Edit: Cindering found the post I was thinking of. http://devforum.roblox.com/t/hide-certain-games-via-keywords-or-approval-rating/21965
Currently, the popular sort is only based on concurrent users. In my opinion, if a game is popular, the ratings should already be able to reflect that.
I have a feeling this was posted before, but I couldn’t find another one of these type of threads.
I think 51% should hold enough to get on the list, we can’t just narrow down games because of approve/dissaprove buttons.
Someone could easy use a bot to downvote a game, to remove it from top games.
And lets not talk about the Roblox halloween event’s popularity
To be honest, I totally forgot about it.
Well, it wasn’t popular, so I doubt it showing up on the popular sort would have been logical.[quote=“Master3395, post:2, topic:23478”]
I think 51% should hold enough to get on the list, we can’t just narrow down games because of approve/dissaprove buttons.
[/quote]
Why that low? Most popular games I see that have bad ratings don’t go below 50% in most cases, and isn’t getting below D good enough to say it isn’t popular?
http://devforum.roblox.com/t/hide-certain-games-via-keywords-or-approval-rating/21965
This would be too abusable and ineffective.
Scammers will just bot their own ratings/trick their followers into giving thumbs up ratings to avoid any ratings threshold
Newer games could be targeted by trolls/dislike bots and prevented from appearing on the front page (there is already usage of dislike bots out there, and it would only get worse if dislikes could have an impact like this)
People who want to see games with good ratings should go to the Top Rated sort. The Popular sort is exactly what it says, the most popular games at the time - popular things can be good or bad, so these games should not be hidden due to some ratings threshold.
LOL that Superhero Tycoon was one of the games in my screenshot in that other thread
As mentioned on the other thread, scammers are a non-issue because ROBLOX can only take into account votes by accounts that frequently play games for extended periods of time (filters out the bots). As for tricking followers, can you find me a single example of a game (that has had enough plays to get to the popular sort on the front page) that has been downvoted to < 60% due to that?
The title of the thread specifically states it would only apply to the Popular sort. New games won’t be on the popular sort – this is irrelevant. As a game gets popular enough to be on the popular sort, trolls’ votes will be vastly outweighed by real votes, and as mentioned earlier, bots won’t be an issue.
Games that are downvoted to below 60% are a bad first-time experience for new users. They’re not something that should be featured front and center on the Games page. And new user or veteran, players could be having much more fun in a better-made game.
It’s subjective.
Could you imagine if iTunes had the same system as Roblox, but with songs instead of games? People’s music taste differ from each other. Just because a game has terrible ratings doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a bad game – why punish them for it?
My iTunes analogy makes sense here. Let’s say a user listens to their first song on iTunes from the ‘Popular’ sort and absolutely despises it. Would they stop using iTunes all together? No, it’s foolish to be able to listen to any popular song at the moment and be able to like it 100% of the time. That’s why things such as filters and search bars exist.
No it’s not. It’s 100% based on statistics. Over and over, observing all of the games that hit the front page Popular sort, games with < 60% approval ratings are underdeveloped and not thought out well.
In the context of front page games on the Popular sort, this is wrong. If ratings were affected by opinion as much as you thought they were, all of the front page games would be fluctuating around much lower approval ratings. Throughout the 115M+ visits Pizza Place has, it still has a 93% approval rating. Why? Pizza Place surely isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, so why hasn’t it been downvoted to oblivion by those people? I’m not going to give my subjective thoughts on this because it wouldn’t contribute to the discussion, but the fact of the matter is that people downvoting a game because it’s not their favorite genre is not as big of a deal as you’re making it out to be. Observing the games that get to the front page Popular sort, only bad games get downvoted to < 60%.
No it doesn’t. I don’t use iTunes, so I’m going to imagine three scenarios:
You’re not referencing the Popular sort on iTunes where positive votes would make negative votes insignificant, and in that case the analogy isn’t appropriate
You are referring to the Popular sort on iTunes, but positive votes still outweigh negative votes by a long shot, so it goes to prove that creations aren’t downvoted to oblivion just because it’s not peoples’ favorite genre
You are referring to the Popular sort on iTunes, and the ratings are around 50%/50% for all of the popular songs. In that case, it clearly can’t be compared to games on ROBLOX whose ratings look nothing like that.
If none of those were the case, please feel free to correct me. A screenshot of iTunes’ “Popular sort” for music would be helpful.
For this I’m talking about upvotes, not downvotes (e.g. “Thumbs up for free VIP!” in the game description, an in-game pop-up, and/or their group’s shout - pretty effective at tricking newer users) I think they will always be able to use some deceptive method of boosting their ratings, with or without bots.
