Written: 2026-02-26
Roblox is a game I used to be addicted to like crack once upon a time. I have many fond memories of playing games like SFOTH and Build to survive zombies for hours almost every day back in 2012. It was fun to play and especially fun to build. Even in 2014/2015 when the game finally started to get boring for me, it was resparked thanks to all the new roblox machinimas coming out at the time, even if a good chunk of them were made to try and get a bloxy award and were not that funny looking back on them.
I've already talked at length about Roblox in a shitty commentary video I made on Vidlii. It was mostly about old roblox and how I have fond memories of it, but that I also strongly agree that its community has gone to shit and that most of the revival projects suck too. This writeup will be going into further detail in that particular frustration I have with Roblox nowadays.
Ever since I made that video, Roblox has already gotten much shittier in a very short time. It has led to a spark of reinterest into alternatives for many people. That would be a decent thing if it wasn't for the fact that the alternatives still suck ass. Polytoria is the one all the zoomers are obsessed over at the moment, and its ALREADY failing because their servers are slow, the game plays like a watered down 2016 roblox, and they released a mandatory body type update (imagine robloxian 2.0 but if 1.0 was overwritten...wtf?). I used to think this one was interesting since it has native linux support and recently became open source, ntm its supposed to be self hostable. It's too soon to say if we'll ever see self hosted polytoria clones, could very well end up like odysee where you might could do that in theory, but nobody actually does it so you're stuck relying on their overly cuckflared website that gives you captchas every which way. The game is now desperately trying to be more unique after spending most its life being a shallow roblox clone, but its obviously too late. Cherry on top of the cake, one of their staff members got busted for being a pedo not that long ago. (NOTE: the fandom post seems to imply the rest of the staff wasn't in on it since his staff role was revoked and got banned from the Discord, but I've heard some rumors going around that other staff members are also pedos (or at least pedo protectors). I hope this isn't actually true, otherwise Polytoria is worse than I thought.) Seems like Roblox is falling for the pedo meme harder than Minecraft could ever hope to lol. You remember back in the old(er) days of Roblox when it seemed like the only pedo we had to worry about was MisterObvious? These days it seems like there is a slew of them, so I don't exactly buy the counternarrative that pedophilia is rare and actually an overblown issue on Roblox. We've long passed the times when that was actually true.
That being said, it should also go without saying that no "think of the children" laws getting passed is actually going to fix the issue. Modern "parenting" is a joke, they'd rather let the media parent us all rather than simply parent their kids. Never let them use Discord, its a cathedral of degeneracy that is responsible for a lot of this shit happening in the first place. Roblox should be proceeded with caution, but honestly, the game sucks ass even without the creeps at play, so why bother? Everybody knows now that Roblox sucks because they finally boiled the pot too fast. This is why there has been such a spark in the alternatives community, but the sad truth is theres nowhere to truly go anymore.
I've already talked about why Polytoria sucks, but honestly I don't like any of them anymore. Austiblox, Novetus, OnlyRetroRobloxHere, etc. The self hosted solutions are nice, but only work well under Windows. I've had so many issues with getting these projects to work right under Linux I'm just burnt out at this point. I know even if I get everything working, it isn't going to be the same as it used to be. Old or new roblox, I'm tired of all of it now because these revival projects are starting to feel not just like beating a dead horse, but reviving a horse from the dead only to kill it again. This pattern is starting to drive me fucking mad and make me realize some things are better off just being left dead, and Roblox is definitely under that category. The game hasn't been good in many years, but so too has the culture, and that is MUCH harder to replicate. It all just feels so desparate, why do we care so much about this online lego crap anymore? The things that made ROBLOX interesting are inherently dead and have been for ages now. The "good" roblox community died in the 2010s when Erik Cassel passed away, people grew up and left roblox, and the "community" we were left with is your typical nostalgia obsessed teenagers that worship the aesthetics over the mechanics.
I know Minecraft vs Roblox is the most 9 year old tier VS match ever conceived, but I think we all know Minecraft won that battle long ago. I don't even like Minecraft, but I totally understand why much more people prefer it. Minecraft is like Star Wars and Roblox is like Star Trek. I mean that in the sense that Minecraft has greater appeal to more people whereas Roblox even nowadays still tends to get preceived as the lesser weirdo coping and seething in Minecraft's shadow. While that doesn't necessarily matter since you obviously shouldn't let popularity dictate whats good and what isnt, Roblox and especially all the alternatives to it just feels like a desparate rat race to recapture something you simply can't truly get back anymore. If you're wondering what I mean by that, allow me to explain...
Roblox is an inherently 'online' game. Sure you have self hostable clients that would allow you to play the game offline and feel a little closer to Minecraft in that regard, but it doesn't feel the same because most ROBLOX games are built around the expectation that you have friends to play with. The singeplayer Roblox experience simply doesn't compare to Minecraft's. There are ways around this too of course, but it's always going to feel more hacky doing this on Roblox and especially the clones to it since most Roblox clones are not polished enough and lack proper scripting and asset support since some idiots (finobe lol, although a cease and desist is what really killed them in the end) thought it would be a good idea to hotlink everything on modern Roblox and hope they don't delete anything or change the way assets are handled.
Roblox's older community when I joined honestly wasn't much better than what it is today. There was obviously less zoomerspeak the further you go back, but the retarded immaturity was always there since, after all, this is a kid's game. Roblox's community in the 2000s I've heard was actually good since the likelyhood of you running into adult programmers was a lot higher back then and you could talk about nerd shit or play more sophisticated games together rather than sliding down a 99 trillion foot slide and getting shot out of Spongebob's asshole.
Bottom line, I'm done with Roblox. For real this time, like the big boy announcing on the forums he's quitting (lol). Despite the pretty doomer attitude of this writeup, I don't actually care if Roblox and its alternatives live on, I'm just tired of constantly hearing about it. Just when I thought I was the only fucker left on XMPP that still cared about ROBLOX, I've had some people who shall not be named INSIST on me trying it again, and if I'm being honest, that's started to get even more annoying than the people nagging me about Steam. So...if I know the bloxfags are gonna keep yapping and nagging no matter what I say, let's spice things up a notch.
That's right, I'm advocating for TOTAL BLOXXER DEATH! ROBLOX AND ALL OF ITS CLONES MUST DIE! MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! AAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAA!!!! >:D