A rampant issue with ROBLOX games is misleading players into believing the game is something that it’s not. Using thumbnails from other games to make the place look more appealing (like every FNaF game on ROBLOX), using thumbnails of carefully posed characters to make the game look like something completely different (like this tycoon), and a variety of other shenanigans. Our rating system doesn’t allow us to do much though because so what if a game has a 90% negative rating? It could have just been negatively rated because it was a free-modeled game that was extremely boring. There’s no way to tell if it was downvoted because it’s a scam or if it’s just bad.
However I was going to rate a TED talk (positively) because I really liked it, and I thought it would be just a simple thumbs up/down or 1-5 star system, but the dialog that popped up is this:
With a couple of changes, here’s what ROBLOX could do with this:
This would not replace (nor fix, depending on your view) genres and not replace ratings. This would be a supplement to help players find games that they like. For instance, take CoD and a first-person version of Mass Effect. They’'re both FPS games, but one is really based on competition while the other is based on exploration and teamwork. A medieval game could be very beautiful and easy to jump into while another could be a less detailed strategy game that’s confusing to younger players. There could be a murder game built towards younger children and a completely different murder game specifically tailored to an older audience. Genres are more of a over-simplified way to describe and categorize something, but that something is always more than just that genre. It can’t be accurately described by one word. That’s where this (description?) system comes into play.
Not only could you search the games page for specific traits you want in a game and glance at a game’s description categories to tell if it’s something you’d like or not, but in the future perhaps even the games page could be filtered by what a user prefers. If a user prefers confusing games tailored to older audiences, they don’t want to be seeing “Adopt and raise a cute baby” on the front page. Likewise on the contrary – a runt of 10 years likely wouldn’t want to see a cognitive-intensive puzzle game on the front page. Users would be able to filter games that they don’t like off of the games page before even seeing them. This could also help attract an older audience to ROBLOX. Right now if I hadn’t ever been on ROBLOX in my life, signed up, and looked at the games page, I would run away forever. Most of the games would look like kid games and I wouldn’t want to stay. However, if ROBLOX ticked off “Child/Everyone games” and ticked on “For older audiences” in the preferences if their age was 16+, maybe 13+ when they signed up, ROBLOX would look more appealing to them and they’d likely give it more thought.
Also, with the two “scam” and “misleading” descriptions categories, it would be much easier to automate the removal of unwanted games from ROBLOX. A misleading game technically isn’t against the ROBLOX rules so you’re SOL if you report it, but if a game received a certain percentage of misleading ratings and above a certain number of ratings (because a group of people were the first to “describe” a game and all marked it as a misleading because they didn’t like it and wanted it gone would trigger this as well) ROBLOX could automatically remove the game from the front page if it was on the front page. It isn’t against the rules technically, but it would be appropriate to remove it from the front page of the games that represent what ROBLOX is. ROBLOX already puts games under review if they get a certain number of reports AFAIK, but those reports aren’t exactly visible. A scam “description” would be a warning to other users and perhaps ROBLOX could append a banner to the top of the page that said “Caution! This place may be a scam!”.
Also, the percentages shown would have to be out of the total number of people who voted – not out of the total number of votes since users could select multiple descriptions. 50% of voters marking it as “Easy Entry” is completely different than 50% of the votes being in the “Easy Entry” category. If it were based on total number of votes and I voted “Easy Entry”, “Teamwork”, and “Replay Value”, my vote would count significantly less for each of those because each of them only got 1/3 a vote. If it’s based off of total number of voters, they each get what they should get.