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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A little over a week into the brand new year, and already we have a fresh update for all you nice people.  Here are a few things to be on the lookout for as you explore the web site:

1. Administrator Badges:  It’s a violation of our Terms of Service to impersonate an administrator, and we will delete the account of anyone found to be doing that.  But some people do it anyway.  And if you’re new to ROBLOX or you haven’t been around in a while, you may not know who the real Administrators are.  Now it’s easy to tell.  We’ve added an Administrator Badge to all of the real ROBLOX Administrators.  If anyone claims to be an Admin and they don’t have the badge, they’re not telling you the truth.
2. Private Message Notifications:  If you’re like us, you were probably getting tired of always needing to go back to your profile to find out if you had any new messages. Well, we’ve added an “alerts” area to the upper right hand corner of the website, available everywhere, which will let you know whenever you have any unread messages.  You can click the link to go directly to your inbox.
3. Message History:  Sometimes it can be pretty difficult to remember the context of a conversation you’re having by PM.  (It certainly can for Builderman!)  We now add a copy of the original message whenever you click REPLY.  Just like with email, you can delete it if you don’t want it.
4. Rankings:  We’ve enhanced the rankings charts so you can now view rankings by Hour, Day, Week, Month, or All-Time.  This way, you can see who the up-and-comers are — not just the people who have been playing the longest.  We also hyperlinked all the results so it’s easier to go check out the user or place for yourself.  If you think you noticed some changes to the leaders, it’s not your imagination. We closed a loophole in the Combat Leaders that could allow someone to get multiple Knockouts for one Wipeout.  We’re also combining multiplayer and solo visits for Most Popular Places.  Moreover, visits by you to your own place won’t be included in the tally (that’s too easy!).  So the results have shuffled around a bit.
5. Fly-Bug Fixed:  It was fun while it lasted (sometimes), but the fly-bug is no more.  Some of you will celebrate: no more assaults from the sky.  Others will be sorry to see it go.  Don’t worry: flight within ROBLOX is something that we like, too.  There are still jetpacks, rocketboots, and the like.  Look for more flying options coming down the pike.

Those are the highlights.  Of course, there are a host of behind-the-scenes improvements as always — exception handling, caching, Builderman’s daily overhaul of the physics engine.  Still, it seems like there was something else … something you might not notice if I weren’t here to tell you.

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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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Those of you who were online this Thursday evening and Friday morning had a sneak peak of our ROBLOX badges feature. We have had heavy traffic this Friday morning. Coupled with the new statistics and badges pages, our database machine started pegging at 100% and http://www.roblox.com/ went to a slow crawl.  We are fixing right now and have taken the badges pages offline. In the interim, all statistics that go towards badges are still being gathered.

For those of you who are curious about badges (and missed the unintentional sneak preview), I’ll repeat the descriptions of the first round of badges here.  Kudos to Matt and Erik for getting this cranking.

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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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