Sorts I would use on the home page in order
Merging the Discover page sorts into the home page is redundant. I’d click Discover if I wanted those sorts
As a Roblox Developer these home page changes are disrupting to my workflow for a few reasons:
As has been discussed for years, the current testing flow is horrible. I have to make changes in Roblox Studio and then in order to test my game on mobile I have to open the App and find my game (specifically, I go to favorites). Otherwise, I have no way of accessing my games without a convoluted workflow.
Continue Playing being gone causes the same issue, and not only that… I can’t continue playing the cool games I have found. Where do I access them? You want me to use Roblox’s search to find the game I was playing yesterday? That’s fine, but tell an 8 year old to use Roblox’s search. This is a massive issue for all of us Developers because you are actively pushing people away from our games that they may love. Hard for them to get back.
Friend Playing is the best sort on the platform. I can see what cool games my friends have discovered and I now have something to talk to them about. Data isn’t going to tell you that a kid went to school and talked to their friends about how cool “Game XYZ” is and then all of them scream because they all played it earlier. Guess how they found it? You’ll never believe it… but… “Friends Playing” sort.
On Roblox’s Data Driven Mentality
These multitude of AB tests going on with the front page are not going to solve anything.
If you are looking at any metric that that tells you users are spending more time on the platform, then I hope that data is granular. I’d bet money that they spend more time on the platform because they have to use Roblox search to find the games they are looking for OR they have to click 3 times to join the game their friend is playing.
If you are looking at any metric that tells you the number of games people are playing in a single session has increased then congratulations you probably did it. Why? Because you are funneling players away from games that they love and shoving more in their face. Of course they are going to hop between more games.
I’d love an explanation from someone about what they look to gain by making the Home page a mix of different sorts that barely differentiate from the Games page.
Thanks
I would put it in this order:
Continue playing and favorites should definitely be at the top, because those are the most important ones. And make the “My Creations” sort optional, as most Roblox users don’t make games.
EDIT: I just made a feature request to add a Favorites button to the website sidebar. This wouldn’t really fix the problem, but it would at least mean that it would be easy to find favorites regardless of where it moves to.
I’ve had to manually bookmark the “Friend Activity” sort page because Roblox keeps adding it, then removing it, then adding it again, etc… The lack of consistency with the home page has been narrowing the amount of (new) enjoyable games that I discover; mainly due to the fact that I look towards my friend activity to find games that I feel like I won’t be wasting my time in.
https://www.roblox.com/discover/#/sortName/FriendActivity for anyone else who wants the link.
Also, the “Recommended for You” category is based on… what exactly? At a glance, it just seems like this is just a “Most Popular” sort with a different name.
This sort option is useless to me as these are not even close to the types of games that I enjoy playing. If Roblox is gonna mine my data and log my activity, please at least use it to improve my experience.
This is still a problem. If I’m having trouble finding my own games then so are my players. Please cancel test and re-attempt after our use cases have been met.
Why are all these extra sorts being A/B tested on the home page in the first place? What happened to the idea of the “Discover” page? Shouldn’t that be the sole place where players go to discover more games on the Roblox site, and the home page is where they have a library that they like (Continue, Favorites, Friends Visiting)
My games are quite small in comparison to other developers. As far as I’m aware, most of my player base are friends who have discovered the game together.
I’ve made the assumption that the friends playing removal will damage discoverability of my game because of this. Is it possible S&D team can share some statistics regarding this?
These sorts aren’t even fully fleshed out. “Racing” only has 6 games.
Out of these 6 games showing up for me on my mobile device:
If you’re gonna fill up our home page with games, at least make the sorts accurate and have choices. And keep Friends Playing and Favorites located above the recommended sorts. If a user favorited a game that’s a self recommendation. That’s more important than an algorithm’s recommendation.
I don’t mind genre sorts being included on the Home page, but they really should be below Favorites, since that’s a Home-specific feature that I can’t get anywhere else.
As a user I use Favorites to keep track of games I’m personally invested in, often times I’ll stop playing games for weeks until there’s a new update, and the Favorites sort is a great at-a-glance list for those games.
As a developer I have no other way to keep track of my games on the homepage. I both need to see how the game is doing at a glance (playercount, like ratio, etc) and I need to have access to developer build games which often aren’t publicly visible, meaning the only way to access them is by the terribly slow loading Create page, then navigating through my various groups, finding it in the list, clicking on it… You get the idea. I just want a spot where I can pin an important game to me and I don’t want it overshadowed by generic and seemingly arbitrary sorts that Roblox thinks I’m interested in.
It looks like Friends Playing is gone now, which is pretty unfortunate. I used this sort to find obscure games my friends like to play. There are a lot of mysterious changes happening to the home page lately that are a bit inconvenient, the ones mentioned in the OP initially included even if they’ve been reverted. I’m very much not a fan.
These sorts are not accessible from the discover page either, this functionality is just completely gone.
3 months on from my original reply and this is still infuriating me to no end. But I dont care because this doesn’t affect me, I care because it affects the UX of players on the site.
Lets assume a player finds this niche game with a name thats hard to remember, and the player really likes it. They close down the game and then want to play it the next day. With the removal of Continue Playing, the player will no longer be able to find that game.
Merging Discover into Home and pushing favourites down to the bottom just inflates the top 200 games. Its the definition of “the rich get richer”.
Why is my homepage turned into https://www.roblox.com/discover#/ 
and you decided to removed “Friends Playing”? which was one of the ways I discovered and played new games… 
and you put my favorite games at the bottom… so I have to scroll all the way down to play them?! 
It was just removed AGAIN!
I’m not sure how I feel about the home page turning into a more frequently updated version of the discover page and thus making the discover page redundant.
“Continue playing” now shows games in a random order. Can the discovery team please read this feature request?
I do love it when Continue has a game I haven’t played for 4 months instead of a game I played yesterday.
Please bring back the friends playing sort - this is an abomination:
I want to see what my friends have been playing in a single, cohesive sort together, not hapazardly scattered across the homepage. This sort is a major source of game discovery for me due to in part the discover page being not being fit for purpose and effectively serving as an echo chamber for a small subset of games on the platform with minimal variety.
Additionally, once again, the favourites section has been moved to the bottom of the page - I should not have to scroll all the way to the bottom just to get to a game that I marked as being a favourite for a reason. It’s actually faster to go to my profile and then scroll down to the favourites section from there now.
It even sometimes messes with my continue panel.
It shows games, that I played 5 months ago, but doesn’t show the one I played before…
I completely concur. As a result, the number of visits to my game has decreased by 400%, leading to the game’s demise…
Not to mention most of the games in the page are mostly anime simulators and tycoons…
