As a Roblox developer, it is currently infuriating for a game with a certain percentage rating to make it to the top of the recommended sort, when there are hundreds, if not thousands, of other higher rated games that do not get the time of day solely because the Roblox algorithm does not know those games exist.
This particular example is worse to me personally as it is a copied version of Virtual Valley Game’s Roblox Titanic. The copied one is being recommended to everyone, meanwhile the real version is buried a bit more in the algorithm.
The easiest way to solve this in my opinion is to bar any game with under a 60% approval rating from appearing on the recommended sort at all, anywhere.
Edit: The fan who created this didn’t mean for it to get popular either, it’s the Roblox algorithm entirely
This gets suggested every few months, and the answer is still the same: this can’t be done because then malicious bots can mass downvote games to hide them from the front page. This is already done here and there, but if downvoting had this much impact, these botters would start taking advantage of it more.
In the meantime, all Roblox can do is 1) fix the recommended algorithms and/or 2) stop bots
This idea is not to hide games from the “front page”. Having a game on recommended is a privilege of the algorithm, and it should be a warranted privilege. Having a game under 60% ratings is pretty bad, where I think it’s completely justified in hiding it from the recommended sort. Sure it would be better if bots were solved, but that’s not my job to care about, I am expressing my discontent with how Roblox currently operates.
I know you didn’t claim this, but I want to stress this idea has nothing to do with the Popular sort, it is only to hide them from the recommended sort. The recommended sort gives free advertising that then allows for games to “duke it out” with their avg visit time statistics, etc in the popular sort, where I would guess the majority of clicks come from. Badly rated games could still be in the popular sort, but they would get there on other merits, not free advertising from the recommended sort.
If anything is important enough to filter out down votes, then botters will start taking advantage of that just to rile people up or sell to people who do care.
The answer to this feature request will be what it always has been for years: no.
And the only reason for that is because developers are always shutdown for speaking their mind about it, so that no one at Roblox knows it’s a continued developer pain point.
Higher ups at Roblox need to realize this is a real problem, shifting every good rated game up one spot on the recommended sort each time there is a “badly rated game” increases the quality of games being advertised freely on the platform. Once higher ups realize this, they’ll put it on the radar for engineers to create a system to stop or significantly lower botted ratings (which they should be doing anyway.)
This is a really good in depth analysis on how parts of the front page work. I think you should keep posting regardless of what some other members might think. I’m learning a lot from this & communicating this issue to Roblox might not get it immediately solved, but at least they’ll hear you.
