On tablets and phones right now if you have a high incidence of poor performance (???) roblox will shadowban your game from all sorts on that particular device. You can tell when this has happened because your game’s page will say “This game may perform poorly on your device” next to the play button when you view it on that specific device.
Of course when a game is shadowbanned it becomes impossible to discover, ergo impossible to play on the device, ergo roblox never gets updated data that the game’s performance has improved. This obviously makes it impossible to diagnose and remedy the issues that have caused your game to be shadowbanned in the first place.
Developers need:
A clear list of things that will get your game shadowbanned
A view that tells you what devices your game is shadowbanned on and why
A way to diagnose the problems that can cause the shadowban, before the shadowban happens
Shadowbanning games without any form of communication is absolutely toxic and permanently stunts games without offering any recourse. Roblox is actively blocking me from growing my player base, and this is terrible.
No. This happens all the time to all sorts of games. Developers are never notified. It’s done by an automated system that uses some unknown metrics to determine if your game should be hidden or not.
If you don’t happen to have a specific device, you could be shadowbanned from that device and never have any idea.
Wow, my bogus developer story is being actualized.
Any interface that helps improve the developer experience (and ultimately improves Roblox) is always something to strive for.
I think this type of messages are out right stupid.
Majority of roblox games are terrible, you can’t just start categorizing them by quality and then warning others to avoid playing, it’s foul play and will be abused heavily!
I was not aware of something like this existed… and I am sure a decent amount of other developers don’t know about it either.
However, bashing on the web team or roblox in general wouldn’t really solve the issue, rather just give your idea of what can should be changed to help fix the issue.
Honestly the warning players get from your game is good because players with devices that aren’t capable with running such games shouldn’t play them if they do they’d simply get the wrong idea about the general roblox games. Though because of the fact that developers don’t get notified of the issue with their game most of us will simply just get mad and want a change as the purpose of this thread…
Roblox has other things that they warn developers about for example when your game doesn’t have a filtered chat, you’ll get a message saying “Hey please fix x issue!” I think if roblox adds that here it would help let developers know and not just telling the players “Nope wrong game go play something else”
I thought this was just a thing that happened for years, I didn’t realize my game wasn’t available to players on platforms where it gives this warning. That’s kinda horrendous if it’s true, although I’ve always been able to find my games when I search them up on the platform even if they have the warning
Apparently has been a thing since 2013 https://forum.roblox.com/Forum/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=83880754
I remember following that up with support but no one in the company had any idea about it. Neither did John who got back to me after being asked about it by support.
Smh when they tell you “mobile is the future” and “you have to develop for mobile, it’s growing so fast!” and then shadowban developer’s games. Why not help us create a better experience for mobile in our games instead of just removing our games (surely the former would be more profitable)?
Might just be me, but I received that warning on my game months ago, and right now Phone and Tablet players are outnumbering Computer and Console players. There’s been no indication that it’s anything other than a simple warning.
Many games that used to load fine on my phone now crash on launch. This came to my attention because a game I maintain has a playerbase restricted to extraordinarily low-spec mobile devices, which one day (from July onwards) wouldn’t load the game anymore.
Please have some public or dev-only resource somewhere listing the results, benchmarks and specs for the automated performance regression tests done for every release. This is especially crucial for supported devices that weren’t meant to play Roeblokes at all (3 year old Android devices sporting 1gb of ram).
Nobody should get their game shadowbanned over poor performance they had nothing to do with.
If so, that brings up another problem: we need a separate tab (or something similar) for these kind of development-related messages (things related to games under review, devex, and this, etc)
While this is unfortunate, I can understand why Roblox has a shadow banning feature, and it should definitely stay in place. However, I think there should be a better notification system and an appeal system for when you’ve fixed it.
Roblox wants their platform to appear compatible with all devices so they will only want games that perform well to appear on those devices.
If a new user downloads roblox on their tablet and the first three games they enter crash they will most likely delete the app and not come back.
With that being said monitoring the game’s page on devices makes sense but it is very destructive to not inform developers when this is happening. A developer can’t improve their game if they are not informed it has a problem.
Most companies lack transparency but simply having an automated message to developers with a list of what disqualifies them would clear up all the confusion.
How is this so different from someone finding roblox.com on their desktop and maybe the 1st three games they play crash?
They don’t shadow ban desktop games afaik
A side feature request is to have the ability to set minimum system requirements for certain games.
The sole reason I’m not bothering with mobile devices at all now is because devices with extremely low physical memory simply instantly crash. Obviously performance is still bad if you don’t have a half decent CPU, but having to ensure the game doesn’t consume more than 250 MB of memory on a mobile device (which thankfully are at least a bit more conservative with memory usage) makes me abandon plans to make games mobile compatible.
