As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to determine exactly why your game has received Dislikes. Is it trolls? Spam bots? Is it someone who doesn’t know how to play the game and raged or is there something genuinely wrong with my game? Unfortunately, we don’t know unless someone goes severely out of their way via Twitter, Roblox Group wall or some other form of contact such as Private Messaging (which most developers have off too) to tell the creators of the game, 90% of people aren’t going to do that.
It would be much nicer if when your game got Disliked, the person who disliked it would be displayed with a small window that’s OPTIONAL, to tell the developer why they’re disliking the game, providing actual feedback rather than the Developer guessing why. This would improve development because let’s be real, not every single person is going to leave a like or dislike, my game has over 130K plays and only roughly 2500 people have liked/disliked, 691 of which are dislikes. Now because of this, I would greatly like to know why so we can actually address the issues that caused them to dislike rather than take a wild guess. Even if only 10% of the people who disliked the game actually left a small feedback message, the SMALL amount of feedback from those dislikes would most likely address MOST of the dislikes regarding the game (whether they voted or not) and hopefully eliminate so many from happening and actually retain players for a longer amount of time.
So my proposal? Don’t force the players to leave feedback if they’ve disliked, however, provide an enthusiastic approach to entice them into leaving a small amount of feedback less than 200 characters long, allow developers to view feedback for their games individually via the Developer Stats page. I’ve provided a small diagram example of how this could be accomplished without being abusive or invasive of the player, it would be totally anonymous and provide us with the feedback that we need, who knows, perhaps they might see you actively take their feedback into consideration and turn that dislike into a like!
What do you guys think? Should this be a feature we should push for or do you think it’s rather pointless? I’ve also left a link to the original Twitter post I made today, i’d love to hear what other developers think about this!
Also before I forget, for the sake of clarity - perhaps this system should also carry over for likes (but completely optional)? That way people don’t dislike just to give feedback, and so the dev can know what they’re doing right.
My only worry with potentially disconnecting likes/dislikes and feedback is that we’d get a lot less feedback vs seemingly random dislikes. Either way, I think we’ve tossed around some pretty good ideas.
Although I completely agree with @WingItMan don’t mark his post as the solution because that makes it appear like this has been resolved. Instead, quote it in the OP or something.
While I realize that Like/Disliking games are a major part of how players give “feedback” on games on if they like or don’t like them, it doesn’t help developers at all if players leave a dislike on a game and give verbal feedback at all, we don’t know how to improve the game, and don’t know what may have upset that player. While for bigger developers, whose games might have so many ratings it rarely affects the ratio, for smaller developers this can be a major problem. Take my game for example Innovation Ocean Facility, I’ve majorly improved the game over time, but not enough players actually rate the game, and I rarely get any feedback, and those original dislikes are still there, bringing the like ratio down to a 69%.
So, as a Roblox developer, it’s currently hard to receive feedback from players who don’t like the game. Another problem I have with this as of recently, are players making new accounts and mass disliking the game simply because their main account was banned for breaking the rules.
If Roblox were to address this issue I stated above, it should greatly improve the amount of feedback and receiving this feedback would help remove some of the stress on figuring out what the community likes/dislikes about games. In the past, we at least something of a feedback function (Comments), but if anything the feedback functionality of Like/dislikes has been completely downgraded, and nothing improved.
Thanks for reading, I’d love to see what others think of this.
Proposed Solution
I think it should create a better experience for developers. I propose a section with the like/dislike section where a player can (I would prefer it is mandatory, but that won’t happen) give their feedback, and there would be some way a developer can view it, say in the “Developer Stats” section. This would make receiving feedback much simpler, and developers could easily scroll through a wall-like section to view the player’s feedback.
As a developer, it’s currently impossible to get up to date and accurate feedback from players using the current tools and statistics Roblox provides.
