it’s not completely removed, it’s just hidden and can be seen hovering it.
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Firstly, thank you for communicating this in advance!!! This really helps with figuring out why various KPIs are suddenly nosediving or skyrocketing with seemingly no major game changes. More communication like this moving forward please! This is a great start.
Does this mean there will be less experiences shown on the home page? E.g. 6 experiences down to 3-4?
Are we still keeping the “Friends” section? I often want to see what my various friends are doing regardless of the context of a given experience. If that’s removed I’d be joining my friends less often / would have to explicitly search for them, which would be annoying as a user.
If the above questions could be answered it would clear up some of the confusion I think!
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I don’t really agree here - you can quickly view the game’s CCUs on its details page, or from the creator dashboard. Can be slightly annoying yes but it’s a non-issue imo.
Regarding the issue of players joining a game with no players in it - I don’t really see that as an issue. If I’m looking at an experience, I’m probably interested enough to join it regardless. Seeing a low CCU can actually make a user not join, when they otherwise would’ve had a fun time in an experience that happens to have only 80 CCU.
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What intern pushed this to the creator dashboard though? Why do my places no longer show the last studio cam picture?
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Bring. back. genres.
For real, bring them back - looking for a new game in a specific genre is so hard with how the front page is set up, the weird Whatever made up algorithm based faux-genre sorting doesn’t even work properly (at least on the site, I can’t vouch for the mobile app or desktop app since I won’t bother touching those with a 10 mile stick).
Clearly genres are still supported by the platform’s APIs since they’re still around in a few places for no reason.
Bring back genres how they used to be, or better yet - like how other game distribution platforms/metaverse platforms have it, where you can search by defined genres and tag so people can find what they want and not what the platform thinks they want. (See: Steam)
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Why is this a reply to my post? I don’t get how this is related.
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Almost the entire developer community hates this. What are the analytics you’ve collected on the impact of this so far? There is no transparency here for the community to understand intention and impact. This is simply inconvenient to us.
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Thanks for the transparency here, super excited to see what comes of these experiments. I think offering up thumbnail views of games will create a more ‘premium’ looking product for a lot of us… now I just need to stop delaying and actually update Bad Business’ thumbnails!
Curious how the friend activity is going to differ from the previous “Friend Activity” sort … unless this is just backtracking to a better system? I’d be okay with that.
And reduction in CCUs on display is interesting. I think it currently is being used as a quick quality-test, although like/dislike ratio and the new verification badge system could maybe be more accurate metrics for users to see.
Edit: I want to mention that I hope that these notifications of experiments happen more in the future, as well as following them up with data so we can see how further decisions are being made.
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Do these features respect this privacy setting?
The previous “Friends Visiting” sort (removed a few months back) did not respect this privacy setting and was the main reason why I always refused to accept friend requests from anyone. I don’t want anyone to be able to figure out where I currently am; please make sure this respects our privacy.
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One question, why? Developers spend a lot of time making a good icon for their game, and now its going to be tossed aside and replaced by a random snapshot? I’m aware that developers will be able to change these to whatever they want but currently thumbnails are often used to showcase updates or gameplay, while an icon serves a completely different role.
What if you want to have a video? Being forced to push it back will just result in less players seeing it, which only makes it harder to show what the game is like. This would also be especially annoying for browser users, as the video automatically plays itself when the thumbnail switches.
And also steals that attention from others. Developers will have to work twice as hard to make an interesting thumbnail due to games taking up much more space. I also want to point out that with this increased size, the amount of games displayed on a users continue playing page will drop from six individual games, to three! That is far too small a number for anyone who plays more then two games regularly.
Wasn’t this always a feature? I can clearly remember seeing pictures of my friends appearing under games they play. What makes this any different?
What? How are we supposed to know its popular if we can’t even see how many people are playing? This change just makes it even harder to know if a game is popular, and seeing at how roblox is a multiplayer game, I would argue that seeing how many people are actually playing before joining a server is extremely important, especially with several multiplayer games requiring more then one user to play properly. It’s like if fortnite or apex decided to hide their players, so you join a server and nobody is there, you just end up leaving because it’s pointless to wait around. And lets not forget that the popular page is literally sorted by active players, which just makes this change make even less sense in the first place. I’m extremely curious who prompted this change, since this is the first online game I’ve seen that intentionally wants to hide player counts.
Have you forgetten the backlash recieved from hiding players in the last update? You should be focusing on improving features like this, not outright removing them. I can’t think of a single person that would want this. Who would even benefit from this? It’s definitely not the developers and not a single player would want this.
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Does removing CCU mean changes to the algorithm or is it just hidden to the users?
P.S. to other devs: they say you can still see it when hovering over, so it shouldn’t be a big deal for us devs who want to check CCU quickly. (Perhaps a bit more annoying though)
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No idea, but I think Roblox studio will still have the last camera picture
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What what’s frong with the 500 X 500 wats 16.9 for pixel format the same as yt tumbnails
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Like these changes! However, the CCU count is great for quick check-ups for games. Maybe show the CCU for the developers of the experience?
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If experience pages are being updated, I would like to see some features that Steam has.
Some suggestions include:
- Enhanced experience description that supports markdown, like this forum.
- Community section with, perhaps with a forum and uploading media (13+ obviously).
- Review system instead of basic likes/dislikes, as well as review sorting.
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- This system appears to be in the works for other assets, as seen here.
- Proper tag and genre system, with appropriate search and filter tools.
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Hey! Serious oversight in my opinion:
Currently the visual journey for a player is as follows:
- See a unique icon
- See a unique thumbnail
Now in both of these stages they will see just one image, and won’t be able to get more context immediately until the thumbnails cycle. we should be able to set the preview thumbnail to one that ISN’T the first in the queue.
For example, Car Dealership Tycoon has a unique icon style, and a unique thumbnail style. With this system we will not be able to continue with this and our marketing strategies/aesthetic will be impossible.
Please, ensure we can SELECT what players see on the preview, and that we can show them something different immediately after they click!
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Can you guys provide a mock-up of how this will look with game thumbnails? I appreciate the transparency but I cannot help but be confused, will it look like this?
For some of us it will also be a bit hard to translate the same feel 4:3 images give (that games outside of Roblox usually use) to a 16:9 image.
Use my game thumbnail for example:
How would you translate the same feel this image gives to a 16:9 image? I guess that comes down to an image design issue, but it’s still a bit odd to want to get rid of icons entirely.
I would personally suggest adding some sort of thumbnail pre-view instead, with the icon being close. Like how it works on the mobile app!
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At 9:09 in the video.
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So odd they didn’t include it in the original post, thank you very much!
In my opinion I think we should still keep icons, but to each their own I suppose. We will all get used to this in the end hahahah!
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No problem, I think some kind of mix with 16:9 thumbnails and normal icons would be great.
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