This is Nick and Tian, Roblox’s Engineering and Product Leadership for Creator at Roblox. Last week, Dan and Manuel introduced you to the Creator Roadmap—a new resource on the Creator Hub that gives you a glimpse into, and an invitation to help shape, the future of creation on Roblox.
Today, we’re sharing the second of four segments of the Roadmap: Grow and engage your audience. We want to provide you with the tools necessary to attract, connect with, and retain users on Roblox, and we want your input on how we can do this right.
Part of attracting users is enabling people to find new experiences that they will love. The ongoing discovery improvements aim to deliver more relevant traffic to your experience and help up-and-coming experiences reach their key audience quickly. Matchmaking and server scaling improvements will help bring the right players together, and features like notifications and social invitations will help you keep your audience engaged over time. We’re also investigating ways to dissolve communication barriers with new functionality such as automatic translation in chat, localized documentation, and in-experience translation feedback.
As you read the latest installment, please keep in mind that while the Roadmap aims to be extensive, it is not an exhaustive list of everything we’re building. And remember, we will be hosting an “Ask Me Anything” with Dan and Manuel right here on the forums after the roadmap is complete.
We look forward to hearing your thoughts and sharing more with you next week.
We’ve needed search improvements for years. I’m wondering what this applies to though. I’m thinking of group search, catalog search, toolbox search, etc. Does this update apply to all of those?
What does this mean exactly? Would this hurt the ability to server-hop?
I have been fighting for this for over 6 years. Staff and algorithimic curation is not enough for discovery, and we developers need control once again in being able to better reach our intended audiences. I have incredibly high hopes for the teams working on this project to make it even more powerful than the genres pre-2017 and how it can work together with the improvement in analytics and personalisation features.
I will never, EVER believe anyone who tells me that genre sorting was a useless feature. Every game market off Roblox has one and it’s time for Roblox to get their head back into the game with this one. Providing me with this update is the single greatest piece of acknowledgement I have been waiting years for, aside from my recent post in an analytics announcement, and I trust the team to not drop the ball with this one. This will allow all developers to thrive with the right commitment, not just the elites.
I’ll reserve a healthy degree of skepticism, but I’m putting my trust in Roblox one last time here, after all the doomposting and losses I’ve been handed. I want to believe in the platform again instead of always holding my breath when an announcement is made; I’m right on the edge of the fence.
This is the singlemost important thing to me out of everything listed.
Automatic Chat Translations - In-experience chat automatically translated to supported languages (Late 2023)
This seems interesting, but I have two questions:
Is a list available for the supported languages or will this be announced closer to the time?
Will this change how different countries join (mostly) different servers or does this not even happen?
Flexible Join Destination - Send your users to non-root places when they join (Late 2023)
I can also see how this would be useful, but will it be possible to disable it for specified places?
If not, how will games that make different “levels” in different places work? An example of a game like this would be a game such as “Space Sailors” by @Pulsarnova where they sell gamepasses to “fast-forward” to a different place (to my understanding). (even if this game specifically can be changed, it doesn’t mean all games with this system can)
A feature I would really like to see that isn’t mentioned on the roadmap so far is the ability for users to leave feedback after pressing the dislike button. Users aren’t very good about leaving feedback, a game can get a lot of dislikes and yet have hardly anyone actually voicing their complaints.
If the system prompted the user to optionally provide a reason for their dislike, and then allowed developers to access the list of complaints generated from this feature, it would greatly help in improving user experience.
I would leave a feature request, but there are already several posts requesting the same thing. None of these requests have any responses from Roblox staff. Considering how valuable this feature would be, I really hope Roblox gives it more consideration.
Does this entirely mean that players will simply skip the starting place and just join a sub place of a experience? I find this being more of a 50/50 feature. Sure it can make it way simpler and easier for people to join their friends however I am also seeing situations where this could be a bad thing for the actual game. For example what if said game had a specialized server system designed for whatever other features said game has? Would this bypass that system entirely? This could break said systems to a minimum to perhaps an very high scale (Players joining places where they aren’t meant to join, player join inconsistencies, etc…). Or what if said game has a data system that relies on the start/root place of the experience? For example what if the players first have to create some sort of character in a save slot via the start place before joining the actual place their friend/friends might be in? Would the developer have to port over whatever data management system over all places just to not have this sort of issue to happen? And sure that can be done but it’s pretty obvious that it will be kinda a waste of game resources on both the ends of the server and client (Especially if said game needs to meet some pretty tight performance/memory quotas). What about player lobbies with matches taking place in a separate place? Would this just cause random players to somehow join an already running match (even thought the developers may or may have not intended for this to happen)? There are currently a lot other more potential issues that could come from this that i simply cannot list them all that im sure most developers would not want to deal with after roblox magically alters how their game joins function. So with this, what stops any developer from simply kicking out any player that joins said places if they do not meet some specific criteria or are just simply not meant to be there? Wouldn’t the developers resorting to just kicking out players the moment they join simply go against this sort of feature? Would the developers doing that simply just, make it useless?
