Room RECommendations
Our game plan for RECommending better rooms for you.
When it comes to finding a good room to play in Rec Room, we want it to reflect what you want to see. That’s why, for the past couple of years, we’ve focused on developing a way to help you consistently find rooms that you’d enjoy spending your time in.In the past, room carousels were primarily picked by our curators, the menus were refreshed less often, and we had the same recommendations shown to everyone - but that doesn’t actually showcase what the community (and you) find popular. So, we’ve shifted to a model where room carousels are now primarily driven by the community’s interests, refresh at least daily, and are partially personalized.So what led us here, did it help, and what’s coming up?
Picked by Us vs Picked by You
In a thriving ecosystem with over a million rooms, and ~45k+ created per day, how do we choose which rooms should populate the menu?The answer is… we don’t. You do!One of the most notable changes we’ve made since 2022 is shifting a majority of our curation from carousels reflecting our taste to algorithmic ones intended to reflect yours. This has been a thoroughly tested process that has led to most of the room carousels on your menu being automatically generated to reflect community tastes versus ours.The newer carousels refresh more often (e.g. hourly) and can also do a better job at fairly balancing distribution to millions of rooms, improving exposure for more of our amazing creators!Over the period of testing - for players receiving the algorithmically curated carousels, we saw
- An increase in the total time players were spending in player-created rooms
- And, a reduction in bad room visits (visits where the player quickly left after entering the room)
As you can see in the chart, when we started, the changes were initially negative - but with each test we’ve learned and made improvements leading to where we are today. While the change is now positive, there’s still more work to be done to combat the ‘quality of rooms’ issues that can come with community-curated content.
Making Community Curation High Quality
So… what is quality, exactly? ‘Quality’ is a very subjective measure that means different things to different players in the community, so we’ve defined 3 ways for us to measure ‘low quality’ and also started work on how to combat the surfacing of each of these types of rooms.
1) Low Quality = Clickbaity Rooms
Think back to early days on many platforms like Facebook, where a lot of engagement was driven by content that would see high engagement - like Buzzfeed listicles. These things got insanely high engagement short-term, but had lasting negative consequences for the ecosystem since they were often click-baity.So, how do you solve a similar issue on our platform, especially at a larger scale when we are getting ~45K+ new rooms created a day?You train an algorithm to identify clickbait, and you remove it.That's what we’re doing right now. We’ve been training an algorithm to better identify clickbait and reduce the prevalence of this content. This is a slow process and we’ll have a lot more updates on this in one of our next discovery blogs.In the meantime, we’ve also been balancing community-curated carousels with some content curated by us. You may have noticed this in our recent update with our two new carousels titled “Rooms We Love” and “Featured This Week”. These carousels refresh weekly, have stricter eligibility rules and are ranked higher in your ‘Highlights’ menu to showcase rooms we consider to be perfect examples of experiences that can be built in Rec Room.
2) Low Quality = Bugs & Crashes
Often, more complex and ambitious rooms run against RAM limits causing them to crash often. We know the experience from crashing or encountering bugs sucks! So, since mid-2023, the ranking of rooms has been affected by their technical quality and crash-rate.Higher crash rates decrease the ranking of the room, thereby reducing its visibility to players. We’re continuing to iterate on these signals and provide guidance to creators on RAM usage and minimizing crashes, starting with an upcoming memory dev blog!At the same time, we've also been working on improving the performance of the Rec Room app to give creators the ability to launch more complex experiences that players can play without obstruction. We’ll go into more detail about how we’re trying to make Rec Room more stable in the memory dev blog, but we've already seen massive improvements including some in the Watch UI that improve the ‘avg FPS when the watch is open’ by 4% across all devices so far.
3) Low Quality = doesn’t match my personal taste
Rooms ranked by global community traffic primarily represent rooms that have mass appeal. While this promotes rooms that most players care about, it can limit the number of unique rooms that could get visits, and make it difficult for novel content to break into the ecosystem. This has led us to start personalizing discovery towards individuals instead of the community as a whole. So, what does that mean exactly?
Personalization
Personalization is intended to extend all the benefits and improvements we’ve mentioned so far by tailoring the rooms we highlight to YOUR specific preferences. It’s something curated just for you!We’re at the beginning of our journey with personalization and it currently is limited to the ‘Recommended For You’ carousel. So far, we’ve already seen significant improvements to room engagement (4.5% increase in time spent in player-created rooms), and more player-created rooms are being discovered (chart below)
Over the course of the year, you’ll see us test:
- Personalization of the carousels you are shown
- imagine a Rec Room where the collections of carousels themselves are more reflective of your interests!
- Improvements to the personalization algorithms to better reflect your tastes
- Ability for you to explicitly affect your curation (find similar rooms easier, mark rooms you don’t want recommended to you etc)
We want Rec Room to continue being a place where our players can find and create great content. That starts with making sure high-quality content gets discovered by the players who would like it most. It’s still a bit of a journey from here, but this is a huge priority for us and we’re going to keep iterating until discovery is the best it can be. After all, Rec Room isn’t the same place without great rooms!As always, please share your feedback as we test these changes and let us know what you’d like to hear about next! In the meantime, don’t forget to support the rooms you love =]
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