Hey! This honestly might be a quite controversial suggestion, but I believe that it would benefit Roblox discovery for experiences on the platform.
Over the past year and a half I’ve noticed a major shift on the Roblox platform which moved almost all of my personal finds to the home page instead of the charts page. This is incredible because if you take a look at other platforms they do the exact same thing, instead of sharing just the top content they instead will have an algorithm catered to your exact wants and things that you would actually be interested in.
This is honestly incredible, and I’ve never had such an easy time finding experiences that I would actually want to play with the new Discovery algorithm.
But as both a developer and a player I’ve noticed that it’s became increasingly more difficult and more useless than ever to favorite experiences. Experiences that you favorite are listed all the way down at the very bottom of the home page.
Most developers would suggest moving the favorites up, but I’m suggesting something completely different. I believe that favoriting experiences should be completely removed from the platform.
I mean think about it! How often are you playing a game and you see THIS?:
All the time! And there’s not even any purpose for it… It’s just a number! And it’s incredibly difficult for users to even find the game again.
Especially with the brand new Creator Rewards system we should be encouraging our users to come back every single day naturally to our experiences via their “continue playing” feed at the top of home.
Additionally I believe that the like ratio does far more for determining how good an experience is than by the favoriting system itself.
Thank you for reading this suggestion! Please let me know what y’all think as I personally hope to see favoriting experiences removed from the platform completely
I would rather them just move it to the top, otherwise I don’t have a quick way of finding games that I like (besides bookmarking). This is an easy problem to solve, and just removing it all together is not the way to solve it.
I feel like a bookmarking feature with an entire tab under the hamburger on the left would be more useful than what we currently have. Especially seeing has home recommendations should have the most space possible.
One thing that I don’t actually like about home recommendations right now is that it’s not an infinite scroll, on other websites like X (formerly Twitter), TikTok, YouTube, etc there’s no bottom and you can go on forever and ever seeing new things that you might be interested in. Removing favorites from the bottom would improve that a lot.
I’m having a very hard time thinking of how removing this feature would bring any sort of benefit. I don’t normally say this, but this seems a whole lot like a “if you don’t like it, don’t use it” situation. It’s such an open-ended feature that many people still use, and putting in the effort of removing it sounds like a waste of resources.
People like myself use the favoriting feature every day.
Poor Evidence w/ illogical conclusion.
One of your reasons of removing favorites is because low quality games spam new players to add the game to their favorites. The logical conclusion isn’t to get rid of the feature, it’s to improve it. To stop people spamming that message.
Renaming Favorites to Saved hurts Culture & Alienates Players
Just like games to experiences, discovery to charts, and friends to connections, these terms hold weight in the Roblox community. These words hold sentimental and valid emotion. A name change being cosmetic damages community culture and alienates players like myself. That’d hurt trust and confidence in the company even more than now.
We can encourage people to come back to games in different ways. Ex: daily rewards, frequent updates, etc. Not removing a feature people use.
my use case is finding games I’d like to come back to later. Hence a saving mindset, but no, cause that goes back to company culture. I use the favorite section a lot tbh, probably the most frequently out of every sort on the platform.
People use the favorite system to gauge how “good” something is? The logical conclusion and solution to fixing the issue of poor signalling for how good a game is is a reviews system. Not removing favorites.
Roblox could just make it scroll forever without needing to remove favorites. They did this with other sorts, why’s this different? Continue and whatnot does not take up everything.
I think your reasoning throughout is flawed and hope my rebuttal helps you see that. Respectfully. I don’t mean any malice.
I’m very passionate and annoyed at decisions by higher-ups that just might agree with you despite the various flaws, and that’s scary.
The perks of removing favoriting experiences on the platform include:
The ability to infinitely scroll down home recommendations without being stopped by favorites at the very bottom (which is not how it works on other platforms at all)
It’d be impossible for users to prompt useless favorites to their user base as a stat which is almost entirely for ego and doesn’t actually describe to players how good a game is
Liking/Disliking on Roblox right now uses email verification, but favoriting isn’t locked behind the same luxury which makes it open to botting / false truth.
