PointsService and Clans - An introduction

You probably read the Roblox blog posts on PointsService. Points are basically Roblox’ answer to - for example - Xbox achievements. There, a game developer has 1000 achievement points to scatter across his game. On roblox, these points are first given to a central account - the games point balance - and can then be deposited to player accounts.

Upon some thought, that appears to be fair. Roblox has a global points leaderboard. Games which sell a lot of products (and thus have a high income) have more points to distribute. It’s easily assumed that these games are the better games - robloxians are not going to spend their money on some junk game!

So how do you use this PointsService? Let’s have a look. But lets first figure out what we can use it for.

Every game has it’s own point leaderboard. You could therefore give points to the better players. On a shooter game, you could give points to people who get a lot of kills, or get an extremely high killstreak. The player on the top of the leaderboard can then be classified as quite pro, as he apparently has done really well in the game.

Every time you sell a product, Roblox taxes some robux. For BC members this tax is 30%, for NBC members this is 90%. This is also called the Marketplace Fee. For every robuck which goes to Roblox, one point is added to the games main account balance. To get this account balance, you use the GetAwardablePoints function, from a server script. The number returned is the amount of points which you can award to players.

To figure out how much points someone has for the current game (for example to create in-game point leaderboards) you can use the GetGamePointBalance function. The first argument has to be the userId for the player. This function can also only be called from a server script! You can also get the total (global) amount of points which a player has. You use the GetPointBalance function for that and you also input the userId in there.

To finally award some points, you use the AwardPoints function (suprise suprise!). You then also use the userId of the player you want to award the point to as the first argument, and the amount of points which you want to award as second argument!

An interesting feature of points is that this also plays a big role in the new Clans feature of groups. A clan is basically a sub-group of a normal roblox group and can have up to 100 members. If a member of the clan gets a point, this will also add to the amount of points of the clan. This will encourage clan leaders to make sure only the best players are in the clan, as they will gain the most points for the clan!

Clans are also shown in the leaderboard of the game and in the global leaderboards. This is especially cool for war groups. They can create a place in which (for example) a player gets a point when they have captured the enemy’s base. The clan leaderboards on that place will then show which clan (and of course, also which player on the player leaderboard) is the best.

What additions or changes would you like to see on clans and points?