The Robloxian Army quits RWI

Yesterday I released an official statement concerning The Robloxian Army and RWI.
You may read it here if you have not read it yet.

"Okay, I don't care about any of the small matters RWI spend an hour discussing about. It does not benefit TRA in any way. Besides, I am not fond of RAT running this whole operation. When I accepted meowmixxed's offer, I was promised technology and a place together with the other superclans. I was promised cooperation between clans at a level never seen before. In reality, all we do is discuss who should be a member and who should not. Nothing really happens. It just seems that the clans within the alliance, want to feel so high and mighty by declining other clans, because it gives them a sense of power. The only people standing up on the podium at any given time are ColourTheory, Ariclatios and piede. This is just RAT trying to run the place, and I don't like it. TRA is no longer a part of this."

Community moderation. A possebility?

Over the past weeks TRA has been running its own facebook group. People have been able to post links, no filters and no bans. We, the players, the community, have regulated the behavior and content of our fellow ROBLOXians. I belive that this idea of the users moderating each other, could be used in a bigger scale.

Would it not be better, if people could delete spam from their items comments. If people could permanently ban people from their games if they broke the rules, if forums were moderated by trusted members of the community. Would it not be better to have these local community centered moderation systems, than having a global bot system?

I belive that ROBLOX should empower their users to deal with user related problems. That real players could provide techical support to those who needed it. I belive that the many parts of roblox.com should be regulated by the users activly using them.

Moving away from global moderation, would save ROBLOX money, while possibly improving the communities across the site. Having a central moderation system would still be needed, for more extreme cases, that would require blocking a person from the entire site.

A flaw with a user moderated site could be biased or bad moderation, but don't we allready have that? It can only get better, and if some moderators are bad, they could just be replaced by ROBLOX.

Another idea could be to have a tier system. Tier 1 moderators can give warnings and notices, tier 2 moderators could suspend people from for example a forum for a couple of days, while tier 3 moderators could work together with the paid moderators and give global punishments across the site.

Having local community moderators would benefit the site in many ways, and I think it should be implemented in some way. Be it simple functions like deleting spam from your places, to a more complex tier system. Of course this is just an idea, and there is much to be thought about. But maybe the admins could start thinking if this indeed is possible, or if it would throw ROBLOX into destruction. What do you think? Leave a comment down below.

-Tonitoni

ROBLOX bans

Since I became the leader of TRA, my enemies have been trying to ban me in every way possible. But also before that I got banned for stupid reasons. Once for telling a guy not to give his password out, and another for uploading a german WW2 flag, for my WW2 game.

Still, it is the recent events that have been bothering me the most. Since I became the leader of TRA, I have been banned 3 times within just one week. First, one of my forum threads were changed to "I am a supernationalist, I hate negr0s." 1 day ban. Then someone built a nazi symbol and wrote "penis" in a personal build server, took a screenshot of it and said I made it in my personal build server. Kinda wierd considering I have not visited my PBS for over a month. Appeals@roblox.com rejected my request to have the ban lifted.

When my ban was finally over, I got banned AGAIN, for the same reason. I have emailed appeals@roblox.com, but I doubt they will lift the ban. I have a feeling the guy that is trying to get me banned has stockpiled tons of screenshots, and that he will send them to ROBLOX again once I am unbanned. Then this will repeat it self until I am permanently banned.

Official reply from a ROBLOX admin regarding exploits.

After several days of protesting and voting, a ROBLOX admin finally replied to our uservoice thread!

@tonitoniROBLOX That's a good thread. Because security is security we talk less about how to fix it, but I'm working on it all day every day -- David York (@DaveYorkRBX)

"That's a good thread." EVERYONE that said the admins don't care, and that the protest is stupid. YOU WERE WRONG! We were RIGHT. Protests, petitions and votes do work! Not only do we now have confirmation they are working on it, we even know who is doing it, and to what degree. It has been confirmed that they are working hard on it. Finally the response we were waiting for.

