Window Seat Studios/Shopping Wars

Shopping Wars is an experience created by Window Seat Studios. It was featured in the RB Battles Season 3 event.
==Gameplay==
Two players are required to start a round of Shopping Wars. Before the round starts, players vote on which map and game mode they'd like to play. On each of the maps, players must also look out for Bob the Forklift Driver, who drives a forklift on a fixed path around the map, killing players instantly if he runs into them. As of December 2022, there are currently two maps in the game: Bloxmart and Candy Kingdom.
The six game modes currently available in Shopping Wars are:
* Classic: Players have two minutes to collect as many items on the map as they can, returning the items they pick up to the cashiers. In the last thirty seconds of the round, players enter the Flash Sale, in which players can get double the amount of cash for the items they collect.
* Storm: A thunderstorm will periodically cause the power to go out, causing the power to temporarily go out. This prevents players from checking out items they collect in their shopping cart, requiring players to work around the power outages.
* Mecha Karen: In this game mode, players must shop around Mecha Karen, a giant NPC in the center of the map that shoots players that move with a laser beam while she complains about things that happen in the store and looks for the manager. Players also receive weapons, which they can use to kill other players; damaging the Karen is also possible, but she cannot die. This game mode is based on pejorative term Karen, which was popularized as a meme during the game's development.
* Frost: Slippery patches of ice will appear on the floor of each map. Standing on the ice for more than seven seconds will temporarily freeze the player.
* Shopping List: Players are given a list of 20 items to purchase while playing the game, and must collect as many as possible before time runs out. Players also receive weapons, which they can use to kill other players. The player who collects the most at the end of the round wins.
* Zombies: A horde of zombies will spawn around the map. Players must kill these zombies with the weapons they get at the start of the round; when killed, the zombies will drop items that can be sold to the cashiers. The items dropped are not exclusive to the zombies and can also be found around the map.
===RB Battles===
On December 5, 2022, Window Seat Studios announced that Shopping Wars would be featured in RB Battles Season 3, during which star creators NotLeah and notiamsanna competed in Classic Mode and on the special RB Battles map, Planet Bloxmart, with NotLeah coming out victorious in both rounds.
After the competition, Shopping Wars' exclusive RB Battles mission went live, which required players to collect enough items on Planet Bloxmart to collect a keycard unlocking the Escape Pod, allowing them to leave Planet Bloxmart. Players initially complained that the challenge was too difficult to complete, leading to developers nerfing the challenge a few hours after its launch. An error early into the event also allowed users who completed this mode to get the bit for Sabrina's Guitar earlier than intended, causing the RB Battles lobby to temporarily shut down while Shopping Wars developers fixed the issue.
Afterwards, a quest to get the bit was found in Shopping Wars, which required players to click the toilets on the Bloxmart map in a specific order that was later revealed through a puzzle involving each of the videos released for RB Battles. Afterwards, you need to click the pipes at the corner of the Candy Kingdom map in a specific order, flooding the map with jellybeans and spawning a Golden Key in the center of the map. This Key is used to unlock the pink door at the entrance of the map, allowing you to collect the Keyblade. After collecting this, you should equip it in your inventory and attack the "Employees Only" door behind the coffee shop on the second floor of Bloxmart, teleporting you to a secret Bob the Forklift Driver boss battle. Defeat Bob by turning on all of the bright red switches around the map, starting with the one on the left and ending with the one in front of Bob. After killing him, collect Bob's Galactic Greatsword and the bit to collect Sabrina's Cyber Shredder.
==Criticism==
During the RB Battles event, many players became confused with Shopping Wars' gameplay, pointing out that the experience has no introduction or tutorial to show players how to play the experience. Many other players complained that the experience was poorly made, pointing out bugs that made the experience difficult to play and comparing it to events made for the Luobu platform. Within hours of its release, the like-dislike ratio on Shopping Wars had fallen from 74 percent to 49 percent. DJMonopoli, one of the hosts for RB Battles, asked fans of the event not to dislike Shopping Wars because of its inclusion in the event, which did little to fix the game's like-to-dislike ratio.
Some YouTubers, including DJMonopoli and KreekCraft, complained that Shopping Wars used copyrighted music in each of its rounds, leading to their videos getting demonetized. The experience features a button to mute the copyrighted songs to accommodate for this.
==References==