Felt like sharing my recent issues with the algorithm.
We released a game during late august. Advertised for 3 days to test it’s initial stats.
After the test sponsor had finished, we optimised the game and sponsored it for 2 weeks with a reasonably high ad credit amount. Just as the sponsor was nearing it’s competition date, we started to see a rise in players coming from home recommendations, and a steady incline with our home impressions too.
We kept a steady CCU of ~300 players hitting ~600 on a peak day. This was purely organic. The sponsor had ended and we were running solely off our impressions from the home page and the search terms. Not even 48 hours after we felt like we had a steady player-base and could start working on another game to get a pipeline going, our game was struck down and our impressions were cut and continuing to be on a steady decline by the looks of it too.
We went from having a stable ~300 CCU to now only having ~50 CCU.
I guess the only thing I can do now is wait and hope the algorithm helps us out. Good luck to everyone else.
I have compared my stats on my game Space Tycoon with another Tycoon (dragon merge) and have higher in almost all places including session time and monetization yet the game won’t be featured anymore? (because its older?)
Its unfair that the home algorithm is obviously reflecting HUGE upticks(like from youtube video spam with millions of views or a recent release) Seems its 100% features “quickly rushed experiences”
It was a very POOR idea to release this algorithm without the genre update and making adverting so costly in the same year.
My 13 year old game is reaching breaking point now; I dont have enough players at night to facilitate lobby creation, and even at peak hours players sometimes have to wait to be able to play. Getting very few players a day compounds the issue of new player retention and player activity. This is basically a soft shadowban.
Roblox is really limiting and CUTTING off search results over like 30? (If you didn’t know roblox there are more than 30 tycoons or simulators!!!) Are we just done lying now and outright killing small games? This search system is literally awful maybe stop making it worse or even pretend to care!!!
Roblox to care about the top 300 and not just 50 in each category: impossible
This just happened to me as well, it’s really getting frustrating watching the algorithm change so often. It gives me less of a sense of stability on Roblox. Tomorrow my game could be on the front page, or it could die off completely.
For some reason the algorithm changes weekly? One week my game is absolutely popping off, then dying, then popping off, and now dying again. It’s unfair to everyone and the top Roblox games aren’t affected by this at all, it’s all the small developers, goes to show how much Roblox cares.
Can we seriously stop doing this? Almost weekly or biweekly algorithm tweaks have been going on for over a year. I’d like to remind the algorithm team that changing the algorithm can put people out of jobs, and having seemingly A/B testing every week is not very reassuring that I’ll be able to put food on the table next month.
Absolutely dealing with the same issues mentioned above.
Just recently we’ve been pushing out consistent, high quality updates every 2 weeks for both gameplay and monetization, and we’ve had literally #1 on average session time for several weeks. Nothing changed. In fact – our position got worse after making both the game and its monetization substantially better, and despite our metrics being at all-time-highs.
Despite this, our new user impressions have rapidly and substantially dropped over the past few months. In particular, a change to the description on Nov 3-4 triggered a 50% drop in home recommendations that never recovered, even after the description was changed back to what it was before.
Can vouch here How does recommendation tab work? Does it actually work? Qualified Play Through Rate Help genuinely don’t know what happened, I used to be at least in the 0.90% range and now I can’t breach 0.20% with the same thumbnails after going through multiple revisions of Thumbnail Personalization, destroyed my game even with the little plays it was getting already
Please make it so we can choose where our Thumbnails are shown via the new Genre feature.
Example: I want my game’s Thumbnail to only be showed to SOCIAL Genre, so it will only be shown to players who PRIMARILY play SOCIAL Genre games, and ONLY if I select an option will it be shown to people OUTSIDE the SOCIAL Genre
Not even kidding, I actually get the feeling that better stats = worse algorithm performance
My game averaged 150 CCU a few weeks ago, so I added more maps, balanced it, changed some UI and overall raised my avg playtime by 2 mins, and my D1 retention increased by a percentage point as well.
Guess what - the games CCU can barely surpass 90 on a weekend now. I used to think I knew how the system worked but I guess it’s completely random
Yeah, these changes totally killed my game, especially after the “low quality filtering” update to home recommendations. We went from 100k impressions and 3k plays a day to 10k impressions and 100 plays a day. Nobody’s even playing it now, and we had amazing session times and monetization before.
Same exact thing for me. Is ANYONE gonna talk about this? I had a great November/start of December then those changes roll in and everyone loses all their players. COME ON!? Were all just gonna let this slide?
So I saw it mentioned once in one of these posts BUT WE NEED MORE COMBINATIONS FOR RECOMMENDATIONS.
Day 1 retention and retention CAN NOT BE WEIGHTED THE HEAVIEST AND TRENDS CAN NOT BE 1000X. It creates a hollow platform. “Some games are meant to be played in detail 1-2 times” not for 5 minutes 10 times.
But ROBLOX WEIGHTS IS AS: You played 2 times for 5 minutes much better than once for 20!!! Can we FIX THAT PLEASE!!! Some games are not as repayable… Just code more recommendations options. Or don’t and take 10 more months to do anything…
I’m starting to think its due to roblox pushing you if you do well compared to the general roblox game metrics (ie. avg playtime, etc) until they sort you based on “similar experiences” who are all top level, and since they are always been so great your game stats look worse cus the average goes really high. I haven’t had a significant change in play time and retention but still went from ~800 ccu to ~50 ccu.
Yeah something seems fundamentally flawed, I don’t know how the algorithm expects our stats to always improve
At first they are above average, then when the algorithm puts our games into a better “tier” it’s automatically way worse than the competition and therefore gets pushed less.
But this stuff is sooo confusing - My game Obby Trials has amazing session time:
I’m honestly at a complete loss. The projects I spend the most time on, the ones I build a community around, all seem to flop. But the low effort cashgrabs with literally WORSE stats can consistently reach 100-300 CCU. This makes so little sense… it’s like they don’t want to earn money
It seems to be that the main stat the current algorithm cares about is Qualified Play-through Rate (Qualified PTR). Basically if you aren’t getting a decent percentage of home recommendation clicks followed by plays with a session time of some amount (which I believe is 5+ minutes), then your game won’t be pushed. My game is stuck in the same slump and seeing the analytics of other games in the same genre that is consistently the main difference.
This is all ancedotal of course, I have no clue how the algorithm actually decides whether the game should be pushed or not.
