Polytoria...?

TL;DR - This site, while a nice attempt at bringing some blocky whimsy into Roblox, is currently difficult to use (and even broken in some places) due to the amount of new players coming in from Roblox. The site is slow, even with good internet. In-game communication, however, doesn't seem to be too bad.

I woke up this morning to see a KreekCraft short briefly talking about some website called Polytoria. It seems some Roblox players are deciding to migrate to this site following the string of poorly-received (and, in my opinion, completely avoidable) updates Roblox has either announced or implemented within the last couple of months. I personally have never looked much into Roblox alternatives, with the exception of looking a little into Novetus, so I got curious and signed up for an account. Mind you, this isn't meant to be a thorough review of the site; this is purely first impressions from my poking and prodding about Polytoria, so more in-depth reviews somewhere in the comments would be very much appreciated. I should also note that I am something of a new-gen Roblox player, with my main Roblox account dating back to some time in March-May 2020, so any potential parallels to "golden age" Roblox that some may notice will not be present in this post, with the exception of mentioning Tix and what little I know about them. Again, if a more seasoned Roblox veteran notices some interesting tidbits relating to older Roblox, please feel free to say something in the comments about it.

First off, there's a warning at the top of the page when you log in, saying the site is experiencing high traffic, so slowdowns and timeouts may happen - and boy, are they correct about that, especially when trying to navigate the general site. The marketplace takes a while to load items, and the games page? I've had that tab open for at least 5 minutes, and only the top banner of promoted games has loaded. That said, I did mention before that Polytoria seems to have spiked in popularity, at least for now, as dissatisfied Roblox players give it a go, which the servers aren't used to. I do sincerely hope they manage to upgrade their servers to be able to handle all these people, partly so older Polytorians don't get annoyed at the influx of new players and blame them for slowing down the site, and partly so it doesn't just turn into Bitview, where it can take days to upload one video. Initially I thought it might be because I use the Mullvad browser, which was made in collaboration with Tor, but I had similar issues using Microsoft Edge, so make of that what you will.

The basic Roblox functionality is there: Games- er sorry, I mean Experiences are called Places, players have an inventory system that contains items they've collected or otherwise purchased (e.g. Game Passes and avatar items), Guilds replace Roblox's Communities, users can trade items and friend others, and Bricks replace Robux (although it appears they follow more of a Tix-like system, which I'll get to in a minute). Like Roblox, the Polytoria player must be installed before you can play any games- sorry, Places, but this can easily be done by clicking the play button on any given Place. There's also a daily streak, which I'm not entirely sure what that will do, since I'm on my first day...

The Store, the Marketplace equivalent, hosts the following categories of clothing and items: regular hats, hair, faces (a lot of which look a lot like pre-existing Roblox faces e.g. Chill, Freckles and :P ) and face accessories, neck items, head covers, head attachments (which I'm assuming means things like antennae), shoulder items, front (most likely things like badges), back and waist items, tools (appears to be gear or other hand-held items), shirts, pants, and profile themes. These can be filtered appropriately by item type, price, whether or not they're collectibles, or even if they're new. UGC is also a thing, at least when it comes to shirts. I managed to pocket a few free things, including the recently released 100k users items. I had a fair amount of errors thrown at me due to... slowdowns, wahoo... but waiting a couple of minutes or refreshing the page usually did the trick.

Everything can be purchased with Bricks, which can either be topped up with real money, or can be earned as time goes on. After signing up for my account, if I were to hover above my Bricks balance, it said I'll receive more bricks in 12 hours. That amount has since decreased to 10 - this is mostly why I'm getting Tix vibes from Bricks, with the exception that they can't be converted into another currency. Free users claim 2 free Bricks daily upon logging in. Polytoria is also monetised through Plus, which seems to be something of a Premium equivalent. It has two tiers: Plus, which costs $6/month; and Plus Deluxe, which costs $12/month. They both offer perks such as an increase in daily Bricks (and an apparent lack of needing to log in to claim these Bricks every day), decreased price in creating a Guild (free users need to cough up 100 Bricks, while Plus users only need to pay 5, and Plus Deluxe only need to pay 2), discounts on Store items, decreased Sales Tax on items (Polytoria takes a 15% cut from free users' sales, 10% from Plus users and 5% from Plus Deluxe), and an increase in public Places (free users can create 5, Plus users can have 25, and Plus Deluxe are allowed up to 100 public Places), among other things. Personally I think limiting free users to only being able to join 25 Guilds and have 5 public Places at one time is a bit much, but that's just my opinion, I may just be a bit snooty.

Now... the actual games. Sorry, I mean Places. I continued to have issues loading the Places page with the exception of the games banner at the top, so I just decided to give some of those a try: 15 Seconds, where you have 15 seconds to escape obbies of varying difficulty; Polygrove, yet another obby where you go around locating Spirit Orbs; and Spell the Word, a game where you... spell words and compete with other players. My main purpose was to try and figure out what the controls would be like, rather than actually rating the games themselves, due to the whole Places page issue, and I'd say overall it's not too bad, at least for a PC player. I will say I found it a tad annoying to have to hold right-click down the whole time while using Camlock (Shiftlock but not quite, triggered by pressing Ctrl), but I play Piggy in third person perspective, so I'm somewhat used to it. Shockingly, I was able to communicate with other players quite well, with little lag when it comes to in-game movement and text chats, so it seems the slowdowns only really affect the website. I noticed in Polygrove that climbing ladders can be something of an annoyance, as your camera angle does matter if you have Camlock on and you can slip off mid-climb if you get too close to the edge. Otherwise, I didn't have much issue with navigating maps.

The site also has its own forum, on top of Guild-specific chat walls. I managed to reply to a forum thread and send a wall message just fine, even if I often got lag spikes while typing out the forum thread response. I did notice multiple users spamming on walls and in Place comments (yes, you can comment on Places' pages), despite it being part of the forum rules that spamming is prohibited, so I'm not sure if spamming is condoned on other parts of the site or if the moderation just isn't keeping up with this giant influx of new users. I'd like to comment more on the moderation, but I've had my account on there for less than a day, so I really can't say anything about it.

Everything I've said so far might make it seem that I think Polytoria is a waste of time or something, but in all honesty, I kind of like it. It has a weird charm to it, and I think it has good potential, but the server issues is a pretty significant problem which I hope gets resolved soon, so players old and new can continue browsing Polytoria's website in peace.

So, now that you've read my giant yappafesto on my first impressions of Polytoria, what are your thoughts? Have you made an account yourself, maybe investigated more deeply than I have? Perhaps you've been a member of the site for a while now, and have some extra input to add? I'm very interested to hear peoples' thoughts on this, mostly from people more experienced with Roblox and/or Polytoria than I am, but even if you're not, your input is also very much welcomed! I'm interested in hearing different perspectives and outlooks on this :)

And before I go, just thougth I'd link an image of my current Polytoria avatar (while I do like this avatar, I wish I could've done more without the avatar editor throwing a hissy fit due to the slowdowns and errors loading images and avatar items):