I am back to reiterate my point that something updated with the algorithm in 2022 that messed up experience discovery and severely impacted my experience.
As you can see, in August of 2022, my experience pictured above showed up as one of the first results when you searched for “army”. This made up a large portion of new joining players for me.
Later in 2022, something was updated with discovery that massively dropped my experience for the same search term. It dropped from being number 8 in that picture to now being hundreds of results down. I do not believe I updated my experience’s title or description to cause this to happen.
As you can imagine, this update has drastically reduced the amount of new players coming to my experience and now returning-visitors make up a large portion of my visitors.
This issue has gotten worse over time and my experience has continued to drop unnaturally low.
If you look closely at this image and look at the scrollbar on the right, you will see a yellow line where my experience, which used to be number 8 on this exact search term, now is. Above it is my old experience which is on my old profile which Roblox randomly terminated in 2019. I spent about 6 months trying to get it unbanned as I was completely innocent of any wrongdoing, so I had to make a new account and a new experience.
My old experience, listed in the image above, has significantly less visits, favorites, likes, recent players, average play time, and earnings. So I do not understand why it shows up much higher than my current experience. There are lots of dead or very low activity experiences listed above mine for this search result.
It almost makes it look like my experience was intentionally throttled for whatever reason. Maybe an anti-spam bot triggered on my experience or something. If not, I do not understand what the search algorithm is looking for. If experiences show up above mine that have less players, less likes, less visits, less favorites, what is the algorithm even looking for when you search for a certain term?
Lastly, I will point out that if you search for “army”, 8/10 of the first 10 listed experience do NOT have the word “army” in their titles or descriptions. So, maybe an explanation of what the algorithm triggers on by someone from Roblox would be helpful to us.
Of course, I have to urge Roblox to consider reverting the search algorithm to what it was in mid-2022 before all of these issues with it popped up. I know my game’s ability to get new players was drastically impacted by this algorithm update and I am sure it has drastically affected other experiences, too.
Finally, if there is an anti-spam experience filter that goes through and automatically throttles experiences, I would appreciate it if someone from Roblox staff could investigate my experience and see if it might have gotten wrongfully flagged. If not, I don’t understand how my experience could have dropped by 300 search box results in such a short period.
I also wonder if Roblox intentionally throttles R6 games in discovery. If this is the case, we need to know about it so we can react accordingly. I would be strongly against any anti-R6 action.
Thank you
