Revert the way games are displayed on your home page

[byc14 (byc)]

I’m now unable to find my favourited games without scrolling down. Not a little, but a lot.

As a developer, there’s still no good way outside of studio to keep track of the games I’m working on without favouriting them. This use case has been reported multiple times in similar threads Do not merge Favorites with Continue Playing sorts on Home

As a developer, my main concern is if a user favourites my games, I want them to see it at the top, not after other people’s games. Why would I want them to play a different game instead of mine? Why scroll to the bottom when they can just click on one at the top?

To give extra context to the above paragraph, I know that I, as a player as well, will visit the home page and see my favourites sort, and think “oh yeah that game, I’ll go play that”

As a user, I care about my recently played and favourites more than other games. I’m not trying to discover games, that’s what the “Discover” tab is for.

I want to see my favourites and recently played only, or at the very least at the top.

Please re-consider implementation.

Also I understand a lot of product and engineering work goes into these tests, so I’m not trying to sound rude/put down the people who have worked hard on it, just trying to convey why this inconveniences me as a developer. I appreciate all the work that has been put into trying to increase discoverability of games recently.

Edit:

@byc14

Looks like the “Friends Playing” sort was removed as well.

I think this shouldn’t have been removed and still be at the top. I’m way more likely to share similar interests with my friends.

Right now I’m trying to find a game they were playing but I can’t see it. I don’t feel like jumping through hoops to find it through the search feature, so I’m just not going to play it.

If I don’t want to find the game, would a bunch of 8 year olds want to? They don’t have discord to send their friends a link to the game, so how would they share it? Via the “invite” feature which they probably don’t know exists?

Please cancel the test and cease all future changes on the page until features are implemented to fulfill the above use cases.

@byc14

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?

[Noble_Draconian]

+1 to this. As a player, if I favorite a game I want to have quick access to it. I don’t want to scroll through rows of suggested games to get to them, as mentioned above that’s what the purpose of the discover page is for. I would rather have the order be:

1. Continue playing
2. Favorites
3. Rest of home page sorts

[Jiskpirate]

I am also still mad that categories no longer play a large part to sort games with, just as the tab “friends playing”, which is also gone now. It is now even harder for creators to share their work as only the mainstream games get attention on the homepage.

[byc14 (byc)]

Looks like the “Friends Playing” sort was removed as well.

I think this shouldn’t have been removed and still be at the top. I’m way more likely to share similar interests with my friends.

Right now I’m trying to find a game they were playing but I can’t see it. I don’t feel like jumping through hoops to find it through the search feature, so I’m just not going to play it.

If I don’t want to find the game, would a bunch of 8 year olds want to? They don’t have discord to send their friends a link to the game, so how would they share it? Via the “invite” feature which they probably don’t know exists?

Please cancel the test and cease all future changes on the page until features are implemented to fulfill the above use cases.

[Roball1 (Roball)]

Agreed, I personally use the “Friends Playing” sort to find most games that I play and record on my YouTube channel. The sort is extremely useful for me because I know that my friends are able to discover new/trendy games faster than I ever could. At the moment it is removed for me and it feels like I have nothing new to play. Removing the Friends Playing sort makes little to no sense to me, I find it to be extremely useful whenever I release a new game because it’s both a great and easy way for your game to pop up on someone’s home page.

[metatablecatmaid (metatablecat)]

Sorts I would use on the home page in order

• Continue “experiencing”
• Friends “experiencing”
• My Creations (add this it would be quicker than going through create)
• Favourites
• Following (would bring more attention to the Follow feature)
• Recommended for you

Merging the Discover page sorts into the home page is redundant. I’d click Discover if I wanted those sorts

[ImprobableAI]

As a Roblox Developer these home page changes are disrupting to my workflow for a few reasons:

1. Favorites are how I am able to easily access my games and play them to test something out. Until this workflow changes from a testing standpoint I do not want this change.

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.

2. 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.

3. 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

[Fire540Games (FireForge)]

I would put it in this order:

• Continue playing
• Favorites
• Friends playing
• Following
• Recommended for you

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.

Add a "Favorites" button to the website sidebar

As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to access favorites when its location on the home page keeps changing. The favorites sort keeps moving around on the home page, most recently to the very bottom. Adding a Favorites button to the sidebar would help with this problem. The favorites button would take you to this page: https://www.roblox.com/discover#/sortName/v2/Favorites [image] If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my development experience because favorites …

[mew903]

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.

[byc14 (byc)]

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.

[TheAmazeman]

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)

[Noble_Draconian]

As of 8/6/21, there is no way for players to easily view their favorites. Please restore favorites.

[byc14 (byc)]

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?

[GeorgeOfAIITrades]

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:

• Project Trackday isn’t even available for mobile users.
• RIA Formula doesn’t have any racing functionality (the game’s core loop is simply to go drive on various racetracks)
• Redline Drift also has no racing functionality

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.

[bizbot19]

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.

[PeZsmistic]

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.

[metatablecatmaid (metatablecat)]

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”.

[RuizuKun_Dev (Kitsune)]

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?!

[GazilionGrandGadgets (Gaz)]

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.

[Noble_Draconian]

“Continue playing” now shows games in a random order. Can the discovery team please read this feature request?