I disagree, as a developer, I do not find this a good news at all for many reasons but I’ll mention few important ones;
This does not benefit small creators at all. How do you know if a game is your or not? How do you know if there are players playing the game? All we get from the cover of a book is a thumbnail, total like/dislike ratio, and a game title. That’s it. That’s the information we get from looking at a tile and we’d assume that game is either; generic AAA game (judging just from the thumbnail), legitimate game (without knowing which’s which is legit or not), and other factors.
Higher player count does not necessarily mean they are a better game. They’re represents as being more popular and players find them more enjoyable for them.
Not to mention experience tile doesn’t even show game owner/creator! Back in 2011, all game tiles used to show game owner’s username, title, player count (in red text), and icon. This effectively made much harder for a stolen games to be on front page simply because of the username being shown on a tile.
In a conclusion, Players will probably play a stolen game more than a legitimate game because game owner’s username doesn’t matter anymore as most of the games we play are owned by a group nowaday.
Also I just received a new change to the Home page. They completely removed “Recent Games” section from the home page. Why?? Do you want us play a new game every day instead of a same game we enjoy?? There are 3 separate “Recommended for You” and 2 separate “Sponsored” sections in a single web page. That is way excessive and they’ve hidden “Recent Games” completely + made finding my favorited games in “Favorites” section a lot harder…
Guess it’s time to pull up a notepad and find games I played often to put these URLs in there. At this point Roblox shouldn’t have went public to begin with.
EDIT: I found “Continue” section but it’s so hidden under “Sponsored” section. How do you call them “optimization” when you made it more complicated and difficult to tell which’s which is actually actively played, not stolen, etc?
You mind telling me how to fix my home screen since you completely bugged it out? Everything is all glitched out and messed up. What happened to quality assurance? Why do I need to scroll down the page to see my FRIENDS LIST? Why do I need to scroll even further to view recently played?
What was the thought process here… I’m genuinely confused. Everything is such a mess and this was executed so poorly. At least roll this update back until you fix things.
This is my exact issue, I don’t mind this update except for the part that you have to SCROLL for the MOSTED USED features of the home page (friends and continue playing.) I sometimes open the Roblox website to check quickly whose online, now that process is more annoying for me.
Dude this is exactly what I hate most about it too. The worse part is I keep thinking I’m on the “Discover” page because my brain doesn’t see a friends list. So I end up clicking home once or twice before I realize “Oh wait, this is Roblox’s dumb update that broke my screen, let me annoyingly scroll down to my friends list and recently played”. Not to mention each one of these list is sandwiched between “Recommended For You” experiences.
I don’t like the player count removal. Now you put an even bigger incentive on developers to beg for likes (which is annoying for both players and developers), because now it’s the only metric that most players will see.
And I also don’t like this change from the player perspective
I agree. Many people just look at how many players a game has and make their decision at once. This will actually give more chance to smaller games that are higher quality to gain traction.
I’m a huge fan of this, thank you for making this change! We’re finally getting players because they aren’t assuming it’s low count because it’s not quality, it’s because we hadn’t gotten a big push!
I understand why this update was implemented and I see its positive impact on newer and smaller developers praying their Roblox experience will explode someday, but as a user part of the opposition, I’d like to mention that I wish there was a Roblox setting closed by default, which players can enable to display player count. Personally, I never used player count as an indicator that pre-determined whether the gaming experience will be good or bad (i.e. a 5K concurrent playered experience never necessarily meant to me that it would be worse than a 20K concurrent playered experience), I used player count as an indicator to determine whether or not the experience and/or Roblox is broken. If the player count is 0 or around 0, I just don’t play it. Perhaps, rather than implementing what I’m just suggesting as it could result in negative impact, something else can be done to fulfill my need of knowing whether an experience works or not. Of course, joining the experience is the easiest method to find out but that’s time and resource consuming to me, I’d rather save minutes and battery life when searching for an interesting experience to play. Hope you find my feedback useful.
I am a small creator and a member of a team of a game that is a sequel to a ancient game that used to be popular a decade ago alongside with a original creator. When I shared this news to the team, they all flipped knowing this will not help us. You see, we rely on number of active players a lot because they’re one of many useful statistics to tell us how fun and enjoyable our game is.
What study are you referring to? Judging by these recent updates to the website on desktop, they clearly did not study enough. You can tell that they are very invested in the mobile versions which is why desktop version still look like/uses mobile design.
Regarding the copy, our game already got stolen multiple time and I had to file DMCA takedown multiple times. The size doesn’t matter; it’s all about how good your game is. If your game look so awesome, they will steal it and get more people playing than your original game! This remains a biggest threat for every small creators and none of them are immune to that.
Personally I think it’s unnecessary and stupid to brush valid complaints from a number of developers and players under the rug and claim that they aren’t “contributing” to anything, but maybe that’s just me ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I usually defend Roblox on these kinds of changes and try not to jump on the “hate train” but I don’t see a reason for this change at all. All this does is make our experience worse, because now you have to maintain the icon AND thumbnail equally, concentrating on the CTR of both of them (As icons are still shown in sponsors!!).
Not only that, not seeing CCU but seeing who played the game on my friends list is such a horrible trade-off… Hoping this gets reverted.
I liked the idea, but the implementation enrages me.
I was optimistic about the new tiles feature at first. I voted for the “I prefer not to see the view count” feature in that one poll because I agree that the current structure of the games page creates a systemic bias in favor of the games that are already at the top of the top and this makes it harder for smaller creators to compete.
But now that they’re out, I really strongly dislike them. Not even because of the tiles themselves. 90% of the reason why I’m upset is because they ruined the homepage. Like… what is this?? I have to scroll through 2 rows of “Recommended for you” followed by a row of “today’s picks” followed by paid sponsored ads before seeing my online friends?
Friends should always be at the top of the home page as they have been for as long as Roblox has been using this site layout. I just feel like I’m being bombarded with advertisements in places where they don’t belong… because I am.
I can tolerate having games below my friends. Roblox can put as many games as they want down there, I won’t mind. I’ll scroll through them and check them out. But something about burying my friends below 3 rows of ads makes me irrationally angry.
People hate being advertised to when they feel like the ads are being shoved down their throat and interfering with their expected experience. My expected experience on the homepage is to see my buddies at the top and some games to play below. I won’t be upset or angry when I see sponsored games below because that’s normal and feels natural. It’s not interfering with anything. But this is obstructive. When I scroll down from my friends list to look at games, I’m looking for games on purpose and I’m happy to check them out. But when I’m scrolling past games to see my friends, I’m doing the equivalent of skipping an ad on YouTube. This is an exceptionally bad design decision.
