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Wrapping Up the Gifts

December 12, 2007

by John Shedletsky


Archive

Now that all the ROBLOX holiday gifts have gone out, it’s time to clue you in on what the gifts are and how they work.

Over the past two weeks, people have randomly been finding gifts in their Stuff collection. You got a gift if you met a certain condition at the time when the gift was being given out. The condition was different for every gift.

Each gift will be on sale in the Catalog for a couple more days. Then they will be removed from the Catalog. Each gift will open sometime after that and reveal what is inside. Due to popular demand, you will be able to keep the boxes (some might even argue that the boxes are the real collector’s item). 

Here’s a list of all the gifts. “Number awarded” is the total number of people who got the gift for free. For the most part, “dead” accounts were not issued gifts.

Shiny Blue Gift of Niceness

Number awarded: 48454

Who got it: All accounts that never had a 3 day ban or worse placed on their account.

 

Black Iron Gift of Pwnage 

Number awarded: 2766

Who got it: All accounts with the Bloxxer Badge (KOs > 250 and KOs > WOs). 

 

Speckled Gift of Pinksplosion

Number awared: 1521

Who got it: All accounts that owned a pink hat. These were all hats that were pink or hot pink or purplish-pink, but not the Music Theory book, which is purple and not pink. You didn’t need to be wearing it.

Elite Gift of Hax0r

Number awared: 174

Who got it: All accounts that messaged JohnCarmack prior to the cutoff time. The content of the message did not matter, you just had to send one. How were you supposed to figure that out? You weren’t. Not really. It’s surprising so many people did. They saw the ASSERT(hax0r); shirt and picked up on the clue there: 0x5f3759df – Carmack’s Number. To those familiar with the C++ ternary operator, the text on the shirt promises a gift to anyone who can find the hacker JohnCarmack. Obscure? Absolutely. But 174 people figured it out.

Wanwood Gift of Treehugger

Number awared: 367

Who got it: All accounts that owned a place, model, or shirt with the word “tree” in either the description or the title. This was the first gift that people had trouble figuring out the condition for.

Glittering Gold Gift of Fame

Number awarded: 601

Who got it: All accounts with an elite number of profile views – that is to say 1337 or more profile views. Har har.

 

Inscrutable White Gift of the Primes

Number awared: 5051

Who got it: All accounts whose user number was prime. Interestingly, due to the distribution of prime numbers, the earlier you joined ROBLOX, the higher your odds of receiving this gift were. Using the Prime Counting Function, you can see that if you joined around last January you had a 1 in 6 chance of getting this gift. If you joined recently, your odds were more like 1 in 13.

The Agonizingly Ugly Gift of Full Inbox

Number awared: 710

Who got it: All accounts with more than 100 messages sitting in their inbox. It didn’t matter if they were read or unread. Messages to yourself were not counted, nor were friend requests.

Azure Gift of Builder

Number awarded: 3348

Who got it: All accounts with the Homestead Badge (100 or more visits to your place total).

 

Bombastic Gift of Awesome

Number awarded: 1774

Who got it: All accounts that had ever used the word “awesome” on the site. This included account names/descriptions, shirt names/descriptions, place names/descriptions, comments, and forum posts. Correct spelling was a must. So basically anyone who said they wanted the awesome gift got one 🙂

The idea behind the gifts was not that people would collect them all – I don’t think anyone got them all for free. Some of them were meant to be easy to get, others hard. Some were meant to be obvious, others cryptic. I tried to make most gifts the sort that new players had just as good of a chance of getting as veterans. At the end of the day, who can argue with getting free stuff?

– Telamon