no independent developer could ever get close to. It also keeps a lot of the old Roblox charm, with the old blocky aesthetic that modern Roblox doesn't have.

[MauricioJara]

I feel like there was definitely more passion back then. Just take a look at how events were run back then. Events were one of the things I really looked forward to

[ggtrknm]

What I for sure miss about old Roblox is for sure Roblox's interaction with its own community. When forums were around, I remember how chatting with moderators was a casual everyday experience. Mods like legoseed, InceptionTime were the mods that were the most active, with the former being the nicest (hehe)
Also, Roblox NextLevel streams on Twitch is also something I dearly miss. They served as a perfect way not only to showcase community creations, but also to generally speak with audience through chat. One time in one of 2017 streams, they created a challenge, in which you had to record a video of you completing a certain task in a certain game, it was a fun and creative idea, something that hasn't been done ever since.
Of course, the community is simply too big to organise these features, but I still believe they can be achieved one way or the other by sacrificing some important bits to please the masses.

I joined in 2016, so perhaps I'm not in position to talk about old Roblox, but I'm still glad that I got to experience the goofiness and charm of this era. Current Roblox and the Roblox when I joined are different like day and night, even the "Online Dater" avatars that used to common in this time are a rare occurrence.

[Tirumsa]

The first thing i liked the most when playing roblox was of how expansive the platform itself was, the idea of being able to make a game anything without limit was such a cool thing to me, it meant a crap ton of games to check out and play just for the fun of it.

Second is the physics, as janky as they are even today, it was honestly funny to see characters just turn into pieces when they die, similiar to legos.

I started in 2015, still playing solely just to play with friends, otherwise i really don't find any fun in any of the games i even try playing. I should probably quit since im graduating too and honestly the platform really feels just empty of everything there once was for young me. Great video nonetheless!

[camoningerland]

UGC is both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, you have some really High quality and cheap stuff that is surprisingly varied, but on the other hand you have a degenerative cesspool of crappy items.

[Cyberjoker]

As somebody who made their first account in 2011, I have mixed feelings about Modern roblox, The things I love about modern roblox is the increased customization features for avatars and better roblox studio features that helps developers make some really cool games. The things I miss about old roblox for me personally is really the charm, it felt more like a platform "for players, by players" and there were better games back then in my opinion, like more challenging survival games, better obbies, and great building games. ofc 8 year old me didn't care much so it's more about nostalgia than anything really.

[rosariobono]

I just miss every game that broke from 2011-2015

[JeLeff.]

for those who have a short attention the answer is it depends on why u started playing roblox in the first place and why u enjoyed it when u started and what aspect of roblox u enjoy the most the socialization aspect the games or whatever else