As a developer, it is currently really hard to accurately determine why users are downvoting or upvoting our games, especially when our ratings change after an update or an advertising campaign.
If users were prompted to select from a number of options for either downvoting/upvoting, and that data were provided to developers, it would make it a lot easier for us to improve our experiences to better serve users.
I would really like to see this. Competitive games such as my own especially suffer from like ratios, since users will often down-vote a game over it just being too hard.
Expanding on this post, Roblox should automatically not weigh a down-vote if a user does put a reason such as “too hard” or “not my type of game.” This might improve game sorts as a result.
Definitely like the idea of “trap” or “unfair” dislike reasons that don’t factor your dislike towards the game rating that’s shown on the website and used in sorts. Maybe these kinds of dislikes could be shown to the developer only, so they can see how the technical playability of their game weighs against audience enjoyment.
This is a great idea that takes the idea of dislike feedback and removes the problem of managing a ton of custom user input. Under developer stats, a breakdown of this feedback over a range of time could also be shown since this breaks it all down into tidy buckets.
This is a great idea and would definitely help development. It’s often a complete mystery why some games have low like/dislike ratios, when really it might be something as simple as the game’s controls not working on mobile, but the players have no way to communicate that besides a generic dislike.
I personally think that what should be done is instead prompt users for feedback for the developer.
The feedback would still be filtered, of course, but then, rather than the generic “It was too hard” or “Buggy controls”, players could say exactly what was making them have trouble. For example, say one of your mobile buttons overlapped the jump button on some devices. Players could say “This button is overlapping my jump button” and then the developer could fix it.
Great idea! Strongly support this. Would be very useful, especially considering that a lot of games just get disliked for being “too hard”. I feel like this prompt, asking why you disliked, would make players rethink whether the game was actually bad or whether they’re just rage-quitting.
I disagree. This is a very dumb feature which cripples the rating feature and won’t work.
The like/dislike feature is supposed to measure the opinions expressed by the players of the game, not “objective opinions”.
There are no “invalid” or “valid” reasons for disliking or liking a game. It’s not supposed to be an “objective opinion”. Game dislikes/likes are supposed to be a subjective opinion held by the player at a specific time point.
In fact the whole notion of an “objective opinion” is an oxymoron.
There is no such thing as an objective opinion.
Attempting to get a better quality metric by restricting the the reasons for engagement/disengagement to “valid” and “invalid” reasons won’t work.
There is no such thing as an “objective” quality metric. How would one even defined what “objective” means?
To decide a valid quality metric one would have to take in to account an infinite amount of different variables. Play time, visits, visits acceleration, game age, FPS, memory, disk usage, network speed, ping, game bugs, gameplay, player AFK time and an infinite amount more.
Then attempting to balance them in every possible scenario that a player has gone through and attempting balance the scenarios with each other is literally impossible.
What would you even prioritise? Playtime? Positive emotions? If people re-play it? Deciding what the “objective” quality metric is, is impossible.
The point of the dislike/like system is to do exactly what the name implies. It’s supposed to provide an opinion of the players whether or not they like the game.
There is no more objective quality metric than that.
Just because people dislike your game and you don’t think they are invalid reasons doesn’t make them invalid.
An opinion is an opinion. If the free market has a bad opinion about your game then it does, just because you think it should be different doesn’t invalidate the opinion of what the free market gave you.
If people dislike the game for being too hard then that’s a totally valid reason for disliking it. If they don’t like it, then they don’t. The creator can’t force people to have a good opinion about their game just because they think it deserves that.
In fact here the rating metric does exactly what it’s supposed to do, tell what people think of the game.
The most objective quality metric in existence is look at what each player thinks of it and then aggregate this.
Even if such a feature was implemented. It wouldn’t have it’s intended effect. People with “invalid” dislike reasons would simply rate the game with a “valid” reason.
Except there is though, sure the player may not “like” the game but what this feature is hinting towards is “why”, why why why! Why does this player enjoy my game or why don’t they enjoy it, While one person putting there opinion over one thing doesn’t make any difference cause “an opinion is an opinion” if many people put their opinion all stating the same thing at what point does it become a fact?
You might try to reply to this saying “well if the developer says this block is blue but everyone disliking the game (“dislikes”) the game cause the block is red” then what color is the block really? Blue or red?
Let’s put this into a more reasonable explanation, the developer has too many “pay-to-win” gamepasses and a player dislikes that, one “review” or “opinion” (depending on how you look at it) isn’t going to make the developer make his game “less pay-to-win” but if a lot of people leave a thumbsdown and put that reason It could just be cause the game is “pay-to-win” and the developer now knows that since the players and the developer could have different point of views and he/she/attack helicopter just might change that to make the game “less pay-to-win”.
Lets take a step back from the “like” and “dislike” ratios and look at feature request as a great example on “opinionated responses”, if a developer makes a feature request but he’s the only one who thinks that feature request is greatly needed but everyone else isn’t agreeing to his opinion is roblox going to add that feature? Probably cause roblox doesn’t listen to its community anyways but would it be a reasonable idea to waste the engineers time on that idea? Probably not since only that one developer is the one wanting it but if you have a large group of people wanting that feature make/changed perhaps its a good idea to focus a bit more time into that idea/change.
Now, everything I have above is just an “OPINION” but if enough people agree with it then it just might be a “fact” or a “popular opinion”.
Maybe. But people rarely leave them or are not truthfull.
Having a star rating system wouldn’t work because there are too many options. And people aren’t good at choosing options.
Having “allowed responses” defeats the whole purpose of liking/disliking. Not to mention people whos reasoning wouldn’t fit in to the allowed categories simply would chooce the allowed category despite it not being the real reason for feedback.
Again, there are no invalid reasons for disliking a game.
This is brilliant. People should select a reason for downvoting or upvoting an experience. I have some downvotes on my game and I would like to know why they downvoted it. It is just frustrating to see people downvote my game without myself knowing what I did wrong. I need people’s opinions on my game to improvise it (and I’m pretty sure everyone else does). There should also be an option where they are asked to explain why they downvoted it.
Yes thats true. But what I meant is, if we restrict the options people can dislike a game for, people will still dislike the game but select an allowed option. My point was that dislikes/likes shouldn’t be seperated for valid and invalid reasons.
Why not? If a player were to dislike my game because other players are too good, for example, a dislike option for such should be present to drastically reduce the weight relative to more legitimate feedback.
If a player doesn’t see an option for why they liked or disliked, why not just have an “other” option? Likes and dislikes are a form of feedback, not of personal fulfillment. Thus, it seems backwards to suggest that all feedback is equal when it simply is not.
Take the example I gave above. Is the dislike reason of difficult opponents within my control? A rational person would say no. Remember that the feedback is relative to the user’s personal experience, so in cases such as that, the personal experience is irrelevant to the actual game itself.
As mentioned earlier,
The reason I summarize it like that is because it is self-evident. All users have an equally valid reason for leaving a review, but that does not mean that every review is equally valid feedback.
Hopefully this clarifies some of the issues with polarized options.
