if you liked the game at one point, and favorited the game. But then the developers did a 180 degree turn or released an update that made you feel distant towards the game, or you no longer liked it as much.
You might feel compelled to give the game a dislike. However, you might not want to unfavorite the game, as it’s a game you’ve spent a lot of your time on and still want to play. There are cases where you simply aren’t bothered to click the unfavorite button.
It could also be a case where you did favorite and like the game, but had a bad run in with staff and you gave the game a dislike.
This is purely your opinion, and there is nothing broke about it. There are two independent systems at work here. The ability to favorite a game, and the ability to like or dislike a game. One helps you find the game faster, the other effects the ratings of the game.
Surely you can see how a favorite may still be around even though a like or dislike could change.
Hiding it is not the solution and it should stay until a better solution exists.
Many developers will hop through mental gymnastics to justify the bar hurts their game.
Not at all. A favorite is just a means to keep following a game and can often be in hope that it improves.
“Proper security” has nothing to do with it. What does is ways to filter reviews. It would take ages to filter to find actual comprehensive comments among all the junk comments.
The like/dislike serves a more primitive purpose than the quality of a product. Its roots lie in its enjoyment. A hard game for somebody wanting an easy game will be disliked and this is completely justified. Developer intent does not make a person enjoy a hard game more.
This ratio is more about how much of the community it appeals to.
But to a lot of people, the like / dislike ratio determines if the game is bad or not - not if it appeals to a certain demographic of players.
Personally, I think Roblox needs to implement a review system alongside the Like / Dislike ratio, so that, Oh I don’t know, developers actually get feedback instead of wondering why their game is getting disliked by players.
Sure this can be coded in by developers themselves, but it’s a lot better and more convenient for Roblox to add this feature to the sight by default.
That was the beauty of Comments and they took them away all because a lack of proper security - i.e. playing a game for 5 minutes before being able to write a comment on it.
Personally, I think that’s how the likes / dislikes should be as well. Play the game for a total of 5 minutes before a rating can be given.
People can play games without enjoying them. Recently seen that kind of skinner-box gameplay in popular simulator games, but it can be true for any game.
Hiding the like ratio will punish players because they won’t know which games are bad and not worth their time playing.
Again, there are separate threads about improving the rating system - it’s by no means perfect, but it definitely is an indicator that something’s wrong with your game if it’s too low.
Also - the favourite button does not mean you like the game. Think of it as a bookmark button - you save the page so you can come back to it later.
Likes and dislikes exist to guide users in terms of which games are enjoyed by the community, which games are broken or generally bad, and even to detour users from games that scam players.
Allowing users to hide this ratio would defeat its purpose, and would allow scams, bad games, and broken games to go under the radar.
Instead you should use this data to improve your game- maybe your user experience is bad, maybe something is broken, or maybe it’s as simple as something being unclear or too difficult- these are all issues that you should look in to fixing. The player is (almost) always right.
Once you fix the issues causing a player to dislike the game, then you will see the ratio balance out over time. Until you do this, it will remain low.
Dislikes Probably means your game is not great and needs improvements.
I think the best way to get around this would be to make a small simple, fun prototype game and see if it holds up. If it does just continue developing it
Hiding the ratio just baits people into joining bad games. The playercount doesn’t speak for itself because a low like ratio means your retention sucks. No one is going to dislike your game and keep playing. Also something to note, if your ratio is so low it makes people not join (sub 60%) it doesn’t need to be constructive. You should know what’s wrong with your game if most of the people that join dislike. That said I do support a rating system that requires a comment like @TrustMeImRussian mentioned
Preface:
If players do not observe the like ratio, then it is a useless feature which should be removed
If players do observe the like ratio, it has the potential to negatively impact games
I’m not sure if you mean it is popular/unpopular, but I believe it’s excessively relied upon
MAYBE I have a problem, but the little red bar makes me crazy
Yeah, if I enjoy a game I will give it a like and if I plan on playing it in the future I will favorite it
I won’t dislike it for having one little bit that I think could be changed while still enjoying it enough to favorite and play in the future
I think they are both very important to a games success, and I think listening to player feedback will increase player retention
My understanding from your examples is that players may only favorite and dislike a game at the same time is if they forget to unfavorite it when they dislike it (disliking a game they enjoyed before seems pretty rough though…it’s like completely abandoning all hope in the game?)
Disliking, while hoping it improves, negatively hurts the game though because it will dissuade others from trying the game (and seeing the potential it has)
Players can’t know why a game was disliked, so they either have the option to blindly decide with the ratio (and hard games become impossible to find by their desired audience), or players can play the game to try it out and ignore the like ratio; although, players will probably have a more critical eye because of the bias the like ratio implanted in them
Which community?
Maybe I am misunderstanding, but why would a player play something if he doesn’t enjoy it?
Yes, I support other threads in improving the rating system, but I want a way to just hide the like ratio-if a player does not want to spend time to try out a game, he can just scroll past it if it hides the like ratio (this is the developer’s choice)
Wanting to play a game you disliked just seems like a selfish way to deter new players from the game
Why is the playercount not dependent on the player retention? I think there are a finite amount of Roblox players
And rightfully so. Potential doesn’t make it good. I think people should be dissuaded until it improves. Developers who abandon games due to it being disliked should probably get out of the industry. Its brutal. You need some form of natural selection in order for the games that appeals to people shines and the ones that don’t fails. Your whole complaint is trying to get a jail-free card out of this brutality. Simply because you might not agree with the ratio which will likely be biased. If the game is negatively hurt that shows your game needs to do something different if you want it to appeal to the audience that plays Roblox.
