Make it such that even the places with 1 visitor get random people showing up

Feature Requests Website Features
#1

When the games page didnt have sections, and there was just a giant list of places, people would browse all the way to the very last places (with 1 visitor or so) if they are bored.

This means that if you have a cool place, you just need to go there and eventually some random guest will show up. And with the guest, the place would jump over the ones with 1 visitor and if the game is good, soon you would have a whole bunch of people in. Without advertizing.

Currently, the games page is limited to places which already have a lot of people in them, so this kind of random visitors are rare. If you go to a cool place, nobody will show up and you will get bored and leave.

Please bring back a massive list that includes every place that has visitors in it. Just allowing the most popular section to continue forever would work too, but you can only see a few places at a time there so its not as effective.

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#2

They don’t want a users first experience on their site to be a bad one though, and as roblox grows so does the number of visitors required to get noticed. Imagine if you want your good game to get noticed they have advertising in which you grab users attention in an ad and get them to play your game. Builders Club Members get 15 robux per day + 10 tickets so in a month of 30 days you’d get 300 tickets and 450 robux which you can convert to tickets and take a risk. If you think your game is good why not take a risk, you assume players will like your game. If your OBC you get 1800 a month so you can clearly advertise 3 times a month at an average rate. Its not hard to get noticed you just have to advertise and let players know about your game without fear of losing money.

Besides 1 Visitor is hardly much I can sit inside my game and i’m considered 1 visitor why would they let players get noticed that sit in their games?

#3

They could add a ‘Visit Random Place’ thing that works off of parameters. You could have it send you to a random place with only a few users ingame or something. Just an idea.

#4

There’s an app for that! It’s not an app but it works…

#5

There’s an app for that! It’s not an app but it works…[/quote]

Random ~= ( Random and PlayerCount > 0 )

#6

Here’s an idea: What if they added an up-and-coming category that only contains places that aren’t in any of the other categories, sorted by players online?

#7

[quote] They don’t want a users first experience on their site to be a bad one though, and as roblox grows so does the number of visitors required to get noticed. Imagine if you want your good game to get noticed they have advertising in which you grab users attention in an ad and get them to play your game. Builders Club Members get 15 robux per day + 10 tickets so in a month of 30 days you’d get 300 tickets and 450 robux which you can convert to tickets and take a risk. If you think your game is good why not take a risk, you assume players will like your game. If your OBC you get 1800 a month so you can clearly advertise 3 times a month at an average rate. Its not hard to get noticed you just have to advertise and let players know about your game without fear of losing money.

Besides 1 Visitor is hardly much I can sit inside my game and i’m considered 1 visitor why would they let players get noticed that sit in their games? [/quote]

This post is the equivalent to the “Let them eat cake!” thing

First off I don’t think Roblox is too concerned about its image. And besides, the image they have is about “Hey, these are games made by random people. You can make this stuff too!” rather than what everyone here seems to believe: Roblox being pretty much Steam 4 Kidz. Roblox aint obligated to get good games out there; they just give you the tools, pat you on the back, and let you have a go.

But as of now there’s a monopoly going on on the front page and in the ad system. Rich get richer, poor get poorer. People on the front page stay on the front page longer now, can accumulate more money, to put into ads, to stay on the front page longer, and continue the viscous cycle. Spending 300 to 450 tix or R$ on ads will hardly earn you any visitors. (Like 1/100th of what you spent)

Maybe your game isn’t front page worthy, but you should at least get credit for trying. Get some feedback and incentive to push forward and accumulate as time goes on. You can’t accumulate if advertising gives you a direct loss.

Where as back in the day, there was less of a monopoly, and people were more distributed among games. Ad space was easier to get a hold of, and if you invested some money, you could literally hit front page in 10 minutes, get your money back, and then sink back down to 1 or 2 servers after 5 minutes.

It was kinda great.

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#8

I just realized there is a ‘See all’ button.

And the ‘best rated’ probably serves the same purpose, although itll take a long time to gather enough ratings to show up on that list.

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#9

Yeah, discovery is a hard problem.

