Entirely right, 1000% agree, couldn’t have said it better myself. Every feature has some level of abuse factor in them; that’s where moderation should step in to help enforce appropriate representation of the experience, much like they once did the ads marketplace prior to the Ads Manager superseding user ads (liable to moderation for misadvertising).
It’s in the name, discovery. Absolutely there is the potential for genres to be abused without the right safeguards, but safeguards should not include removing developer control or algorithmically sorting experiences based on some arbitrary criteria. No self-respecting developer would miscategorise their experience and hemorrhage a good market or, if there was real consequence for it, manual intervention via moderation or otherwise. Which, on the latter point, there never was, and it was used as a justification for its removal on the original announcement.
They said that new experiences have gained traction through discovery changes but I don’t want to rely on being lucky enough to get picked up by some automation. I want to know, deterministically, where my audience comes from and how I reach my target audience, and I want that factor to be properly consistent. I want to clearly search for a type of experience and limit results to that.
I’ve been fighting for this for over 6 years, and I don’t want to get complacent and stop fighting for them at any given moment because accepting the status quo is how change doesn’t get made, let alone even the potential to be heard. Though at this point, I would even be happy to settle for a larger genre sort that then breaks down experiences of that genre via the automatic algorithms or vice versa. Some way to funnel my results clearly as a player, and target my audience as a developer.
Roblox needs to stop pushing this disrespectful narrative and nonsense justification agaisnt its first class citizens to reason about how they curate their audience. This is a prominent issue across multiple tenets of the platform, even down to how we can work with the engine. There needs to be some level of developer control within discovery much like, for example, the Steam store.
Between Roblox and Steam, there is one page that gives me significantly less friction on searching for games and clearly has both developer/community control and algorithms in place, and the better search experience certainly is not Roblox.