My concern is with games that have not yet been fully released/marketed to the front page. If someone’s got a grudge against a developer and wants to dislike bomb their new game (if not through botting, then by using alt accounts/gathering up a group of malicious users) then that would really hurt the game’s chances at initially reaching the front page.
You might think that’s just paranoia, but there really are quite a few bad apples out there. For example, I’ve heard about numerous instances of OT mass-reporting legit games to try to take them down (while I doubt this specific method actually works, it does show that they have intent to group up and perform malicious actions)
I agree, but I think that an automatic ratings threshold for hiding games from the front page is a dangerous addition that can bring more cons than pros. For providing new users with the best first-time experience, I think new accounts should just be shown the Featured sort first (right now they see the Recommended sort first, which can be… questionable, at times) As for veterans, they’ll probably already know to avoid the bad games in question.
I can’t make a rebuttal for this point.
iTunes doesn’t have a system like this. That’s why I said imagine if iTunes was EXACTLY like Roblox, but with songs instead of games. Or in the same line of thinking, if Youtube was like Roblox, but with videos instead of games. Sorry for not being clearer.
Having so many downvotes puts their game in a seriously negative light. Having their followers mass-upvote it would make their game look a lot better, but all of these games are still under 60% approval ratings. Why haven’t they done this? Or have they? If you look at the screenshot I quoted from the other thread, you’ll notice the superhero tycoon went up about 2/3 of a bar since then. This is their shout:
They’re doing what you mentioned, and I assume for a while, but their ratings haven’t improved that much. Maybe they will over time, but if they can’t get > 60%, we’ve pretty much debunked that bad games can use their followers to inflate their ratings enough to get on the popular sort. Of course, we’ll have to wait a couple days to see if the rating keeps increasing or not. Maybe it will get to > 60%.
Games only get to the popular sort when they have a lot of players. They get enough people to get to the Popular sort on the front page through ads or other categories, which don’t hide games with < 60% approval ratings. Once they get to point where they’d be in the Popular sort, they’d have enough real votes to outweigh the bombed votes.
Ah, I can imagine that. YouTube videos have similar ratings to ROBLOX, and even clickbait videos have > 60% approval ratings most of the time. Videos only get downvoted to < 60% when they’re scams (e.g. “Go to this advertising website to get this software for free! (not)”) or a really crappy tutorial that you can’t learn anything from.
The same is basically true for Roblox. A popular ROBLOX meme is the Roblox game Adopt and raise a cute baby yet it still has ~80% likes even though the majority of players who do other stuff on ROBLOX dislike it.
The superhero game is a scam game (AKA advertising stuff it doesn’t have) and it has below 60% likes.
So I guess you could filter games out of the popular sort at a certain dislike % threshold :s Although I would rather them manually remove games that are scam games…
I would too, but with the whole fiasco of people upvote-botting scam games to the front page, ROBLOX made it pretty clear they didn’t want to manually delete these types of games – that they would rather find an automated way to deal with them. Maybe they’d be okay with automatically sending a report to moderators when a < 60% approval rating game got to the Popular sort since they wouldn’t have to babysit the front page that way, but I don’t know. I’ve reported scam games like that numerous times and not a single one has ever been put under review – I’m not sure if ROBLOX cares when people solicit their players for upvotes/favorites/etc and reward them with all sorts of benefits.
It’s not a bad, underdeveloped game though. Sure it has a lack of features, but that’s because it’s a roleplaying game (I just played it for a couple of minutes). As far as I’m aware, all roleplaying games on ROBLOX have a lack of features. The baby theme may seem stupid, but that’s just an opinion of ours – it’s not definitively bad.
The “Popular” section isn’t a selection of games with the most people, it’s a list of every single game in order of most players to least, depending on what platform you are on.
If they are going to filter it, it will require more parameters than just +60% ratings. That would mean the game with 5 people playing and 1 upvote and 1 downvote wouldn’t be shown at all. With tix being removed, this would make it even more difficult for budding developers. If we’re going to have another sorting filter for games based on “quality”, it should incorporate things like how long the users spent playing the game, consecutive visits by the same players, and of course ratings as well.
Basically, the “popular” filter affects small games too, not just ones with the most players. If we want to make a sorting method to filter out poor quality/scammy games it will take more than just ratings.
You shouldn’t base your rating on your personal bias. You should only vote down something if it’s objectively bad.
If most players don’t like the game then why should it be promoted? “Bad” is subjective but if everyone agrees then it is actionable.
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