Please Revert the "Friend Activity" Update

[pyxfluff (Pyx)]

No, I won’t change my “games” usage to “experience”, don’t ask.

Recently, Roblox has been testing a new “friend activity” view on the homepage. And, today I got it, and I’m usually on the late end of all rollouts, so I assume its out for real:

Previously, it would display in a different view on the homepage. Now, it will just display “friend activity” on all games in any view:

I disagree with this change for many reasons. Now, it’s impossible to tell the games that friends have been playing without having played them yourself, or having it happen to appear in a feed below your own resume playing page.

It also adds a banner to every game, which hides the like/dislike ratio, and current player count.

What I’m requesting here is that this is undone, or we simply get a toggle (although unlikely). I don’t like seeing a large banner on every game tile, I prefer seeing the “friends playing” feed. I don’t mind the banner staying around as long as the feed returns, but it needs a lot of work. Maybe just a smaller icon on the game icon, not a full banner which covers a lot of the game’s info.

Generally, this is a terrible change for UX and I would like to see it undone, or rethought a lot. This has been complained about a lot, and people strongly disagree with this change, so this should be an obvious change to revert.

[VGVC2]

@pyxfluff

No, I won’t change my “games” usage to “experience”, don’t ask.

Based.

…Anyways, I’ve also gotten this just recently, and it’s… inconvenient at most for me…

I often use the Continue section to see how my games are doing since I visit them a lot for testing, or if the very niche games I play are currently active.

Since I have a friend that always plays my games with me, now I won’t be able to tell via the homepage if anyone’s currently at my games (even though the visit count is often highly inaccurate), or if the ratings changed because of angry kids getting mad at some ridiculous thing.

[vvv331 (vvv)]

This thing is an inconvinience, now i dont know what to play because games friends play are no longer shown!

[GamEditoPro]

Worst thing in this update is that Friend activity text CONTRAST. It just eye-catching, and I can’t normally look on anything other than this “Friend Activity”.

You just can see there that this Friend activity much lighter than background.

Roblox, ‘please’, REMOVE THIS USELESS UPDATE

EDIT:

More and more games got locked with this banner. My friends (note: I have not really much active friends) usually play same games as me, and my home will turn out to consist only of games with this ANNOYING, ABSOLUTELY USELESS “FRIENDS ACTIVE” BANNERS. IT WILL BE IMPOSSIBLE TO EVEN SEE SOMETHING OTHER THAN THIS STUPID BANNER, REMOVE IT, IT’S ABSOLUTELY USELESS AND NEGATIVE UPDATE!!!

Roblox, don’t let my home page to be like this:

[pyxfluff (Pyx)]

@GamEditoPro

Worst thing in this update is that Friend activity text CONTRAST. It just eye-catching, and I can’t normally look on anything other than this “Friend Activity”.

You just can see there that this Friend activity much lighter than background.

I think the better solution would be to copy Studio. If a friend is ingame, then display a small tile:

If not (and there’s “friend activity”), then just display a small notice:

This doesn’t make it that I don’t want the feed back, but the banners need to go.

[Maxwell_Edison]

I was literally about to post a thread regarding this because it has gotten on my NERVES.

I use the Home Page to monitor my game’s current player count.
It is the easiest way to monitor it, as just with normal use, I can check up on the game just by using the website.

Now I Cannot do this, as the “FRIEND ACTIVITY” icon exists, permanently, even though I do not have any friends in the game currently.

Earth to roblox. Knowing if a friend played a game within the last who-knows-how-long, is not a justification for completely removing the playercount from the game icon. It was absolutely annoying enough before when it’d show the friends playing, but since it’s just permanently up now, roblox has effectively made it extremely, extremely annoying to check up on my experiences.

Being that it’s my game, obviously I have friends playing it every once and a while.
Duh. I know this. Show me the player count!!!

I don’t want to see this NONSENSE!

It is hilariously bad from a player’s perspective, as stated in the OP, but I attest it’s a terrible change for developers too, making player count unviewable at a glance on the home page.
(Some have even claimed this might be contributing to the algorithm problem stated in this thread: Roblox’s Algorithm Changes Are Killing Our Game
Though I have limited evidence for this.)

[VSCPlays]

They did bring back the tab

edit: BRUH IT’S NOW BACK

[0xRaptor]

Ngl even just a friends icon or something next to the playercount will suffice for indication

[VSCPlays]

unfortunately, it doesn’t work for every account, I logged into my alt (cuz my main got banned AGAIN) and I still have the “Friend Activity” thing

[SpeedySanikJr]

I also still have this. Any idea on when they will remove it for everyone?

[Abcreator]

This update has not been reverted for everyone as seen in the above replies. It is likely that this is possibly an A/B test and you are no longer eligible for the update, me and many other players still have this update so it is not yet solved!

[hunterk1241 (HunterDaFloofer)]

Mine was reverted. I assume that they are slowly returning it to before to ensure no issues are caused when going back.

Update: it came back…

[pyxfluff (Pyx)]

@Abcreator

It is likely that this is possibly an A/B test and you are no longer eligible for the update, me and many other players still have this update so it is not yet solved!

I had it for a little big along with some other friends who usually get rollouts quicker than me, and they’re reporting it’s gone too, so I assume it’s what the post above me is saying

[bg9]

I created a chrome extension for it called “Roblox Better Friends Visited” which moves the banner and re-applies the game rating and player count. It’s also open source.

[PeZsmistic]

Mindboggling that this was the design Roblox chose to test this idea with. Confounding variables here are a mess; this is obscuring two important data points with a label that’s not always relevant to the person looking at it, this is not going to give you a meaningful measure of how performance changes when you show friend activity per tile versus in a sort, not even with other possible changes to the homepage to reduce the likelihood of showing dead games, people still want the assurance before they click. This is a waste of time and a pointless generator of anger for both players and developers alike.

[Xecular]

I strongly dislike this change. It makes the user experience worse and removes useful controls from the users

[pyxfluff (Pyx)]

I got the update again - please do something about this.

[Entyon (la creatura)]

All of the games I see with “friend activity” don’t have any supposed “friend activity” at all.

We ““played”” this together like a week ago.

This is such a massive UI failure. Who thought of this? And ESPECIALLY who approved this? Yeah, just hide literally all of the insanely useful game information just to display one fact that could be indicated by a tiny icon.

Not to mention the fact that they also changed the avatar outfits page for whatever reason. Now all of my outfits are in a completely random order every time. Awesome!!! So much for muscle memory. Who thought of this? Creation order was FINE. It can’t be a bug, I don’t know what could even cause that by accident.

I swear to god, Roblox UI changes are written up by a monkey at a typewriter at this point.

[luketeam5]

Hi,

is Firefox support planned? Also, where can we download this I don’t see the download link.

[pyxfluff (Pyx)]

@Entyon

Not to mention the fact that they also changed the avatar outfits page for whatever reason. Now all of my outfits are in a completely random order every time. Awesome!!! So much for muscle memory. Who thought of this? Creation order was FINE. It can’t be a bug, I don’t know what could even cause that by accident.

Still in created order for me.