As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to combat dislike botting. Sometimes my games get botted with thousands of dislikes, and when I contact ROBLOX to remove them, they go right back.
Additionally, players abuse the dislike system, for example if we run ads on our groups/games, players may request for a certain rank, such as co-owner etc. Most of the time, they will dislike your game due to that demand not being met.
(Photo credit: @RealVitalious)
Additionally, right next to the player count, specifically to the right, we can put a star, and right next to the star would be how many players have Favorited our game.
If this issue is addressed, it would improve my development experience because I don’t need to worry about new players coming into my game thinking our game is bad due to the botted dislikes etc. It also may bring down some developers motivation, if this was removed, developers would constantly have a positive mindset at all times, not worrying about dislikes.
I don’t think this would be a good change. Dislikes, while not infallible, are still a useful metric for many reasons. They often show the broad difference between good games and bad games, even if not totally accurately due to the misuse you mention.
Instead of simply removing dislikes, a better solution is to make the system harder to game or abuse, for example one idea that often comes up is allowing players to leave written reviews.
The only problem is that allowing players to leave written reviews is like opening a comments section, which lets bots spam stuff(i think that’s why roblox removed the comments section).
I only provided that as a quick example. My main point is that removing dislikes would make it much harder to distinguish good and bad games and ultimately reduce the usefulness of the metric.
I agree that dislikes are indeed abused sometimes, either bots infeltrating the game and disliking it or people doing so because the game is hard or they lost or got scammed or anything of that kind. But removing dislikes is a really risky thing to do, first of all the Top Rated section would be removed, and also I’m gonna the like/dislike ratio is used in a lot of algorithims, like determining which games to show in other sections such as Popular. It would be better to suggest replacements or ways to prevent this.
I don’t think an arbitrary number is very useful and isn’t a great replacement, as it doesn’t show the proportion of players who enjoyed the game. Games that are low quality but have advertised heavily would appear to be highly rated.
Instead perhaps unique players who liked the game as a percentage of total unique players, or something similar. But it would need care as you’ll find a lot of people don’t bother to rate a game.
That’s not abuse of the dislike system. If the players dislike the game due to difficulty or systems that don’t work properly, that’s the exact case where you want people to dislike so others know not to play.
Trying to hide the main issue with band aids will not solve anything.
If this is the issue, make a request to solve dislike botting, not hiding the fact that it is happening. Removing dislikes will hinder statistics to improve games, that’s a path we cannot go.
If dislikes were removed, take the picture you added for example:
This would be very unfair as games with more average players would have more likes and be ‘top rated’, while in reality there is a decent percent of players that dislikes them. Plus, games that have had 99% of player’s like them wont get as popular as easy as they should since the Top Rated section will mainly just be the same as the Popular section.
Anyway, I honestly dont think that the like/dislike ratio will affect your game (even if its botted and it is 0%) because players will play your game if its good. Everyone has a different opinion of what is good, so this really doesn’t matter in the first place. Maybe I should create a request to get likes/dislikes removed altogether…
It needs to be more like the Play Store. Like @Elttob said, some sort of review system. This would be much more helpful to developers. It allows us to see why exactly a player has disliked, instead of guessing or trying to build some sort of in-game analytics. I’m currently tracking amount of time players spend in an area to see which areas have the least retention. Perhaps a way to prompt it in game too?
If dislikes were removed, I’d like to see it as percentage of players who played and liked; e.g. if 100 people have played, and 50 of them liked, then the ratings would still show a 50% approval rating. This still wouldn’t solve botting though, as they would just play and not leave a like.
