Honestly I see removing player counts as a benefit.
A lot of players choose games based off CCU so new experiences often get overlooked. Besides, if you’re interested in playing a game you have to click on it anyway, and having to read the extra info in the experience description gives you an extra chance to decide whenever it’s worth your time or not. General platform health can be found on those various tracker websites.
Reintroducing genre search is also important, I’m still astounded that this feature was removed in the first place. Imagine searching for a game on Steam or a product on Amazon without genre/category.
Seeing how divided this update is going to be, why is Roblox not doing A/B testing with the new layout? I remember seeing reports of a few users getting this layout a few months ago, but perhaps a compromise would be to increase it to 50%.
In this way, 50% of users would see this update, and the other 50% wouldn’t. This would provide much better analytics and I’m sure people wouldn’t be as harsh to this change as they need to be with A/B testing in mind.
I understand you didn’t say those exact words, but there’s no reason to care about player count at all unless you think it predicts something about the kind of experience you will have.
The justification offered for this change is basically that when users can’t exercise their high CCU preference as easily, they enjoy themselves more than they might expect they would.
I’m not saying that justification is definitely true, I’m just saying it’s what you would need to refute.
Personally, I think the algorithm changes this will help few. I didnt like the CCU hiding behind the friend played icon As a dev this helped me 0 and I have to click on groups to see my CCU. But I think a change to the overall rating system would help even more. Showcase LIkes of a game rather than a % rating. Rating can tell if a game is utter trash but its far to hard for a good game to crawl out of a dislike hole then it is for someone to glance and see how many players liked the game youtube does this and their algo will rise to the top upvoted games the most vs trash videos. I do like the 16:9 ratio however and will give me a better opertunity to create a better game icon.
We are removing Offline Friend activity(X friends) today as well.Our experiments show that the Offline Friend activity in its current state “X friends” is not useful to the users. In the future, we’ll work on making this information better by showing evidence of whether your friends enjoyed the experience
Friends recently played should come back. It was very useful for finding new games that you and friends might enjoy playing together. Now, discovery just recommends me games we might not ever play, even just by ourselves.
The “X friends” was almost useless since it only even appeared if you recently played it anyways, on top of it showing the number weeks later, even if the friend only played it once.
Excited to see what the new feature you just mentioned will be.
What’s the point? Many players won’t join an experience if the player count is low. Once again, Roblox has provided a change that does not benefit the developer community. Additionally, developer resources would be better expended in other areas, such as fixing the myriad of bug reports and implementing features that the community has been asking for for years.
I still think it’s a mistake to solely rely on game ratings with this new thumbnail view. It is very easy for the rating to be manipulated, intentionally or otherwise, and will lead to a growth in copycat games as the player count won’t be easily visible to dissuade people from playing these.
I seriously don’t understand why something like the below can’t be done
Isn’t it important to know if there are actually other players playing a game in some cases? For example, if there’s a minigame that requires 2 players to start.
Either way, not a fan of deferring to only showing the like/dislike ratio for these reasons:
There is still real estate to show CCU. Hiding it due to abuse makes minimal sense, as other aspects can and will always be gamed. If CCU is gamed, deprioritize the game from discovery instead. Making game stats + discovery even more of a black box for users is not user-friendly and feels coddling. It is not a delightful experience, especially for older users, even if metrics show a “positive” change.
