Made an under 13 account
It took PS99 over 2 months post release to start appearing on the home page. This is with top 0.001% stats. PSX still shows above it.
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It kinda is now. But it’s only for accounts that are > (under) 13
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Sounds interesting and I’ve never thought about this 
nice idea
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Yep and if someone doesn’t like a game… they could mass dislike the game (maybe with friends or alts if theyre really dedicated)
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Why would you want a game to be above 13, if it was a game like GTA 5 i would understand it but its ROBLOX and as we all know big corporations like money, so if you think about it that would be a dumb move if you where to remove users below the age of 13.
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Are there any plans to make search more accurate for genre-specific searches and games with matching keywords in their title? Search has been on and off for a while now, but lately it’s been a lot worse with showing diverse experiences.
For example, my game Infinity has “RPG” in the title, as many others do, such as @Chrythm’s Legend of the Bone Sword RPG. The genres of these are “RPG”, yet for some reason when searching for it, the response is just filled with tons of anime, city/adoption roleplay, and even simulator games, that are all already super popular, as if it’s copy and pasting half of it from the Popular sort.
Games highlighted in green feel relevant, most of the others however do not.
This is what the page looked like around mid 2023 - much more relevant results.
The majority of these games were heavily pushed down by hundreds for this search, and I noticed a decrease in traffic from ‘Search’, where it remained steady from other sources. I’ve encountered players in my community wanting to find RPG games to play, but with no luck, as the search has become so much worse for smaller games, that unless if you’re searching an exact match, I’m better off using Google to find what I’m looking for.
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I just said, that most online games are 13+,
but I saw some exceptions before, like Minecraft (10+), which also has online gameplay, has a <13 age rating.
But, Roblox is more related to ‘online’ gameplay.
Just saying it’s not a dumb move, it’s more of a ‘ethical move’ that would improve overal the game types you find on the main page (Less effortless simulators overall). But, I’m aware this would only occur if Roblox is forced to do so.
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The transparency about the discovery system is very helpful and I appreciate it, but nothing ranks king for me than trying to figure out why Roblox seems so deathly allergic to pursuing any sort of developer-driven curation of the discovery page via genre sorts again. I will see any and every initiative to discuss and iterate every step of the way for better or for worse except in this area, where Roblox falls behind every other market.
Something needs to be done here. I am done leaving my fate to algorithms that don’t benefit my types of experiences because I need to compete on metrics and against other experiences that are entirely irrelevant to the audience I want to target; and need to rely on third party platforms rather than organic growth within the platform itself first and foremost.
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No it is dumb, to make a game that was primarily made for kids 13+ is a dumb move, ROBLOX now has age ratings on games 18 years after its release, ROBLOX want to earn money - not loose it.
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The games in the first two rows were actually RPGs for the most part, so nothing really wrong with the algorithm there.
Brookhaven is a role-playing game (RPG) by definition, but I can see why you didn’t mark it. A lot of the anime games also seem off-topic but anime RPGs definitely exist and not all of them are “super popular.”
The discovery starts going off the rails after the first two rows, but I would say that it did its job for the most part.
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There’s a lot of indecisiveness and no clear definition of the term “RPG”, as Roblox has kind of had its own definition branched from other games like Runescape for most of its lifetime - the problem with classifying it as purely any sort of roleplaying game, means that technically almost every game on Roblox could be considered an RPG.
The definition I’ve always went for it to split “RP” and “RPG” - RP implies roleplay, hence why many of those experiences have “RP” in their title, while the latter are leveling simulators in nature with a varying amount of violence - for example, Vesteria and Shadovia are two RPG games that fall under that logic.
My main argument here is that it feels like it’s throwing in more games that don’t feel relevant at all to my search, especially after the first couple rows. I hope that…
- Discovery can be improved to search through genres of games, say “Horror”, “Adventure”, “Minigames”, with very literal search terms, until genres/tags can be revamped someday.
- Experiences would appear higher in these sorts if their name finds a partial match - for example, if I search “Obby”, I’d like to see games with “Obby” in their name, since most obbies meet that criteria.
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This sounds like an improvement, but please please place more weight on the actual terms people are searching. Very consistently over half of the search results on the page have ZERO relation to the search term being used. And further improvement would be letting people search for experiences by genre like steam and any other game site.
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Very good post, much needed. Looking forward to updates in this area
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This means - new recommended for you page!!! I’ll hope no scams or “sus” games will be there.
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Thanks a lot. It’s really what we want to know.
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Pertaining to discovering communities and experiences, I’d like more information about whether or not Roblox actively shadowbans games. There are quite a few games, even my own, that do not show up at all when searched for… even using the exact title of the game. There’s no emails, calls, messages, reasons, warnings, nothing… Just one day it’s like your game just disappears unless you have the exact link to it. Nobody will ever find your game again on Roblox, unless you buy ads.
What’s up with that?
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Finally! I can’t believe it, but it seems they have finally made exact search with quotes work!! I don’t know when they added it but I can now search for my game and find it by using quotes. This would never work before with the flood of tycoon games, but now it works:
I hope they don’t break it again.
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My input on the new search results
I don’t know whether it’s a good or bad thing, I guess Roblox is different than it was before but I did notice something →
Let me explain
I have a showcase called The Eiffel Tower Showcase
My goal was to make a nice Eiffel Tower on Roblox, was just a small project but nevertheless, some people can go and visit the experience.
Here’s what I noticed:
back in 2022, when I would search Eiffel Tower, the first result was my experience followed with some other related results of Eiffel Towers.
But now, when I search “Eiffel Tower”, it barely shows up, and if I go a step ahead and search “Eiffel Tower Showcase” which is a quite specific search, mine which has the exact same name is hidden down, and the other results have nothing to do with my search query:
Conclusion, I’m not quite sure what is going on with the behind the scenes of this new search results, I’m guessing that it rewards games with good revenues and not simple experiences such as showcases, maybe that’s where were at. But I do feel that such a specific search should have given me more relevant results?
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Thanks for the transparency! This is a really good start to open and honest communication about discoverability on the platform, and I’m excited to see what the follow up posts are here.
I wanted to bring to your attention though the contradiction between the events platform system made available about a year ago and these thumbnail-discoverability experiments. Currently, the same thumbnail that is being shown in people’s sorts is the thumbnail that gets used for future events. I’m worried this is tainting the thumbnail experiments / discouraging people from communicating future update to players through this really cool feature! I linked below the feature request for this, please take a look!
Thank you for the transparency!
1 Like