I believe stats I have collected in my games indicate that a large percentage of my smaller player base, is made up of users who have followed their friends in-game. As a developer, I believe these changes may have a negative impact on how my games are discovered.
Search and discovery is a black box. It would help make these changes easier to digest if some details were shared about the new alternative ways users can discover games their friends have played, with statistics.
I don’t have this yet, but from what I’ve heard, that “Friend Activity” button isn’t actually a button. That feels so wrong to have something that looks like a button but functions as if you were just clicking the game normally.
I agree with this. The new “Friend Activity” label just doesn’t look natural in my opinion, it feels like there’s something off about it.
The “Friend Activity” label is actually very annoying to me but for a different reason outside of the sort - I used to just load up the home page and quickly see how many people are currently playing a game that I help develop. Now instead of it showing the number of active users, I just see this big “Friend Activity” bar in its place.
I agree. Since the Friends Playing sort has been removed we have seen an over 30% decline in our daily player base and revenue.
This new update only shows whether friends have played the games in the continue sort. I think there should also be a setting that allows users to turn off friend activity.
I greatly agree with this post!
In the past, you could see both the “thumbs up” and the people playing. Now, the statistic are replaced with the bar “Friend Activity.” You can’t see how each game is doing anymore until you click in.
I cannot believe they replaced the friend activity sort with this ugly text label
Roblox trying not to make game developing harder for small devs challenge (impossible)
This will seriously affect smaller devs, how is someone even supposed to organically get players now that the friend activity sort is gone? it was by far one of the best sorts that roblox had
I really hope this will be reverted soon, I’ve been working on my game for months and I don’t think I’m gonna have a smooth launch now that this category is gone
This indicator is neither helpful nor visually appealing. It will never be a substitute for a sort – please bring back the sort.
From disabling sponsors for <13 players to this, and on top of that the lack of response from Roblox, I can’t help but assume Roblox is just doing ANYTHING to save face from the controversy of children seeing inappropriate games.
These actions have made it increasingly harder for smaller games and new games to be discovered and it just feels like they don’t care because they’re still continuing to profit from existing games.
It would be great to see some form of userscript that can mimic this functionality since Roblox doesn’t seem to be interested in rolling back their questionable decisions
+1 to bringing this back. I don’t casually socialize with most people on the platform (most of them are outside my age range), but one thing I really appreciated was that if I met someone who had shared interests and I added them as a friend, they would often expose me to new games I liked that I wouldn’t otherwise find. Given all the other methods have been gradually removed over the years by Roblox in favor of leaving discovery to a black box algorithm, friend activity was the last and most reliable option for encountering new and interesting titles. I don’t anticipate playing many new kinds of games without it.
Roblox really should keep the “Friend Activity” sort. This new way of formatting is awful as it blocks the likes and visits from the home page, just like the friend icons at the bottom of games when they are currently playing.
I think they should maybe add an icon in the top-right of games to show if friends are currently playing and a dropdown of the friends when clicking on the icon. Here is a mockup of what I thought would be cool to see instead of the current version of the friend activity banner.
Please let us toggle this “friend activity” label. It’s sooooo annoying!
i wish there was more transparency behind these changes, they’re clearly not liked by the majority here
I wish they actually asked people if they wanted a major change before pushing it out and irritating most of their playerbase.
A/B testing doesn’t work if people have no way to opt out or adequately provide feedback.
Please bring this back! This is an awful change.
4 and a half months after OP and this still has destroyed my browsing experience, well played Roblox.
Found myself playing less and less after this change as it became increasingly harder to find games to play when I can’t look at games my friends have been playing. Please revert this
Bump. The friends playing sort was pretty much the only one I actually checked has it had some interesting games from time to time.
If roblox wants to help smaller games, they shouldn’t be removing the only sort that was actually promoting them, instead of hidding how many players are playing