I don’t see this as a problem. A game that appeals to the audience won’t struggle with this. You know if you are an outlier and will know that the ratio won’t represent you well. The like bar is about majority.
The Roblox community? You know the people playing games.
As a Roblox developer, it is incredibly frustrating to see users intentionally dislike a game because they have a grudge against a user, or they think it is funny. This is particularly common with “communities” of groups.
Recently, a skiing game of mine, for example, got a large influx of dislikes. A fellow ski community is run by a bunch of kids who were removed from one of our Discord servers because they were immature/inappropriate, underage (<13), and have caused issues in the past. They decided to revolt and spam our game with dislikes.
This not only makes a game look bad, but it discourages a developer who worked on something to only get hurt by dislikes that are there not because the content is malicious or bad, but because the person giving it thinks they are funny or has a grudge.
My idea is either removing it as a whole, not allowing a rating to be shown if it is under a certain amount of likes/dislikes, or allowing the developer to hide that from the public. This would help prevent developers from having their game, image, etc. from being penalized by users that intentionally want to damage a competitor or user/group they have a grudge with.
This will just be the same as Youtube, now scummy games will be pushed to people since you cant see the dislikes. Dislikes are, and will be, a critical part for discovery, as it gives a 1 look idea into what you might get.
If dislikes are removed, making bait and switch games will be easier, as now, they can hide people trying to help others not play.
I for one would be in favor of a Roblox based Alpha game launch system that both helps and punishes developers. Here is what I mean
Allow developers to Launch a game in an Alpha Mode ( toggled in game settings ) this does the following : A. Hides a games like ratio. B. does not allow a game to make revenue from Premium play time until the game is out of Alpha ( turn off the toggle )
This would incentivize developers to actually make a solid game.
Note: Split testing is very hard to do as I Have to spend hours porting id’s and passes to a new game, for a failed launch if 1 thing goes wrong . But if my game had alpha mode, I could drive players to the link, get feedback and give my game the opportunity to be fixed so when it does come out of alpha I have a shot at not getting like bombed to oblivion.
or
Roblox could force all games a 15 to 30 day grace period prior to a like ratio showing up
Support. When you’re a small dev, a single dislike can lower your like ratio by 50%!!! its ridiculous, and definitely makes people want to play the game less.
I’m not sure if hiding the ratings is the solution, but I know one or two things about this problem.
Dislikes are a source of low quality feedback
I don’t think that anyone here thinks that most people think before pressing the dislike button. People can dislike for any reason they want and they will most likely not come back and change their rating. They won’t (also can’t) say what’s wrong with the game, or they will say it but it’s for completely personal reasons which is the result of a concept not working out for everyone. Basically they can leave a permanent mark on a project with contributing almost anything to the situation.
Destructive for smaller games
You’ll know what I mean especially if the game turned out to have a toxic community. Bigger games don’t see the result of this much due to high CCUs however for smaller games this impact is huge enough to leave a mark on the game forever. This also personally, reduces my reasons to explore different genres on Roblox, knowing the possible player bases of those genres and the impact it’ll leave on the game.
Almost impossible to recover
Since most Roblox games can be considered as “live service” experiences, it’s not rare to keep updating a game for a long time. However once you get dislike bombed because of previous updates (maybe the game was really bad or maybe there were lots of bugs), your rating is now stuck forever if you don’t get a huge CCU boost for a long time and they liked your game. I know that we can just publish another place, but we should not need to do that in my opinion.
Extremely easy to access
All it takes for a rating is visiting the game once. In my opinion, if there was a basic limitor like an at least 3-5 minute play time to drop a rating, this would get improved a ton. It’d incentivize players to actually play the game before rating.
With the addition of displaying the 16:9 thumbnails for games, in my opinion rating became more important. Now that CCU is gone, the only visible metric about a game is the rating before playing a game, in terms of the 16:9 thumbnails.
I have some suggestions for improving the rating system:
Instead of displaying the numbers, display a little like/dislike bar.
It’s important to note that developers should still be able to access the exact values, but I don’t think that players should.
Instead of displaying an overall rating, only rating in the past 6 months/year/etc should be displayed to players
This would address the issue of dislikes being “almost impossible to recover from”. Past ratings are rarely relevant to any game, especially smaller games which change a ton with each update. The alternative to this could be displaying ratings of players who’ve played at least once in the past 6 months/year/whatever.
After playing a disliked game, there should be a one time pop-up asking if you still want to keep your rating
This would remind players to maybe change their rating, clearly if they played more after a dislike they did not straight out hate the game.
Have a 3-5 minutes of playing requirement for dropping a rating
I stated this above as well but just to keep the list intact.
Some might agree, some might not, but these are my opinions and suggestions about the rating system.
That would completely destroy the purpose for even having a like ratio, it tells a player whether or the game is good or not based on popular opinion. While I don’t agree with this, the only way I see this working is to prevent dislike botting.
