Down votes - Why? How to fight it?

I’m ready to make a big advertising push with my game:

Space Avengers

but I’m getting a large number of down votes! I tried many things to get on-top of it:

  • redesigned the UI
  • Added a co-operative mode for those who don’t like competitive modes
  • Added a tutorial
  • Added an in-game feedback button
  • Added in-game request to get more up-votes (after 20 minutes of game play)
  • Tried to engage people on Discord to understand what is wrong

but alas, I am no closer to understanding why people down vote it other than maybe ‘some people don’t like 2D-type game’.

Does anyone have any advice? Looking for:

  • Why people might be down voting it
  • Lets say some people just don’t like this style. How do I deal with this? Is there a good way to engage people to get more up votes?
  • Should I continue with a big push/big investment before solving this issue?
5 Likes

Hi, I had tried your game and it is pretty good!

  • Why people might be down voting it
    Maybe because what you had mentioned above: some people don’t like 2D-type game. Or there are
    not many features in the game e.g. there are only two game modes.

  • Let’s say some people just don’t like this style. How do I deal with this? Is there a good way to
    engage people to get more up votes?
    Make the game 3D such as they can see their character driving the spaceship. Add more game
    modes

  • Should I continue with a big push/big investment before solving this issue?
    I think you would need to solve the issue before the investment.

4 Likes

I played it as well, its a really cool game!!

I think the reason people are disliking could be because you advertised on mobile, mobile players are more often younger kids playing on their parents’ phone. Your game seems to be geared towards an older audience. I’ve never advertised before, so I’m not sure how big of an impact this could really have on the votes, but that is probably a part of it.

Someone please correct me if you dont think that’s true, I’m not a roblox advertising-ologist haha

Also, while I was playing, I found TypicalType in the game, pretty neat :open_mouth:

8 Likes

Interesting point about the mobile. I do enable my game for ipads, but not for phones (not enough screen for all the guis). I’m hoping that the ads respect the game settings?

3 Likes

What do you mean by, “I’m hoping that the ads respect the game settings?” I’m not sure what you mean

1 Like

I’m hoping that if the games is set to only be available for PC and tablets, it will not show the ads to phone users or xbox.

Ah okay, yeah that sounds good. Tablets might be the same story as mobile, I can’t think of any other reason there would be so many dislikes though…

I hope things turn out well for your game :smiley:

2 Likes

Could just be that people dont like it, every game gets downvotes, just gotta keep working on it and hope more people like it then dont

2 Likes

Maybe a fix might be asking for what the players want in an update

Currently your game has 409 Likes and 358 Dislikes.
I wonder whether the game votes are now suffering from herd instinct? If a game has a high Like:Dislike ratio then people will less readily choose Dislike - they will question whether they dislike it enough to stand out from the crowd. It may not be a conscious thought but we all do it to some extent.
Once there is a high enough proportion of Dislikes, they will more readily add their own Dislike vote.

2 Likes

Implementing Google Analytics might help you understand your players’ in-game experiences and what type of people they are (geography, browser type, time of day played etc can give a lot away).
Article here: https://developer.roblox.com/en-us/articles/Using-Google-Analytics
(I haven’t used Google Analytics on Roblox myself).

Also, does Roblox give you reporting on Likes/Dislikes per day over a time range? If not, it might be insightful to track those manually yourself.

3 Likes

Well… Rather than being polish I think it comes down the to UX of the game design:

The bullet velocity even when upgraded is just so slow that actually hitting anything is impossible, and the start of the game without upgraded bullet velocity is unplayable.

The default special ability which accelerates you has a fixed very large distance, you can’t do a small boost towards a direction, and hitting an asteroid can send you careening off miles away, and with the low base speed it pretty much makes using the ability a bad idea.

The UI is quite good.

edit: may have come across as quite antagonistic having not had any sleep last night, I made my feedback less toxic and more constructive.

2 Likes

I personally like the idea of the game and the mechanics too but i think kids mostly play games on roblox they dont really understand what u need to do, it has an older theme which makes it harder to understand. Maybe if u changed the theme of it to a colorful one or like made it 3D like @Electron0047 said. Good Game dont give up.

2 Likes

I got my daughter to try it, she said “This is weird, I don’t know what to do”. Needless to say, she hadn’t had the patience to open the tutorial so I haven’t seen that.
It’s funny, to me it was immediately intuitive what to do yet I get baffled by many of her Roblox favourites (the role play games like Adopt Me and Royale High). It’s a generation thing :rofl:

On Dislikes, she suggested a dislike-bot might have attacked.

1 Like

Dont scale your GUIs with Offset. Use scale. Thats why the GUIs dont fit on mobile.

Thanks. I do - never use offsets. But the guis are too complex and are too small/unusable. Going to need to rethink how they appear (e.g. a separate screen)

My bad. Most of the time I see devs using offset so I figured that was the case. Best of luck with your game! :slight_smile: :four_leaf_clover:

1 Like

Some notes about your game:

  • People might think you’re associated with scamming because of your username
  • People will skip the tutorial because it prevents them from playing the game. Once I closed it, I didn’t find a way to open it back up. A better tutorial would be accessible but not intrusive.
  • At first I was under the impression that defending the first planet would unlock more planets, and that you could build a a fleet of ships to to defend these planets. That would have been kept people’s interest for longer. But as it stands now, what is there to really look forward to?
  • Game feels overly punishing. Level 2 would be a struggle for most people and level 3 seems impossible.
  • Combination of fast enemy AI and slow bullet speed makes for a miserable combat experience
  • Some of the fonts are hard to read
  • The ratings on this place are finished. You don’t have to give up on the game, but you should re-upload it to a fresh place (to reset the ratings) once you’ve spent a few months improving it
1 Like

Joined your game and played for some time. Here are some issues that could have motivated people to dislike.

Quite hard to hit people

The bullets travel in a slow way making it quite hard to hit anyone. Adding to this, they do barely any damage, making killing anyone practicality impossible without spending 10 mins fighting each other.

Complicated UI

There is lots of UI that younger players could find complicated to understand.

Unfair gameplay

I ran into a much more powerful player, his bullets went fast and they did huge amounts of damage. Compared to the starter bullets (which go quite slow), it is techinicaly impossible to do anything in that situation. People may have been killed and ‘rage quit’ the game leaving a dislike.

My advice is to make everything much more simpler and easier to understand since most people playing roblox are younger kids who do not understand much, and leave dislikes because of that. :man_shrugging:

1 Like

Hello Developer,

I’m glad you’re reaching out to the Roblox Developer Forums for us to provide feedback and give you advice on such topics.

Of course, It’s not very pleasant to see downvotes AKA dislikes on your game, but that’s how things are in life.

Upon creating a game, you have to make sure that you are aware of people that will have negative thoughts of your game for whatever reason.

Downvotes may occur on the following occasions:

  • When a player dislikes the game genre
  • When the player generally dislikes the developer for whatever reason
  • When the player has heard rumors about the game, similar to stories like Meepcity or Adopt me as you can see in the image below.

  • Or dislikes may even occur when the other party is jealous of your work.

So upon creating a game, you agree on receiving dislikes from players for a variety of things, which you cannot change. But the thing you can change is the game itself, by collecting feedback for improvement of the game and make it even better for everyone.

Happy creating and best of luck to you in the future!

Cheers,
CrashFacts