Such “a massive list that includes every place that has visitors in it” still exists, in that each of the sections on the games page are infinite-scrolling. The problem is that now there are an absolutely massive number of places with users in them, I’m talking 1000+ places with 5 more more players in them. Back in the day that you’re talking about you could go back just a couple hundred games and already see games with just a couple of people on them, but that just isn’t the case anymore.

And, advertising actually does work. The problem is that you have to both have a large enough ad-spend to dump to have a significant number of impressions, and a good enough game that people actually want to stick around and play it for a while as opposed to just leaving and visiting more popular places. We have proof of this in an experiment: The Space-Knights game by the games team. We did not use any “hacks” to get that game popular, we legitimately bought $100 worth of Robux on the account, which was previously an unknown user, and used them to advertise the game. And we did get it to the front page for quite a while off of that, easily earning back many times that investment on advertising.

#10

“each of the sections on the games page are infinite-scrolling”

This is only if you go to the “See all” page though.

And the problem of having too many places can be solved by only showing a random sample to each user. The same amount of places are shown overall, but each user has less ‘work’ to do.

#11

That doesn’t actually benefit anyone other than 1% of users who are actually trying to get someone to see the thing that they made. 99% of users just want to play good games when they’re looking through the games page, and with such discovery they would likely be seeing worse games more often.

While we can do things that only benefit developers (the 1%), unfortunately we can’t really justify doing something that only benefit developers and detriments non developers at the same time.

#12

If the random sampling was applied more the further you get from the top of the list (whatever that list is, most popular I guess) people will get the best games at zero bias, but if they want to discover (and go a few pages further), they will always get a somewhat random sample.

I justify this making sense by asserting that there are only a few really popular places, but a lot of placed with just a couple of visitors, so if you randomly pick out of the latter it doesnt really make a difference since they are all about equally popular anyways.

As in:
[50 popular places][500 less popular ones][One hundred thousand places with 1-3 visitors]
There is a clear ordering for the most popular ones, but the further you go the more uncertainty there is regarding the meaning of the amount of visitors so you cant establish a definite order and as such can just pick a random game or two and only show those to some single user.

#13

[quote] That doesn’t actually benefit anyone other than 1% of users who are actually trying to get someone to see the thing that they made. 99% of users just want to play good games when they’re looking through the games page, and with such discovery they would likely be seeing worse games more often.

While we can do things that only benefit developers (the 1%), unfortunately we can’t really justify doing something that only benefit developers and detriments non developers at the same time. [/quote]

It’s a little depressing that we won’t ever get that back now.

I mean, back then when you went to the last page, you weren’t really going there for a quality play experience. It was moreso like exploring the neverending world of games. It was then when Roblox really felt HUGE.

But now it feels like we’re limited to what we can see. Whatever cream rises up from the bottom of the huge huuuuge barrel. And a lot of the time that cream is too all the same.

I wouldn’t go as far as to say no one would be interested in something like this. People like being part of communities, or exploring something new. In fact, I would go as far as to say when someone is “bored” and “can’t find anything good on the front page”, this is the next best thing to do. Even back in the old days, those 1 player servers way in the back had random people joining them.

Random people just swinging by, and a steady stream of them. You were guarenteed to have 1 or 2 random players show up.

Happy Wheels has this same sort of concept. A lot of the fun comes from delving into that barrel, and seeing what you can scrape up. Sure, you can play guaranteed quality games from the featured list. But if you talk to anyone who has played Happy Wheels for a long time, they would say the real meat of the game comes from that recently updated list. Games that have just been made and released.

OF COURSE a lot of it is absolute garbage, and you’re not just looking for the gems. But you often find things that raise an eyebrow. Not necessarily diamond-tier, but definitely not worthless.

But without the option to view such a massive amount of random games that were recently updated, Roblox as a whole feels smaller. More limited and enclosed. Less wild and more tamed, which I feel like isn’t really in the spirit of a sandbox/ community content driven website.

#14

“It was moreso like exploring the neverending world of games. It was then when Roblox really felt HUGE.”

You have to realize that the game has moved away from that inherently as the audience has grown. Naturally, the people to come to the site early in it’s history are going to be the people who like “exploring the neverending world” rather than doing something more mainstream, because that’s exactly how they found the site while it was still in it’s infancy.