Some of you are probably thinking: "Well, I knew that allready." You were assuming it was the case. Now we know, and they know we want it. Thank you for voting and supporting, in the end it payed off. The blackout was smart too, because it made members realise it was a problem, and how to fix it. I am very happy that the admins have responded, hopefully they will have fixes ready soon.
-Tonitoni

Working up in TRA #1

This is episode number one, in the series where JuzzbyXfalcon, the guy from ROBLOXowns Productions, tries to achieve a good position in TRA

So last week I started being active in TRA once again, with the current RSF war that wasn't really a that big problem, checking the group wall as much as possible, going to trainings, raids and defending Normandy. Within that time I read the promotion guide a few times, and didn't really noticed any problems. Until I became sergeant, the rank where you have to do more then just shoot and kill. Now I have been and I am a high rank in several groups, so obviously it's not that I can't take command, actually I take command over higher ranks some times, because they totally mess up. It looks like when saying that you need to have a skill over other people, that skill doesn't get noticed by other people, for example I could make a base, but non of the high ranks would come check it out, give feedback and optionally promote me for it. I could make new weapons, but non of the high-ranks would actually make time to test them, to use them etc.

Now, I don't know what it is, but as far as I know other groups don't have this problem, even better a lot of TRA do get promoted to captain... Actually we have 289 captains at the moment, so I guess it's just me not spamming the high-ranks enough, which I will probably never do. Though I will really have to find a way to get a promotion to captain... Any suggestions?

The dark side of the TRA vs. RSF war

TRA and RSF have been at war for over a week now. The war started for no other reason than to have war for war's sake. TRA is a war clan, we don't need excuses to go to war. Some bonuses with war include more activity and members getting more skilled.

The start of the war was pretty nice. Everyone fought fair, no hacks and little flaming. Sadly, like most ROBLOX wars, bad stuff started happening. Bases got exploited all the time, and flaming became more and more common. As much as this is a bad thing, we must tolerate it and move on. Hacking and flaming can't be avoided.

Even though bases get hacked all day, TRA has managed to produce evidense of 21 legit victories, while RSF has produced 1. Still RSF claims they are winning, and accuse normandy of being unfair as the reason for why they are losing. Honestly, normandy is pretty fair compared to other clan forts. The reason RSF is losing the war is their inactive members, and devided leadership. Many RSF generals are about to betray RSF, or are inactive. One of them even asked us to end the war because their leadership was too bad to handle our power.

In stead of admitting they are losing, RSF is now planning to counter this by putting their spawns inside the base, and give them selves 1 hit KO snipers. They allready have an easier time than us at the fort, yet they are planning to make it even more unfair. Just imagine trying to swordjump over the wall, while 1 shot kill snipers pick you off and spawnkill you from the hills. Then if you actually manage to get over the wall, you just get shot in the back while trying to cross the bridge. They are creating a huge spawntrap to even have a chance of winning. Still they claim they are "One of the most prestigious clans on Roblox!"

TRA is winning this war, what we are seeing now, is RSF's final attempt to win. The question remains if they will actually carry out these changes. Even if they do, I belive TRA will be victorious once again.

Summary of my 1st week leading TRA again.

This has been a rather interesting week. I got TRA the day before my mid-term test, but I think I did well with both. It has been fun being back behind the wheel of this great army. I took a loooong break, but you know, I started to miss it. Working with the highranks, which are all doing a great job by the way, has been fun. I also did some reforms. The promotion system, elites, rules and the majors academy have all been reformed. Another thing I am proud of is fort normandy. Formerly a TSB (The Strike Battalion) fort, it scaled well up to TRA. 18 players seems to work fine, and I am glad TRA like it. When designing it, I had fairness and fast paced gameplay in mind. Did you know one of the administrators, reesemcblox favorited it?

Overall it has been a great week, the war with RSF is going great, and the fort is more active than ever. There has been some bad buzz about the United Powers Clan Allaince (UP for short) recently. They kicked us out because we went to war with RSF without them accepting it, but really we decide who we want to fight, not them. The UP never helped us anyway. The thing that everyone seems to be waiting for now is the major reform. Honestly, I haven't found a fair way to solve that problem yet. Still thinking, maybe having major logs or something. Other than that, I wish more people would enter the build a base contest, a 2nd base would be nice.

I am uploading some nice voice commentaries right now, you should check them out on my youtube channel. I am thinking about making a series of tutorial videoes to help recruits become better soldiers. Might happen, depending on the feedback I get on my first video. I noticed we are getting tons of new members too. Probably because normandy is so popular nowdays. Anyways, what do you want to see in TRA over the next weeks?

-Tonitoni

The work behind "The Robloxian Army in 30 seconds."

Most of you have probably seen my newest video by now. If not, you can check it out here. In this blog post, I will explain the work behind it.

