A large portion of game searches on Roblox are made to find a specific game. For these searches, users often find it difficult to distinguish between the original game and fake versions with the same name. We now make it easier to identify the correct game by highlighting the best result. A few months ago we released this feature to the website. Last week, we released this same functionality to mobile as well!
Try it out now by searching for your favorite games like “MeepCity”, “Arsenal”, or “Adopt Me”.
We’re working on many more features to make game search effortless, and will post more announcements as we launch them.
difficult to distinguish between the original game and fake versions with the same name.
While improving the search feature is a good way to do this, why not remove these “fake versions?”
If it is clear they’re “fake” then surely they should be able to be removed.
Surely you can’t just remove every “meepcity” named game, it would make more sense to remove any game that has “stolen” thumbnails.
Of course this is a hard to solve issue. You don’t want to incorrectly moderate games and “spin offs” but it would make sense to attempt to employ some type of moderation / prevention of uploading “clones” and “fake versions” of these games.
Alternatively, will this be based off the amount of times you play a specific game, or the amount of players in another game. What if I want to look for “MeepCity” but the one I’m looking for is a “fake” but I like this version more so I play it more often than the real one. This “fake” one would also get around 2-5 players.
Fantastic update for mobile users. Hugely beneficial to developers who are losing players to fake versions, and to players who can now find the game they are looking for much more easily.
This is a really neat feature, expesially to find games that you enjoyed at one period of time and can’t find! I’m glad mobile users are finally recieving the same treatment that a user on the computer recieves (as well as the group admin page, amazing!) I’m really happy to see where the search engine goes, and hopefully we’ll get proper searching on things like the group page soon (or atleast something like this)
Since the system only picks one best result, this could cause one of two good games of the same genre with similar names to be removed, even if not necassarily a “fake” version of the other.
I agree with @EpicMetatableMoment why not just get rid of cloned games? In that screenshot taken most likely by someone that works at Roblox you literally show 3 fake MeepCity games. One with a stolen thumbnail so how hard would it be to get rid of those. However as a starting point great update for mobile players especially since they are typically the younger Roblox players.
I assume they’re not focusing on that because it’s easier to whitelist a relatively small group of legitimate games, rather than moderate a way larger pool of possible fakes.
It’s probably not time-efficient to address these individual cases over fixing the system. Besides, as a developer I wouldn’t want an oversight in the search algorithm to entirely blacklist my game from search when people look up similar names. This seems like it’s a step better than what was already there without being too invasive.
I don’t think mass removing will solve anything.
Complications arise. What constitutes a brand name vs generic?
MeepCity vs Roleplay in a City
For example, what if a game called “Roleplay in a City” got a few hundred player base. But there are 100s of other generic titles the same that also have that name. Who was first to claim such a generic name? What if one of those clones got popular on the recommended sort, which is known to boost fake games with no mercy.
Would this concept of a fake game remover, start removing all the non popular ones (they must be fake right) with potential to remove the actual original?
I don’t think it’s the correct way.
This is all an algorithm game, why do they name the games that to fool people into playing? What do they get out of it? A few players here and there, never to get anywhere more than that. Unless, a certain algorithm picks it up.
There are still copies of games on the recommended sort. This is where it matters that Roblox is actually giving free advertising to these stolen places.
This is an ongoing problem, these are all pictures from JUST NOW. This happens daily/hourly. This must be stopped. Stop promoting stolen IP on the recommended sort. Then drain the search vampires of their hope to get onto the algorithm to get more players
It’s very nice to see that higher-quality games get now prioritized in searches. But, speaking about searches, the search system still has some flaws, such as, searching for “V5” doesn’t bring games with “V5” in them. To bring games with “V5” in these, you need to search for “V5.0”, which I find a bit of weird. Also, sometimes, the actual game I’m searching for just isn’t there, or it is but hidden deep in other games.
This is yet another great update, though I am wondering what is the criteria for your game to be in the featured search section? Most games I usually play don’t show up in the featured search section.
My game(The Conquerors 3) is not compatible for the phone, but when I search for it, scam/fake games come up and mine does not at all. I know you don’t want to display a game that people can’t play, but how many real The Conquerors games exist? There’s only one, I think I’d rather that one be shown first before a scam game claiming to be it that wouldn’t work on the phone anyway.
Actually, mobile users are still not fully receiving the same treatment as a user on the computer receives. As a matter of fact, mobile users are still losing out on many essential features such as a catalog with a search filter, the ability to upload clothing, trading, etc. However, ROBLOX is doing some amazing advancements and progress with making mobile players have the same features as the PC player (as can be demonstrated in this post). Anyways, I’m sure we’re not too far off from having a mobile app that accomplishes most of the things the website can! I can’t wait for that to become a reality!