So with all these points, would it simply be some sort of automatic feature the developer has no control over? If that’s the case then developers would be yet again (After many other updates from the past), be forced to either completely adapt their games around this (Possibly wasting a lot time on developing redundant features that were already there in specific areas all players were meant to go in) or simply just still waste a bit of time creating quick workarounds for this sort of issue (Kicking, teleporting said players back, etc…) that will 100% simply make this feature useless/meaningless. Personally im hoping that our games will AT LEAST get a button somewhere to disable/enable such behavior for our games. Best case scenario we do get some connection or function that detects whenever or not a player simply joined directly in a sub place of an experience to more effectively handle such situations if we so wish to have this sort of feature active for our experiences.
As a Translator on the platform and someone who already knows how horrible auto-localization on Roblox is, Auto Translating Chat really worries me.
Currently, auto translator doesn’t understand and mistranslates slang heavily. I do hope that there are workarounds to prevent mistranslations/random swears being thrown in.
Not liking this one. The Home page should be for stuff Roblox players usually access, basically what we already have - Friends, recent played, friend activity and favorite games. What I’d like to see in the home page is some “recommended activities” that could encourage players to perform certain actions, such as “Send [Friend] a message”, “Post something in [Group]”, or maybe, using algorithms, recommend a game to a certain player based on what they usually play. That’d make a home page, a “Home” page.
A continuous game scrolling sounds like an acceptable idea. One can just scroll how they wish and play something at random. However, Discovery is there for you to discover games, hence the literal name. Why not move it there?
A few months ago Roblox had a horrendous update where they implemented the continuous recommended games in Homepage, and I had to scroll for a whole minute to get down to Favorite games, so if you wanna do that, at least move it to the bottom.
Plus, bring that new mobile home page back. I liked it, very cool concept.
If we’re going to have an infinitely scrolling games page, can we see the Popular sort return? Additionally I don’t think it’d hurt to see some sort of “Staff Sort” with handpicked games, like the App Store has today.
I don’t think an infinitely scrolling page is a bad thing, Youtube has done this forever with recommended videos, but some of these plans sound like a doubling down on the current implementation.
Thanks for posting your roadmap, it’s great to see what’s next!
Good stuff overall, but I am severely concerned about “Continuous Home.” Nobody is complaining that the page isn’t long enough. However, there are a significant number of people (including myself) complaining that the sheer number of algorithmic sorts on the page already are drowning out the genuinely useful ones, such as Continue, Favorites, and Friends Playing. No matter what happens, please keep these three sorts at the very top of the page, because they are the only reason I visit the Home page. If I wanted to discover new games to play, I would go to the Discover page.
If Roblox is to remove the current implementation of categories and sorts, I feel a ‘tag’/category, in this new system, for “popular” is a better solution. This is if they remove the current popular entirely, which I don’t think they should do.
Guess we have to wait to see what it looks like, but I personally dislike the handpicked approach Roblox has been having with its current implementation of categories.
Maybe they mean infinitely scrolling based on a category, which would make more sense.
It defiantly looks like they’re having some kind of redemption ark going on since DevForum moderators are more open with players, updates are now a lot more transparent and it’s easier for smaller developers to DevEx since they’ve lowered the minimum amount to 30k.
The fact that we’re now getting better discovery features makes this even more clear, so I’m defiantly glad Roblox is acknowledging all the criticism they’ve gotten these last few years.
Hopefully we can see events go this route aswell, since I would love it if we could earn UGC content by doing various tasks in games tbh.
It should work like InsertService ( or that one function that lets you spawn models via scripts ) so people can’t exploit it for old hats or hats that aren’t made by the said user/group.
Love this, I also like how you guys will be working on more localization settings, due to most of my fans not being form the U.S. I do hope that soon, all languages will be able to have “auto translation” on.