Every proper video I make starts with music. Be it a funny sketch, or a recruitment video. For this one, I wanted to use the battlefield 3 theme. I was not sure if it was copyrighted or not, so I spent days contacting different people at EA asking for permission to use the song. In the end I ended up uploading a random video with the song, to test the copyright my self. It was not copyrighted, so I started work on the film part.

I had allready written the manuscript while waiting for EA to reply to my messages about the song. So the only thing left to do was record everything, and edit it together. I worked on a tight scheme, because I wanted to finish the video in the weekend. I built sets, recorded and edited for three days, and the 3rd day it was done. I had compressed two hours of recordings into 30 seconds.

Both the recording and editing part were pretty easy, I got a couple of my friends to act, and then recorded some nice scenes. I had most of it planned allready, but sometimes I come up with super ideas while filming. The tank and plane scenes were both figured out on set. I use ScreenFlow to record.

The editing part was probably the most fun to do. I use final cut express, and I am quite good with it. The four scenes in one part with the jet was pretty awesome to do. Originally I did not plan for it to be there, but I had so many jet clips and so little time. I just smashed them all together and it looked goid. The part I am the least happy about was the end. I kinda rushed it because I was going to visit someone. Rushed projects rarely turn out great.

I hope the video was as fun to wach as it was a learning experience to me. -Tonitoni

Making a video advertisment for TRA.

Yesterday, roblox officially released a new feature. Place galleries. This new feature includes the ability to upload pictures and videoes to your places. I decided to make one for darox II. I know I haven't done much in TRA lately, but I love making videoes, and this seems really fun. Especially since the video will be seen by thousands of people at roblox. My goal is to create the best place advertisment ever! (Not very hard since so few have been made.) Hopefully it will continue to impress people even after video advertisments become common.

My first challenge was to find fitting music for my video. I allways get inspired by the music I use. After browsing youtube for a while, I settled on the official battlefield 3 theme. I looked around youtube to see what other people hade done with it, but I was suprised to find very few videoes with the song. This lead me to thinking that the song might be copyrighted, but I continued with the project anyway. The evening went on planning the scenes, and writing the script, but the chance of my video being instantly removed from youtube was hounting me.

I have had my video removed before, an epic TRA advert that never saw the light of day. I used days on it, just to have it removed from youtube instantly. I should have known that the song I used, the transformers soundtrack, was copyrighted. Anyways, back to the TRA recruitment video, when I was done with the manuscript, I decided to check if the music was indeed copyrighted. I tweeted the official battlefield support center, but right as I did it, they stopped responding to tweets. I did not give up, I wanted that song. 30 minutes later, I had tweeted every single lead developer at DICE, sadly it seemed they had all gone to bed, so my efforts stopped there.

The next morning, I still did not have a reply, so I went to school thinking if I would ever be able to use the song. I was relieved when I found that someone had tweeted me. It was one of the developers at DICE, he said I probably would have to pay for the lincence, although there was a chance no one would care if I used the song. Unsecure as I was, I was still not satisfied with the answer, I wanted to know if I could use the song or not. The search went back to youtube, and to my relief I found a video with the song creator's name in it. A quick google search, and five minutes later the email was sent. Now I just have to wait for the reply. Let's hope that I can use the song.

WIJ log entry #2

After getting accepted as a STA trainer, I finally thought there was a way for me to become an officer. I was wrong. I keep getting this feeling of hitting the wall. I have a goal, and when I REALLY want something, I will do EVERYTHING in my power to make that happen. The problem is, my obstacle is something I can't controll. Timezones.

I am trapped in a place where I cannot move on. Most of the officers live in america, while the majority of the high command is british. I am managing to stay in touch with the high command, but the officers just don't know me. The only people that actually are online when I am online are iRykorz and Rykarz. Problem is, they rarely hold trainings. So I figured: Hey, I should become an STA trainer, so I can host trainings my self! Well guess what, that aint helping me get anywhere. I can't get cP for hosting my own trainings, and I can't go to other peoples trainings.

So what do I do? Well, I try to find alternative ways to earn cP. How is that working out? Not very well. First of all,my suggestions often involve changing rules, or doing things in a new way. Of course the high command does not like these changes, and the officers can't do anything about them. The high command says: "Go to trainings." I would, if someone actually hosted one.

I asked the officers, how do I get cP for officer? They said: "Go guard bases and you might get cP." Hey guess what. THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT I HAVE BEEN DOING THE PAST 4 MONTHS! AND GUESS WHAT! I NEVER EVER GOT CP! BECAUSE THERE ARE NO FUCKING OFFICERS AT THE BASES THAT CAN GIVE ME CP!

