Front page game delivery/discovery broken

[ToppleGames]

Reproduction Steps
Device Info:

• User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/96.0.4664.110 Safari/537.36 Edg/96.0.1054.62
• Platform Type: PC
• Device Type: Computer

Repro steps:

• Go onto the front page, and scroll down to the ‘Free Private Servers’ sort.
• Click the right arrow to scroll across and view more games from that sort.
• Once 64 games have been displayed to the user, no more appear.
• Click ‘See All’ on the front page sort. Initially, the same 64 games appear.
• When a ‘scroll to bottom of page’ event triggers, another 10 games appear, which are hidden from the front page
• If the browser is zoomed out and no scroll bar is present when the sort page loads, there is no way to load the final 10 games.

Expected Behavior
When I click the right arrow on the Free Private Servers sort, I expect all 74 games on the sort to be visible to the user, without having to click See All. Obviously, fitting that many games onto a single sort will not fit on a typical monitor, but by clicking the right arrow the user should be able to see all games in the sort.

If limiting the sort to 64 games is intentional, the 64 games selected should be randomly selected from the entire sort. Following the repro steps above, the same 10 games are consistently not put on the front page, and are only visible on the see all page.

Actual Behavior
Scrolling all the way to the right using the arrow button on the free private server sort, once 64 games have appeared, no more games appear. The 64 games that appear are in a random order, suggesting they are randomly selected from the 74 games on the slot, however consistently the same 10 games are dropped.

By clicking ‘See All’ the user can see all 74 games on the sort. However, the 64 games from before, in a new random order, always appear first. If the user scrolls down, it prompts the page to load the next batch of 64, which appear in a new random order.

The games I have highlighted here are the ones that consistently appear after the first batch.
Given the order of this sort is supposed to be random, I would expect the first batch to randomly select from all games in the sort, not just shuffle the order of each batch individually.

This is daily visit stats for my game, Business Legends (one of the affected games) which show roughly when the issue started, and the massive impact it had. The huge drop off in visits shows the issue is most likely affecting every user, which agrees with user reports I have received regarding the situation.

We observed this issue begin around the 13th / 14th December, exactly the time changes were made to the front page to include the Winter Sort.

Workaround
There is no real workaround for this. The issue massively impacts how many players find the games in question, the only way for a player to discover the games is to click on the sort, and then click see all, and then scroll down. If the users browser fits on the first batch of games without requiring a scroll bar in the first place, the user is unable to scroll down and load the next batch.

Issue Area: Roblox Website
Page URL: Discover - Roblox
Impact: Very High
Frequency: Constantly
Date First Experienced: 2021-12-13 19:12:00 (+00:00)

[thirdtakeonit]

Thanks for the report! We have filed a ticket in our internal database and we’ll follow up when we have an update for you.

[1nf1n1tyRX (F3lix)]

same thing happening for me, in the ‘free private servers’’ sort i could see 64 games [1]… with all the 74 games in a jumbled manner in the ‘see all’ option[2]

[1]

[2]

[ToppleGames]

Not heard anything for about 2 months now, if I can get an update on the status of this bug, that would be helpful.

There are now 15 affected games. I compiled a list of ids:

139687976 Robloxian Waterpark
81762198 Vehicle Simulator
1001911915 Farming and Friends
2191008915 Snowballer Simulator
1225282225 (NEW) BeachBlox Rescue Roleplay
2025565382 Untamed Planet
1865553771 [Update] Build It
1499870257 generic roleplay gaem.
1940051735 Business Legends
782836330 [UPDATE] Apsley Bus Simulator V4
2162459720 Summer Camp
1840326425 Pet Store Tycoon
997545142 Paradise Island Resort
2211017328 BloxCity RP
2690469318 Work at a Hotel & Resort

These games are on the free private servers sort and should be on the front page, but they are hidden from the front page which massively impacts game discovery. Not sure why this isn’t higher priority to be fixed.

[ToppleGames]

Another 2 months (ish) later…

Roblox has been aware of this issue for 6 months now. The issue is still present, and there are now 20 affected games

Demonstration/explanation of issue still present:

This issue is very damaging to the discovery of affected games. The 20 affected games are ‘always’ off the screen at first and the user has to scroll to see them. They also never appear on the front page.

