I’ve been trying to replicate this tonight. My game used to show up as one of the first results for “army” and ever since August it has dropped hundreds of places down for the same search and it has hurt my experience’s discovery by a lot, and today my playerbase is as much as five times lower than during the Summer. I’ve spent the night tonight updating my game description over and over trying to see if part of it is somehow triggering the algorithm to downgrade my game. I suspect this is the case because two of my friends have games with significantly less favorites, likes, and players, but they appear hundreds of results higher than mine.
If I might ask, Robotz, what did you change in your description that fixed your discovery position? Was there a specific word or item that was causing it? Thanks
Thank you + the team for helping out with these issues. The quick fix (assuming it rolled out recently) appears to have worked. My experiences have received a DAU rebound back to ~60-80% of where they were prior to October. MAU TBD.
They had an initial massive MAU drop starting in May of 2022. Then they had another massive MAU drop in October + November. Compared to pandemic and pre-pandemic trends, the MAU difference seems to be way more than just seasonality. Oct/Nov 2022 have had the worst MAU for my experiences since Aug 2017 for no obvious reason.
It had been over a week since the last time it happened.
I am attempting right now to bring it back using the self-fix technique of submitting a random Title update.
This issue has had a band-aid put on it many times. But the real solution is still not in place. This forum post will need to remain open until Roblox actually fixes it!
Please do whatever is necessary to un-ban my game ASAP!
The best way to somewhat fix the discovery yourself appears to be updating to title to something else unfortunately. Sometimes, you just have to fix things yourself.
I got a horrible response. There’s no way it wasn’t automated. I described my issue and how it was a shadowban, only to be met with “Sorry we can’t make it where players see your game on continue playing unless they’ve actually played”. This had NOTHING to do with my problem and I was quite disappointed. This problem has persisted for 3 days and is absolutely destroying my player base.
Your words state that you’re the PM of Roblox Search and Discovery, and that your team is actively monitoring the forum and that “we hear you” and “we are working hard”.
I call your bluff! I see no evidence of any truth in any of your words. Please prove me wrong.
I would like to know what your team is doing to fix this horrible issue of my game continuously being shadow banned.
It has been admitted by Roblox that this is a “mistake” and I want to hear directly from you what solution is being worked on.
I demand to be given a lifeline of communication when my game is banned, so that I do not have to wait 48 hours for the “mistake” to be temporarily fixed.
My players demand that the game be put back online. You can read their words in the game’s group or Disco server, linked below the game. My players spent money on Gamepasses and Developer Products that now gives no value because the game can’t be found.
I worked hard for months to develop this game, and to build up the game’s reputation, traffic, and popularity. I demand that there be some form of compensation for all of the downtime that I have experienced.
If this were an isolated incident, believe me, I would not so aggressively pursue a resolution. This has now happened to my game over 40 times and the only reason I continue to suffer is because Roblox takes no action to solve the problem, but continues to temporarily fix it and act like nothing’s wrong.
YOU are responsible for the Search and Discovery, so FIX IT!! THE THING IS TOTALLY BROKEN that YOU are in charge of. YOU are to blame for my emotional suffering and all of the losses I have experienced over the past moths.
I DEMAND that the traffic and reputation that has been lost, be restored by Roblox. You can send 1 million visits to my game after this mess is cleaned up that YOU’RE responsible for.
This is awful to hear. Not only are you as a developer impacted by the bizarreness of this problem, but players who have spent their Robux on your game now get no value.
I have heard rumours that the update they made to Search and Discovery was to prioritise the higher revenue games, ie those games that are already hugely popular. Obviously this is at the expense of everyone else on the platform, both players and developers. Lets face, we all get bored of even our most favourite games are a while.
This seems like a very slippery slope that only benefits the already popular games and Roblox itself. Someone please prove me wrong.
Well, you are not wrong. The roblox official discovery guidance seems to also claim that how much the game is making would also affect their discovery.
However, this bug in discovery was different. I had updates and were making more for roblox, yet the sudden hidden discovery changes pretty screwed up everything.
The only reason this outage was so brief, is because I have now implemented a monitoring system that is working quite nicely to notify me every 30 minutes of my traffic. I am able to immediately change my title to remove or add the “.io” which can unban me. It is 100% ridiculous that I have to continue doing this, but hey, it beats losing thousands of Robux for days at a time waiting for someone to acknowledge or fix the ongoing problem.
I’m reporting another ban on Slither Simulator this evening. I used my early warning traffic crash detection system to realize it was banned and quickly respond. Then I submitted a title update to add the “.io”. Waited 15 minutes and still it was not unbanned. So I submitted another title update to remove back the “.io” and now it is unbanned.
Are you determining that it is “banned” /not banned based on the search result placement? Because player drops could have to do with recent outages as well
When it is banned that means it does not appear, at all, in any search. It does not appear, at all, in Continue and Friend Activity. The note from Roblox support tells it all:
What this says is, “we have a glitch in our moderation system, that nobody knows how to fix, we’re going to unban it this time, and next time you’ll have to go through the same 48 hour request and wait cycle again, because we’re going to treat this as an isolated incident every time you report it”
My alternative, is to “fix it myself” by closely monitoring it, waiting for it to get banned, then quickly responding by randomly updating my game’s title. If, in that case, I try to contact support, I’ll get a response like this:
What this says is, “our system is so cavalier as to quickly and silently ban your game, and keep no record of that action, all we can see, is whether it is right now banned, which is by the way, 48 hours since you reported it”.
They have been provided with links to all of my devforum posts which contain numerous screen shots. Yet they are asking for a reply email with screen shots. They claim everything is working normally.
@Focia19 it has been 27 days since we heard anything from Roblox about this issue. Your last post said that this issue has “multiple heads” and you actually said “our engineers are actively investigating and working on a long term fix!”. Have they really been actively investigating for a month now? What did they find? What solutions have been put in place? When can I expect my life to go back to normal and stop having to post my problems on devforum and Roblox support every day?
HELP. Our game got hit by the moderation glitch and has now been restored. However, we have disappeared from all searches. @Focia19 had fixed the problem previously.
@BadDad2004 yours appears to actually be under review, there is no Play button on the game’s page. That is a different issue than the shadow ban I have experienced, there is never any feedback to me, when that happens, and the game can still be played, just not found on the Roblox website. At least you can see the message on your game page and have an explanation of what is going on.
