Last week we released a new feature called Room Comments, and this week we wanted to take a deep dive into why and what this means for Rec Room.
We thrive off of community feedback at Rec Room and we want to give creators a chance to engage in deeper collaboration within their communities. Internally we’ve talked about this as “audience connection” - we want creators to feel as connected to their audiences as we feel to our player community. You may have noticed some features aiming at this already - like the ability to put cheers and favoriting buttons in your rooms. We believe room comments are an important step and we want to continue making these investments in the “KindaSoon” time frame (1-3 months).
One of the goals for room comments was to encourage expressive feedback by displaying comments in-world. This allows players to show creators where they experienced delightful moments or encountered issues with a room. If you find a bug in one of your favorite rooms, you can save a lot of typing by leaving a comment right where you see it.
People might have a lot to say about your creations and so another goal was to make sure room comments don’t create visual clutter in rooms. We decided that making comments display on a togglable visual layer (similar to circuits) would give players control over when to view feedback versus creating or experiencing a room.
Finally, it was important to us that players be able to learn how to post and read comments without having to, for example, read this blog post. Even if you’re a new player in Rec Room we wanted feedback interactions to be easy to stumble across as you explore the game. Put another way, it was a goal to make room comments: intuitive, discover-able, and low-friction.
Leaving Feedback
We landed on an implementation called the Feedback Tool, which is available from the backpack or shortcut wheel just like the Maker Pen.
Players can use the new tool to leave feedback in the world. When holding the tool, players will see a placement hint showing where their feedback will appear to help with positioning. Pressing the action button will bring up a UI dialog where players can select the style of feedback to be left and enter a short message to the room creators. Currently, comments can be styled as feedback, ideas, or bug reports. Each displays with a different color in the world to help creators read and sort through feedback quickly.
Feedback tool and hint
Dialog for leaving feedback
Viewing Feedback
In order to reduce visual clutter, players will only see comment icons when holding the feedback tool. Unread comments appear brighter in the world to help creators focus on new feedback quickly. For the initial launch of this feature, we only display the most recent 100 comments, but we’re investigating better ways to display and sort larger amounts of comments in the future.
Creators will be able to view comments in their room by tapping the floating icons in-world which will toggle on and off a bubble showing the comment message, posting date, and commenter information. If you see multiple comments in the same area, it can be a good signal that players are reacting strongly to something - perhaps it’s a magical moment in your room which players love, or maybe it’s an area that is buggy. The comment types can help you understand at a glance and the feedback can help you learn more.
If the comment is constructive and appreciated, creators can easily cheer the commenter directly from the comment bubble. This creates a nice interaction loop between players and creators -- something which we’d love to encourage more as we develop new audience connection features. Creators can also delete comments and report commenters that are trolling or abusive.
In addition to viewing comments in-world, they can also be viewed from the “Comments” tab in the “This Room” UI and sorted by type. This is a great way to skim feedback quickly when you don’t need the spatial context.
Types of feedback in-world
“Comments” tab in the “This Room” UI
As a regular player in a room, you’ll still see the comment icons when holding the feedback tool, but they will be in a grey deactivated state. The intention behind this is to help players better position their own comments around existing comments. We’re thinking about this like a bulletin board where users will (hopefully) not want to place new comments overlapping with existing ones.
Notifications
Having players leave feedback in your rooms is only useful if you know it’s there, so we’ve built new notifications to let you know when feedback has been left in one of your rooms. However, we know it’s easy to be overwhelmed by notifications. To help cut down on the noise, creators will receive at most 1 watch notification per room and at most 1 iOS push notification per day. Watch notifications will tell creators how many new comments have been left in their rooms since they were last viewed. We hope that by condensing this information into a single message, the notifications are useful rather than overwhelming!
While thinking about how to make notifications more useful, we also took the opportunity to add filters for watch notifications to easily allow players to customize which notifications they want to see and which they want to ignore. Also, a new “Clear All Notifications” button will help more organized players quickly get to “inbox zero.”
Handling Abusive Feedback
We made the decision early on to only allow comments to be viewed by room creators, co-owners, and moderators. It’s important to us that players have control over how their rooms are presented to other players and for now we’ve decided that the safest method is to keep comments out of public view.
Comment messages are filtered through our standard content filters and if creators are feeling overwhelmed by a flood of feedback they can completely disable comments in their rooms via a room setting.
We’ve also implemented a limit (1 comment per minute) to prevent spamming.
Finally, placed a few restrictions on who can post comments to a room. Junior players are not allowed to leave comments, nor are players who have been reported too many times recently or blocked by one of the room owners. Rec Room admins have the ability to remove commenting permissions from players who are abusing the system and have tools to quickly verify reports and delete offensive messages. We trust that with these measures we can keep creators from abusing the system and ensure that room comments bring more value than grief.
Future Plans
As always, we’ve been thinking about where this feature goes next. It would be amazing to let creators filter, sort, and mark comments for public view or favorite them.
We also want to invest more in this feature to drive a deeper interaction between creators and individual players. Right now, you can cheer a player from their comment, but that’s a very surface-level interaction. We’ve brainstormed ideas around adding a thread system that would allow creators to reply to feedback creating ongoing conversations. Ultimately this is about furthering the goal of creating meaningful connections between creators and their audiences which will remain the main focus for future iterations.
Like this article about the Feedback Tool? We always like your feedback. Find us on social media and keep an eye on this blog for our next update on creators selling their own inventions!