Idea for voting/ranking system

Help and Feedback Game Design Support
#1

Hello, I wanted to put this idea in website feature ideas, but I am unable to create a post there.

I am aware that this feature has been brought up in the past, but I believe I could shed some more light on it with a slightly different possible solution.

I believe it would best serve players as well as developers to remove the thumbs down vote option.
The thumbs-up icon is ubiquitous but the thumbs-down is much more ambiguous.
Is it for games you personally don’t like, games that are full of bugs, ugly games, games that have stolen assets, games that are scams, games that are pay to win, was it bot down-voted, or any and all of the above?

What I am afraid of is people seeing that some people didn’t like a game, but misinterpreting that as it is a bad game and so they never try it out for themselves.

If the options were report, support, or do nothing, I believe it would put an end to bot down-voting as well as be a much more accurate portrayal of how the community feels about the game. You could still display a % as in 90% of the people who played this game have up-voted. I realize that this would drop many ratings as most people do not vote on a game, but at least the drop would be level across all games and encourage more people to vote if they enjoy it.

The devforum and facebook use a similar tactic where you can heart or like a post, but you can’t downvote it. If downvoting were allowed on these platforms, I am sure many people would be afraid to express their creativity due to the negative backlash.

It literally crushes my soul every time I log on and see even 1 extra downvote when I have worked so hard to the best of my ever-increasing ability to make something great. (Studies have shown that I am not just crazy as I had previously thought and that many people also feel this way)

I made a math-based game (it was ugly and had bugs as it was my first game) and people would tell me the game sucks because it is about math and they hate math and would downvote it once they realized that 30 seconds into the game.

Sorry for making this so long and thank you for reading.

TL;DR Remove downvoting because of bots and because it is unclear as to why the game is downvoted in the first place to devs and players alike, while positive reinforcement is obvious, negative is not when lacking comments or additional feedback.

7 Likes
#2

Although I see where you’re coming from this simply wouldn’t work in my opinion. There needs to be some way for the players of a game to give some sort of feedback to the developers. If a game is receiving many likes but then after one update the dislikes start to overtake the likes that means that the developers need to look into their game and talk to their players. Without the system the players and developers simply have no formal option to criticise the game. Although some games are getting botted the majority are not. The problem with bots needs to be solved by roblox.

See the dislikes as an opportunity to make your game better and don’t forget that some people are just out to troll or hurt your reputation.

4 Likes
#3

If a developer is concerned on why something i getting more dislikes they should probably investigate into it and talk to the players to see whats wrong. and removing dislikes wont certainly fix botting. people can still bot likes to instead make the game LOOK better than it actually is.
also any game that is apart of a teleport system from another game, specifically a bigger one will drop down in likes because players simply dont want to go all the way to their recents games they went on, find the game and give it a like…
To sum it up… not a good idea

3 Likes
#4

An option to show/hide the votes, which can be used by the game creator could help.

3 Likes
#5

I see where you’re coming from, recently a game I made got mass disliked, because there were some people that got together to do so, however the like/dislike ratio is a very good way of feedback, and you should take the dislikes as an opportunity to improve your game to make it the best you can!

3 Likes
#6

I also believe a lot of the algorithms Roblox uses to promote games in sorts like “Players Like You Like” or “Because You Played” use the likes vs dislikes ratio and quantity a lot to determine whether to promote your game.

So if this were to be removed, Roblox would have to spend a lot of time reworking their suggestive algorithms which might not be worth it for the change that removing downvotes would bring.

Hope this helps,
-Tom :slight_smile:

3 Likes
#7

If you remove dislike button, there will be more like bots in roblox which will overrate some games

3 Likes
#8

Thank you for the responses, some of you had common points, so I would like to address them in one reply:

  1. Removing dislike bots in no way will increase the amount of like-bots liking games. One does not depend on the other and the possibility of bot-liking a game already exists.

  2. Disliking a game in no way gives a developer feedback. Going into a game and talking to players (who frankly didn’t sign up to give you advice) about what could be better about your game is very inefficient. I would agree with a dislike if, in order to do so, the disliker had to supply a reason to the dev. In absence of that, it should be removed for the reasons I stated above.

  3. The people playing my game are the people liking it. How can I find out who disliked my game and then do I message them for feedback? Am I to expect the person who just disliked my game to then join the group, discord, or leave in-game feedback? It just doesn’t happen in my experience.

  4. The way a player criticizes a game is with feedback, not up or down voting which has more to do with popularity it seems then great game making.

  5. I am not asking for advice on how to make my games better.

Edit: I fail to see how any of these reasons above should give any player the ability to hurt how other players perceive my game. That is called slander or libel in the real world.

Edit2: I also find it frustrating when you go into your game to get feedback and at least one person demands some sort of admin or group privileges or to work for you and if you decline, instant down-vote.

#9

I like your ideas, it certainly would be more encouraging to new developers and would be more friendly. However, I see a few problems.

  1. What you said about dislike bots not being a problem would be true, but there’s a flip side to dislike bots. They would upvote games that don’t deserve it, like stolen simulators and obbies to grab a million or so robux from little children.
  2. If this was to happen, we would need a way for practically every game to make a review and point out criticisms. Saying nothing but good things about a game is a bad way to grow and learn. If you made a game, and everyone has no choice but to say that they like it or not say anything at all, the creator could get delusional and think their game is perfect, and with the removal of comments, there is absolutely no way to see what people think except for jumping into a small server and asking around about 0.01% of the playerbase.

A solution to this would be adding reviews and playtime markers. If someone gets a total of 1-3 hours playtime on a single game, they can be eligible to write a review on said game, and, after moderation of the review and the player’s history, the review may be displayed to the designer of the game and, if the designer allows, the review may also be posted on a section of the game’s page.