Now Roblox is a pretty mainstream product, hitting a non-negligible percentage people out of entire age-groups in the US, and as such the users coming to the site now are more naturally want to play the mainstream games on the site.

"But without the option to view such a massive amount of random games that were recently updated, "

This feature doesn’t exist now because it would not actually be useful. There is such a large volume of stuff going on on the site now that you will rarely find anything of interest anymore by this method.

#15

[quote] “It was moreso like exploring the neverending world of games. It was then when Roblox really felt HUGE.”

You have to realize that the game has moved away from that inherently as the audience has grown. Naturally, the people to come to the site early in it’s history are going to be the people who like “exploring the neverending world” rather than doing something more mainstream, because that’s exactly how they found the site while it was still in it’s infancy.

Now Roblox is a pretty mainstream product, hitting a non-negligible percentage people out of entire age-groups in the US, and as such the users coming to the site now are more naturally want to play the mainstream games on the site.

"But without the option to view such a massive amount of random games that were recently updated, "

This feature doesn’t exist now because it would not actually be useful. There is such a large volume of stuff going on on the site now that you will rarely find anything of interest anymore by this method. [/quote]

Wait

I’m confused; what’s the general vision of Roblox as it stands right now

Like what do the people in charge want the game to be like

Or is it more like whatever opportunities present itself, you hop on board

#16

We can do something like Rising games which includes visits and current visitors stats, that shows games with <50k visits and how many visits per minute and how long they stay and accumulation of visitors. Should bump them up on rising and remove top points from the main 5 categories and put it under the selections to replace with Rising games.

#17

I see nothing wrong with a “Rising” or “Trending” games category. Depending how it was done, it may show an interesting assortment of games

#18

Okay, so new users/ mainstream users make up a large majority of users. How long do these users actually play for?

Do they know about the different sections, or filtering by Genre options?

Do they click the first game they see, or do they actually scroll down? What % of these people begin to forum or “stick around” and not really play games?

I know that that is somewhat of a thing now on Roblox. Lots of people play Roblox, but no one actually PLAYS Roblox. They never go to the games page or partake in anything they’re unfamiliar with. Hell, even clans are dying out because Roblox is becoming more narrowly focused on that top % of games that they think are worth showing to new players.

I really really really do believe something like a random assortment of games that between 3 and 50 players, and recently updated, and has a like/dislike ratio > 50%, would do nothing but breed new potential for a lot of the community.

You get the “I’m bored and there’s nothing on the front page” thing a lot. Just like on Reddit or something, you then begin sifting farther down the list, or finding out if there are any subreddits which interest you. There’s even a “Bring me to a random subreddit” button, and I found cool subreddits like /r/imaginarymaps, or /r/bannedfromclubpenguin.

Then again, Reddit’s aim is to try and breed grounds for discussion and community. There’s been a lack of that on Roblox because all anyone sees is the front page, top paid, top rated, etc.

There’s nothing there to really represent the community.

Even just now, I’m skimming through this list:
http://www.roblox.com/Catalog/Lists.aspx?m=RecentlyUpdated&c=9&q=

I’m seeing new game genres, small clans, people having their first attempt at an obby and being THRILLED to see someone joining. “HOW DID YOU FIND THIS GAME? :O”

I even found this! What’s arbi up to?:

I get to meet new people, see new ideas, and really get woven into something.
Of course this isn’t for those mainstream kiddies, but if this sort of filtering was put between Builder’s Club and Top Rated, would it really be even noticed by these mainstream users?

If this is a matter of money, I’m really disappointed in the direction Roblox is heading.

#19

Here are some other cool things I found:

This guy is making a futuristic city game with planes:

(Don’t tell him I linked here, he says it’s a secret project lol)

I found an early version of a game that may look front page worthy:

#20

[quote] Here are some other cool things I found:

I found an early version of a game that may look front page worthy:
Defenders Of Roblox! - Roblox [/quote]

The kid who made that is a scammer and owes me 15,000 Robux, SINCE I BOUGHT GOOD ART THAT WAS SUPPOSE TO LOOK LIKE THE EXAMPLES HE SHOWED ME AND HE DIDNT EVEN GIVE ME CRAPPY PICTURES EITHER. He did not attempt to do shit.

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