I am not getting anywhere, but the frustration I have been feeling lately just keeps raising. An entire holliday wasted patrolling bases. For nothing.

WIJ log entry #1

Yay! I have finally become a WIJ STA trainer! After trying to become one for weeks, I finally made it. I think it all comes down to having the right connections. Many other WIJ are trying too, they be jelly. But yeah, having a network is vital when wanting to move forward in a group, not just in WIJ. Back when I was active in VAK, I was friends with all the highranks. I became a HR in just a month. Not bad, considering it is VAK we are talking about.

The more highranks you know, the better. After I got xfire, communicationhas been really smooth too. I'll start training the people in STA as soon as I get admin at the training places. I think it will be awesome. My next goal is officer. Wish me luck :D

ROBLOX's New Layout

When I checked ROBLOX this day on school I noticed something strange. ROBLOX had a new design, and loading it in Internet Explorer 9 took me ages! Luckily when I came back home, and I went on Google Chrome, it worked a lot better. So let's speak about the new design in this article!

The homepage

If we look at the homepage when logged out, you will see that the content hasn't actually changed. I am not sure if ROBLOX is going to change the content on the homepage, but I don't really mind about it. the most important thing changed on the homepage is the menu and the log-in box, which has changed layout both.

My ROBLOX

As far as I can see, nothing really changed to My ROBLOX apart from the menu and the location of the advertisements, which are now located under the menu.

Something that I noticed was that this is still the 3.0 design, and not an all new 4.0 design, although I think a lot of things changed since the very first version of the 3.0 design and the 3.0 design as it is now.

I am not sure if you can put this as a part of the new design, or it's just the fact that ROBLOX wants to reintroduce it, but you can now view the sets of a user on his or her profile. If I'm right this was actually enabled before the new menu already.

I haven't seen any other changes on the My ROBLOX tab yet!

People

Not a lot of changes on this tab, although after searching really well I found this "Tips" button thingy. It gives a blue pop-up which you can't really read yet, due to some stupid CSS coding, After some smart copy paste work I got this out of it:

Tips Exact Phrase: "red brick"

Find ALL Terms: red and brick =OR= red + brick

Find ANY Term: red or brick =OR= red | brick

Wildcard Suffix: tel* (Finds teleport, telamon, telephone, etc.)

Terms Near each other: red near brick =OR= red ~ brick

Excluding Terms: red and not brick =OR= red - brick

Grouping operations: brick and (red or blue) =OR= brick + (red | blue)

Combinations: "red brick" and not (tele* or tower) =OR= "red brick" - (tele* | tower)

Wildcard Prefix is NOT supported: *port will not find teleport, airport, etc.

It sounds like nonsense to me! Roblox, you will have to explain me that, later!

Help

I'm not sure if the help page changed, because I never really took a look at that page before.

Over all

In the overall changes, it seems that the only thing really changed is the header, with the menu, the ads and when logged in the statistics, with the number of your robux, tix, friend requests, and unopened personal Messages. Also has the background changed to white instead of the blue picture or black picture.

Conclusion

I don't think you can say that this is a bad design. Actually I pretty much like it! Apart from the white background, it's too boring, and too bright. I gues BrightEyes designed it ;) Anyway, it's up to you if you like it or not, but if you ask me, it's a good design!

Virtual fame

This text was written for my english writing day this spring. I just got it back from my teacher, and decided to share it with you.


What is a famous person? I define a famous person as a guy or girl that a lot of people know about, possibly a person with a lot of influence. From now on, I will refer to a famous person as a he, because I am the only famous person you will read about in this text. I don't care about other famous people, nor do I know anything about them.


When my friends in real life see what I type on the internet, they often call me arrogant. Famous people can be arrogant, at least I can be at times. What makes me so famous? First of all a lot of people know about me. In fact over 500,000 people have seen my name. Not my real name, my virtual name. These people know me on a game, the online game ROBLOX. You might be thinking: "That's not a lot of people." or "It's only a game." Well let me tell you something. Wherever I go on that game, people stalk me. People constantly send me messages saying: "Tonitoni, are are my idol." or "Please Toni! Be my friend." People actually look up to me, and hope to become like me one day,

What did I do to earn so much recognition? I created one of the most muccesful war groups on ROBLOX. At one point this group, named The Robloxian Army had as much as 35,000 members. Thirty five thousand people ready to do whatever I told them. There were thousands of people looking up to me as their leader and idol. For over a year I worked on this group, making it known by anyone important in the world of ROBLOX. I was hated, hated by my enemies. I was hated because I was more famous than them. Because I had done something they would never accomplish. I even had bodyguards with me, trained elite soldiers, ready to die for me if necessary.