It’d be less confusing to new players as to what “favoriting” actually means and it’d encourage users to interact with communities more and use the upvote/downvote system to more accurately describe how they like the experience
I feel like the better description of things on the platform is important, and from what’ve seen on the platform people only really use favoriting as a means of bookmarking which is why I would further suggest to rename it. The same way that not all connections are friends, not all experiences are games, etc if they did keep favoriting experiences It would be better to label it as such. (Bookmarking, Saves, etc)
I think it’s also important to think of this as a way of stepping back and looking the Roblox platform as a whole. Favoriting on Roblox hasn’t been changed for a LONG TIME, pretty much ever since it came out! I think that it’s important as the platform evolves that we remove features which begin to create clutter and or reimagine them as new features completely.
Every source of game discovery has essentially become a slop conveyor. I’m glad you like the kinds of games that are shown on it, but day after day when I look at the homepage I see absolutely nothing I’m interested in. I see games Roblox wants me to play, not games that I want to play. But the Favorites tab is a list of every game I’ve ever enjoyed in the past decade - I can always go onto this list and find something I know I’ll have fun playing again.
It has not gotten more difficult - the Favorite button hasn’t moved. It hasn’t gotten more useless either - in fact, it’s gotten more useful as the other ways of discovering more niche games have been eradicated. What has actually happened is that the sort has been pushed down and made difficult to find in hopes that you’ll give up and just let the algorithm serve you.
The internet’s broader trend toward entirely algorithm-driven consumption is kind of a blight on humanity - We’re dominated by mass-market, sensationalized content that has miscalibrated what we think “normal” is. On the Roblox front, every game is expected to be some high-retention, polished, ultra-monetized experience, when beneath the algorithm there’s a variety of fascinating showcases, small games, and weird side-creations that never gets surfaced unless you really know where to look for it.
And I do know where to look for it - it’s in my Favorites.
I hear that “not all connections are friends”, etc., etc. But that’s not the point of all this.
Roblox has the core value of “respecting the community.” That is a standard they set for themselves. This means what the community wants should hold weight. The point and validity of the community’s sentiment isn’t nullified by a different word being a “better description.”
We, the community, don’t want to “bookmark and join experiences with our connections”, we want to “favorite and play games with our friends.” I feel you fail to understand that dynamic.
The only singular change I could ever see making sense for the favorites system is making it only visible to the player to prevent people from using game thumbnails to spell out obscenities on their profiles. But even this point is moot because you can just go moderate the thumbnails.
The favorites feature has stayed unchanged for nearly 20 years because it’s the most inoffensive feature ever; it does exactly what it’s supposed to, and it’s easy to use. I don’t think purposefully finding things to change makes any sense.
i disagree. I can’t vouch for others, but i and my friend do use this feature to not completely lose game or save for later, which serves the purpose of it.
But i do agree that devs shouldn’t able to let players prompt favorite game, it shouldn’t affect game in any way, as this feature serves for community only.
Also, remember that there are backbone structures that can’t be removed or replaced, like mitochondria. But i do agree with that point tho
I feel like this is a decent suggestion, although if it were to happen, there should be an alternative, like a bookmark button that doesn’t display stats under the game for how many bookmarks it has, can’t be prompted, and stays at the very top of the home page.
Ideally it can stay as “Favorites”, but we all know a suggestion like this is going to be taken the complete wrong way and be rebranded to “Saved Experiences” or something.
The home page is my home page, the first thing I see should be games relevant to me, not games Roblox wants me to play. If I wanted to find new games I’d go to the charts page.
I use favorites as a way to bookmark games. Thus I am absolutely against the idea of removing them, and I have an extension that brings them back up, to the second row of my home page. How it should be
Since the favorite section is the second row for me, the recommended for you section is the last one, and could go on forever. Roblox is just stupid by putting favorites at the bottom
Your other points can be solved without removing favorites (ie not allowing prompting, making the algorithm ignore favorites when recommending games, which it might already do?, and common sense, favorite is quite a common term in the software world)
Sure, but renaming “friends” to “connections” is really confusing, and dismisses the gaming and casual nature of Roblox (compared to something like LinkedIn where “connections” would make sense), and renaming the “games” page to “charts” is ridiculous to me. If you think favorite is confusing to new players, charts must be gibberish. If I was a new player, I’d expect that page to be actual graphs of idk, how many players are on roblox???
Bookmarks is not a terrible name though, other platforms use that term as well. Saves is terrible though. That term is used for like files, or saving your progress