My proposed solution is for Roblox to update the ‘game list API’ to make it more to fair to all games

api: games.roblox.com/v1/games/list
documentation: here

The ‘front page’ & ‘see all games in sort’ page use this API to fetch games in batches of 60.

Current (apparent) behaviour:

• Every game is given some index (per-sort) behind-the scenes
• The site calls the API requesting 60 games
• The API takes games with index 1 to 60, and gives them to the client (shuffling order each time)
• Later…
• The user scrolls down (not even possible on front page sorts)
• The site calls the API requesting the next 60 games
• The API takes games with index 61 to 120, and gives them to the client (again shuffling order)

The issue with this behaviour is the sort order is supposed to be completely random. This current behaviour favours games, as games with indexes 1-60 will always appear ahead of games with indexes 61-120, requiring a player to scroll down further to find them, or in the case of the front page, not appear at all.

(Note, the concept of numeric indexing likely works completely different behind the scenes, I am using the concept to describe how the API appears to function from a clients perspective)

Proposed behaviour:
When requested, along with the games, the API would return some ‘shuffle’ parameter.

When a client makes the initial request, the API would generate a ‘shuffle’ value. and use it to shuffle all games in the sort all together in a deterministic way. The API then returns the first 60 games and the parameter used. The ‘shuffle’ value works like a seed for a noise function, allowing the same shuffle to be reproduced for later requests.

Next time the client makes a request (to fetch the next 60 games) the shuffle parameter is passed back to the server. This parameter allows the server to reproduce the shuffle from the initial request without requiring storing any kind of session, and the server can then return games 61-120.

This way, all games in the sort would have equal probability to end up in the first batch and be discovered by a player on the front page, or earlier on the ‘see all’ page.

[Sir_Highness]

What about the games that aren’t in the first 60 and also aren’t in the 2nd 60? Are those being adversely affected by not being on the front page?

It seems that being in the 2nd batch of 60 is still better than not being in either. How will those games with free private servers be discovered?

My point? You’re complaining about being somewhat featured. You didn’t make the top 60 cutoff? My game has free private servers, I don’t see it in the list.

[Protoductio (Proto)]

The private server sort is a ‘staff curated’ sort (Roblox staff manually pick which games appear on it). If your game meets the criteria, you can apply for it to be added. Read more here.

I applied to the sort and got accepted, so should be appearing on the front page, however the bug is preventing this from happening.

I am not complaining about being somewhat featured. I am complaining that I have already been fully featured, and a bug is preventing this from benefiting my game.

(Protoductio on behalf of Topple Games)

[Sir_Highness]

Okay I didn’t realize it was curated.

I noticed something odd, but not likely relevant. In the See All page, sometimes I see your game ahead of some games that appear on the front page scroller, but I never see your game on the front page scroller.

[len_ny (frieren)]

I hope there is more going on behind the scenes to resolve this than what has been shown here.

[Dylan56202 (Dylan)]

My game (Apples to Pairs) is apart of the 20 affected games under this sort. I strongly believe it is only fair to have all of the games shuffled and displayed on the front page sort in a randomized order. Maybe it can shuffle every x amount of hours or every day. I hope this gets fixed soon as it has been like this for many months.

[FirstVertex]

@thirdtakeonit you reported in January 2022 that this was going to be looked at, and that was the last update from Roblox. What was the outcome? This is still a serious problem with the Roblox website.

See this thread for additional details:

I can't scroll down the Popular genre for games anymore

Reproduction Steps All I do is click on the Popular Tab on the Discovery page. Expected Behavior What I expect to happen is when I visit the Popular page for games, it should show me more and more games as I scroll down the page. Actual Behavior What actually happens when I visit the Popular page is it shows me a limited amount of games and won’t load any more if I scroll down. Workaround No workaround at all. The same issues applies to the Roblox Player, along with the website. …

Here is my original writeup addressed to #Bug-Support which was closed as a duplicate. The steps to reproduce here are accurate:
https://devforum.roblox.com/t/infinite-scroll-failure/1663812

/cc @Focia19 @gigagiele

[Tenaval]

Sponsored game discovery on Xbox is also broken, only shows 5 games when its meant to show 15+ so wondering if you could fix this.

[uhcak1p]

Thank you for your feedback!

Please note that this is the expected behavior today across all sorts on discover, however we’re continually working to refine the user experience by incorporating user feedback. We’ve taken your feedback into account, but please let us know if you have further questions or concerns.