Many people have probably noticed that most Roblox games have less-than-stellar ratings. The games in the “Top Rated” sort have at best 95%.
What’s wrong with the current system?
Players are often uninterested in rating a game positively. It has been proven that humans are more likely to remember negative experiences than positive ones. This results in a much higher proportion of players disliking because something went wrong than liking because everything went fine.
Very few players actually rate the game. On my game with almost 550k visits, fewer than 5000 players have rated the game, for better or worse.
Because ratings are not currently limited based on how recent they were, every dislike will be on a game’s permanent record. Without a system for developers to request such binary feedback, as stated earlier these dislikes will add up fast. Ratings are used by players to determine what to play, and having a low rating can impact game discoverability and playability.
What is the solution?
Developers will be given a new API method that allows them to prompt players with an official Roblox rating CoreGUI.
This interface cannot be altered or tampered with by developers
This new UI will be easy to close and offer the option to both like and dislike.
Developers will be limited to promoting this only so many times over a certain interval of time (i.e. once per month, three times over a year, etc.).
How will the new system fix these problems?
Players will be prompted to give games ratings, leading to an increase in the overall usage of the rating system, therefore increasing accuracy.
Developers can choose when to solicit a rating from a player, which can increase overall positive ratings. I’d rather have my player rate my game in-game when they win than when they ragequit and return to the website.
This will allow developers to slow down negative ratings during events like datastore outages by just not showing ratings in-game. While some players may dislike on the site, there will be fewer.
In my mind, this opens up for “abuse” by the developers to collect only positive feedback. For example, if a player didn’t win / never has won, the developer can choose not to show the prompt, but, if the player wins or has won a lot, then, it could be displayed to them.
I like the solution, though, to be able to retrieve feedback from the players in-game, but, after certain conditions have been met and only to be triggered by Roblox and not the developers. For example, 10 minutes into the game there could be an icon in the corner next to the menu button they can click to rate the game.
The idea is to make it easy for players to rate games, especially at “neutral” times. Here’s what I mean:
Without prompts Player_A joins your game. They enjoy the game, stay for a little while, mildly impressed with the quality of your game, then leave. Nothing really stood out enough for that player to like the game, even though everything went as expected. Player_B joins your game a short while later and ends up accidentally skipping the tutorial and is confused. Player_B leaves and dislikes the game.
With prompts Player_A joins your game. They enjoy the game, stay for a little while, and partway through are prompted to rate the game. They decided to like it because even though the experience didn’t stand out very much, they felt that it was a well-made game. Player_B joins your game a short while later and ends up accidentally skipping the tutorial and is confused. Player_B is prompted for a rating right before they leave and dislikes the game.
Player_B would dislike the game either way. Player_A, otherwise ambivalent to rating the game, is given a quick and easy option to help out the developer.
In essence, players expect the game to always work perfectly as a given whenever they play. However, no matter how hard we as developers try, that will never be possible. Players don’t like a game that works exactly as expected, they dislike games that have imperfections.
Also adding the like/dislike buttons to the Roblox pause menu would be good too.
You can still dislike the game on the website/app, just like you can now. And if my idea to add it to the Roblox menu gets added, they could just click the Roblox button.