There have been countless attempts to assasinate me. Not because it would hurt my virtual character, or me sitting in front of the computer. They tried to assasinate me so that they could humiliate me. Humiliate me in front of the entire clan world. I have tried to avoid humiliation, as keeping my image of undefeated and powerfull was vital to my success.

The Robloxian Army (TRA for short) is no longer lead by me. I passed it on months ago, although I am still 2nd in command. Partly because administrating a group of 35,000 people takes a lot of time. I had no manager or secretary most of the time, so administrating everything drained my energy. In fact, I spent so much time on the group that my real life situation was getting worse. My grades were dropping and I was sitting up to 4 AM reading and anwering private messages from my members. All this time spent on the computer was making my health worse. I tried hiering a secretary, but she quit just weeks in. She could not handle the pressure I had been subject to for over a year. The other secretary I hired was too lazy, so I fired him after a week. Like for any other famous person, the career has to end one day. I decided to end mine before all my energy was drained from me. After all, real life is more important than what happens in a game, no matter how famous you are.

I was semi-famous before my clan became so popular. Making games was my passion for almost a year, although I never really became famous for my games. They were mostly redone ideas, or improvments of allready existing concepts. In total my games managed to rack up around half a million visits, which is not bad by any standards. Looking back, I am not very proud of them, they were mediocre at best.

After quitting as the leader of TRA, I have started spening much of my time on social medias like twitter nad youtube. My youtube videoes have been seen over 45.000 times in total, although I am not very happy with most of them either. I guess you could call me a perfectionist, as I am never really satisfied with my work. There are allways things I think I can do better.

If you are still in doubt of my fame, let me refer to some of my accomplishments over the past two years. My games have been played over 1,490,000 times in total, my ROBLOX profile has been seen over 1,200,000 times, I am ranked as 99/99 in the ROBLOX level calculator, I am the most famous ROBLOX player from norway. possibly even Scandinavia. Klout, an online influence measurment site ranks me as 42/100,  just by calculating my influence on social medias outside of ROBLOX. I am the ROBLOX leader with the most youtube videoes dedicated to him in the world, over twelve thousand people have sent me a friend request, and thousands of people look up to me. When I look at what I have accomplished in less than two years, who knows what I wil accomplish in the future?

Being famous brings both good and bad things. On one hand you become popular, rich and important. On the other hand you lose much of the free time that could be spent on other things like family and friends. In my opinion it all comes down to finding the right balance. I don't think the countless hours spent on ROBLOX were wasted. The fame and recognition I got on that game, will probably never be replicated in the real world. I guess you could call it, a once in a lifetime experience.

Team Domino changes name to Team Jessie J.

Phone picture editor... (I need a graphics designer!)

Team Domino, a group that was just about to get accepted by the clan community has screwed it up again. The group description states that the group has changed name to Team Jessie J. Why their leader pieperson50 has done this, is still unknown, but speculations are sirculationg on the C&G forum. One of the reasons for the recent change, might be because pieperson50 likes the british artist Jessie J. This means that the group, which is allready considered pieperson50's fan group by some, will lose its status as a war clan.

The change of name also confirmes what many allready have said: "Pieperson50 only wants money, and does not care for his members." Pieperson50 has also changed the name of one of his places to "Team Jessie J HQ" It is expected that Team Jessie J will loose many members, if the group does not go back to being a war group. The name change has raised many questions, but the most important one would have to be: Will Team Jessie J keep their their current name? or is this just a prank played by pieperson50?

WIJ allies with UAF

Talks have been going on between the WIJ high command and UAF's leader bbal. This has lead to the forging of a new alliance between WIJ and UAF. Both clans stated that the alliance will benefit them both, which seems to be the case so far. Many WIJ have joined UAF and vise versa, making bonds even stronger between the two groups. WIJ has also launched a new program where officers are allowed to bring squads of around 4 people to defend allied bases. This will hopefully boost activity in WIJ, and provide greater revenue to our allies. So far the alliance stands strong, but only time will tell if it will last or not.

Welcome to my blog.

This blog will focus clan news, new features and popular places.
-Tonitoni