The other day a player, gameshark, complained to me that he did not like the new Rocket Arena map because it required no skill to play. His main criticism was this: whoever shoots the most rockets wins – just find a good place to stand and spam them. Now obviously this is not entirely correct because if the Rocket Arena map required no skill to play then it is a game of luck. One person is just about as lucky as another, so everyone should be equally good at Rocket Arena. If you visit the Rocket Arena map for 5 minutes, you will notice this is not the case.

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Roblox is currently in alpha online testing. This means that we don’t consider Roblox to “finished” or “well tested”, it is an ongoing experiment that we let other people take part in. Today I’m going to give you a sneak peek at a Deep Alpha feature, something so experimental, raw, and new that it just barely compiles. It’s in the pipeline, but you probably won’t see it for several releases. Ladies and gentlemen, I present: James Blox.

James Blox was created by early Roblox user Katalyst, an acquaintance from gamedev.net. You will no doubt recognize his pyramid & sphinx place from the cool places tab on the Roblox homepage. James Blox was recently picked up by Montresor, the alter ego of a Roblox admin, who has been experimenting with custom avatars. James Blox is not an exciting feature. Don’t get me wrong – he looks so cool and stylish stalking around in the Rocket Arena that I often forget to shoot at him. But really, the exciting feature is character customization. We have a little bit of it on Roblox now (you can pick from ten models), in the future we will have a lot more. Raise your hand if you think that’s a bad thing. Ok, you guys go sit in the corner.

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As of this afternoon, there are 44 people on Roblox who have earned the prestigious Bloxxer badge. We have stats logged in our database for more than 2500 users, meaning that only 1.76% of all players have been able to earn this badge so far.

Thanks go out to Matt Dusek who helped me to write the SQL incantation to retrieve these stats and Builderman, who demonstrated some cool Excel tricks. If you are as obsessed with numbers as I am, you might enjoy this table I made, listing everyone who has a Bloxxer. We may use data like this to calibrate a future combat badge that is harder to get than a Bloxxer…

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I want to discuss something that I’ve been thinking about for two months now – a problem that all of us at Roblox have been anticipating even before we started tracking combat statistics. Actually there are several problems…

Problem #1: The players who have the most time to play Roblox tend to rise to the top.

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Happy New Years, people!

I’ve been taking it easy the last week and a half, chillaxing in Rehoboth Beach, DE. You might not think that that would be a good place to be in the middle of winter, but you would be wrong, it was great. Luckily for you guys, while I was admiring nature, eating delicious pastries, and catching up on my Peter Molyneux games (also known as “doing research”), Builderman was slaving away in the pixel mines. So we may see a new release this week. Unless there’s a cave-in.

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When I was in school, my teachers would sometimes comment that I had a warped sense of humor. Anyone who has played the new Christmas level will probably agree. I won’t even tell you what I had planned for the Thanksgiving level before it became obvious there would be no time to work on it. Ok, one small hint. It was going to be set in Roanoke.

But that is not what I want to talk about today. Today I want to talk about the new Christmas level. When I started to design the level, I was interested in creating a new Roblox game type that did not directly center around combat. I also wanted to try to make a level where time bombs were useful and dying meant something. Finally I wanted to make a team game. Santa’s Winter Stronghold was the result and I do not think that I was entirely successful — it is a pretty looking map though.

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Sometime over the weekend we reached a milestone: our 10,000th Roblox user account was registered by “destroyman”. I haven’t seen him online yet, so maybe he is just sitting on it until he can flip it for a profit on eBay. We would love to be able to award our 10,000th user some sort of prize, but we don’t have anything to give at the moment. Maybe the 20,000th user will be more fortunate.

stcsean47 writes:

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