There have been many recent complaints about getting botted dislikes. I am sure that people also bot likes to their own games, but obviously wouldn’t complain about this.
It would improve ROBLOX as a platform if the like/dislike feature was removed altogether as it is basically useless in the first place.
For example, when a player goes to look for a game by searching, they are mainly going to choose the game that is at the relative top to the page (given their search). They will also choose games based on popularity or player count.
Players really dont care if a game is rated badly, because this is both other people’s opinion and sometimes an unfair judgement of the game. This is because everyone has a different opinion on whether a game is good or not. For instance, if I strongly dislike a game (and rate it with a thumbs down), my best friend could love it and favorite it (and rate it with a thumbs up).
With the current system, the only positive affect that likes/dislikes have is getting a game to the Top Rates section of the top page. I am sure that it wouldn’t be hard for ROBLOX to get 1 person to spend 15 minutes a month to find new games that people are playing.
Not to mention, that if a game is just starting out, a few people won’t like it. But then after a few updates, it hits the top page but these players wont play it again giving it a bad rating even though it evolved.
Removing this feature would improve the experience of developers because it gives smaller games a better chance at becoming popular.
TL;DR The like/dislike system has many issues as people can bot it in either direction and no one really judges a game on its rating as everyone has different taste. So the feature itself is pointless.
Before replying that players do look for well rated games, please answer this.
If you are looking for a game (with a certain genre) that you have never played before, and the top result on the search page has 3k players but a 5% like ratio, are you going to try it out for yourself?
Then what will be the basis for the game sorts if this gets removed? We need statistics to provide good content to players. Kids these days don’t exactly have the patience to go through every game and decide if it’s good or not and some developers will question the effectiveness of the criteria to place a game on the front page.
There’s obviously more reasons as to why this shouldn’t be removed, but this is just one.
Also like what I’ve said in the post you linked, hiding the effect of the main cause will not solve anything.
Honestly I feel like most of the people who complain about this think it’s bots when it’s actual players that dislike their games. I have never been able to make something above a 60% Like/Dislike ratio and it’s because the games were always bad when I first released them, even though I didn’t think they were.
They are definitely not useless. Likes/Dislikes are a pretty accurate way to show whether or not players like a certain game, and that’s important information.
Duh? I don’t go to the fifth page of Google to find answers to my questions, do I?
You just said they did care in the paragraph before this. If they don’t care about other people’s opinions, they would check out the game regardless of likes and dislikes anyway.
Not at all. Again, it’s useful for players because they can see whether or not a game is actually worth their time. For developers, it tells us if what we’re doing is working or not. Is the system perfect? No. But it’s better than nothing.
Even without dislikes I would never play a game I didn’t like initially again. First impressions are very important.
There are thousands upon thousands of small games that have positive like ratios that still aren’t popular. Likes and dislikes are completely insignificant in this regard.
That’s completely subjective.
We don’t need to remove the like/dislike system. We just need to fix its flaws so that it meets industry standards.
There could be arguments for making a 5 Star rating system, but I don’t think it’s reasonable to suggest removing the like/dislike feature altogether. What percent of games get botted? What is the good that comes out of the like/dislike feature? I don’t think this post is weighing those fairly. We don’t want to remove a system propping up good games to save the few who have been botted.
This is no reason to remove the feature all together, I think it has a lot of potential if worked on a bit more.
I agree that the rating feature needs to be more secure, but I don’t at all agree with either removing dislikes or removing the system as a whole.
As others have said, the system still has a lot of value for developers and players and really only goes bad when bots abuse it. I don’t believe players abuse the system at all, just bots. My game was dislike botted a while back and it hit our player count hard until they were removed by Roblox months later.
I think the best way to thwart dislike bots is something like what Amazeman suggested, or adding a minimum play time to rate games, or making rating only available to players who have used Robux at all over the lifetime of their account.
Roblox has a trend of not actually fixing issues but rather just removing the feature causing the issue (take comments for example)
Opinions matter, however, ever sense the comment feature was removed it honestly has started to feel like people dislike to harass or bully other people.
The massive problem with dislikes is that the developer does not know why the player disliked. There should really be a pop-up that mandates the player explain why they dislike. If they bypass the prompt they can be warned and if they do it again they can have their ability to dislike removed.
This is why Roblox needs to also add a way to see the games rating in the past week or month. That is if they refuse to remove dislikes.
tldr: liking doesn’t need to be removed but disliking needs to be either revamped or removed.
Yes, I would want to know how a game with that kind of rating gets 3k playing.
I don’t think removing the feature entirely is a smart move, honestly when there is already little to no feedback from players.
Why not change the Like/Dislike into a star rating or something of that sort so we’d get better feedback, sure people can still bot their game but this isn’t unique to Roblox, look at the Appstore and Googleplay