Prompting users who go out of their way to dislike my game the option to provide feedback from a list of pre-set options or text box entry would allow me to properly address their concerns. Currently I have to resort to using off-site communities (such as discord servers) to get feedback about the content of my game, and the limited visit length analytics in developer stats for issues with my game crashing on different devices.
Unfortunately the latter isn’t always easy, especially taking into consideration the lack of analytics features discussed in Detailed Dislike Analytics/Feedback which would help me correlate dislikes with potential bugs.
This issue has been especially prevalent since comments were removed. There is no on-site outlet for users to provide feedback anymore.
If Roblox is able to address the issue, and implement more relevant tools and analytics for developers to use, it’d improve my workflow by allowing me to quickly address content issues and bugs in my games to keep my like ratio up. Taking into consideration that quickly addressing these issues is critical because bad past game performance causes irrelevant ratings to negatively impact player’s expectations.
Having this issue too where my game has started getting more dislikes than likes and no one tells why they are disliking, didn’t have this issue about a year ago, but it could be great if players must leave a reason to why they dislikes so we know how to fix it, maybe have a feedback for likes too so they can tell about any issues there too, but not required for that.
As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to know why a player is thumbing down your game when over 90% of they never tells why they are thumbing down in first place and that no feedback was required when thumbing down. Just a thumb down and no feedback back is to no help for us as developers, and worst case it can make some people quit developing good games because of too much pressure without a reason for why they thumbed down (I feel it a little this way, it kills my motivation)
If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my development experience because we will know why they thumbed down and how to fix the issue they had, most of they players that thumbs down on my games is because of rage quitting or unintended bug, but I don’t know where it happens in the game or if it was a unintended bug I have not seen yet.
Good use cases can be
Debugging where the feedback can solve critical bugs you have not found or was unable to replicate.
Debugging where the feedback can tell you about really bad glitches that breaks user-experience.
It can stop those cases where there is a bot that auto-thumb downs games where it gets stopped by not providing feedback.
Sorry for bumping this old topic, but I think this suggestion is underrated.
Besides the fact that this is amazing to know what your players don’t like about your game, this will also prevent dislike bots.
What I want to add to this is that there maybe should be a captcha prior to pressing the dislike button and opening the feedback window. On this way, you will prevents bots even more and you won’t have lots of spam (because there is a chance that Free Robux bots will use this at games of younger children).
Potentially you could change your vote inside the feedback pop up, if you change your mind last minute
This will only pop up for people that are 13 or older
Skip button if you don’t want to enter feedback or leave it empty when sending. When it’s empty it will not show up inside the feedback menu in settings. (Can be seen below)
To view all feedback you received go to “Configure this Game”
Once you’re on the page you will see “Feedback”.
If you click on “Feedback” you will see all feedback from everyone that left feedback.
It could look like something like this, the feedback on the picture is very random. But that’s what we most likely will get. As some feedback posts will be useless while others will be usefull.
People that are 13+ can only post feedback (privacy reasons)
The username and userID aren’t visible towards developers (to prevent developers from contacting the dislikers)
Feedback is limited to a maximum of 100 characters, this is plenty enough
Minimum characters is 5, to prevent short messages like A, etc
Roblox can use the chat filter so people can’t post personal information, etc
Filter Roblox usernames, people tend to put the Roblox username in the message
Optional only the owner of the game can delete unwanted spam feedback (just an idea) like “shhshehhssjga”
Here’s a few pros and cons I could think of.
Pros:
Can be used to post suggestions
Can be used to report bugs
Can be used to know why someone doesn’t like your game
Can be used to know why someone likes your game
Cons:
Ban appeals (people might try to appeal for a ban in-game if your game has a ban system)
Reporting exploiters
People posting their own username or userID in the message or from other users
I hope my idea of the feedback system is a bit clear and understand able. I was planning to post it a few months ago but didn’t had the time for it. If you have any suggestions let me know
Edit:
Feedback should only stay for max 7 or 14 days. Otherwise Roblox would need to store to much.
