Just last week, we described our vision for a Games page that’s loaded with fantastic games to play and worlds to explore. One piece of that puzzle is improving and adding alternative methods of sorting games, an effort we recently bolstered by launching the Top Grossing sort (soon to be “Top Earning”). Another piece of the puzzle is a rating system that lets you and everyone else vote content up and down, thereby providing a community-generated metric for games that are amazingly good, offensively bad and everything in between (i.e., “decidedly meh”).

This feature is now live on ROBLOX.com and comes packaged as part of a cosmetic overhaul for each game’s individual page. As you’ve probably noticed, we’ve re-organized the standard elements – description, play buttons, etc. – updated the icons, and made the game thumbnails slightly larger. The most significant change, though, is the addition of a “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” rating option, and an overall measure of public sentiment toward a game.

As a ROBLOX member, you can rate any given place once (and you can change your rating at any time) by clicking the thumbs up or thumbs down icon. In order to vote, you must first play the game and you must have a verified email address on file. This is not an optional feature for game creators — it is standard across the board — and we will be moderating ratings. For example, if we notice a mass down-vote on a particular place, we’ll investigate the activity to make sure it’s not malicious in nature.

At the outset, we will not factor the rating of a place in our games sort, but we plan to integrate it in the near future. Eventually, games that are overwhelmingly given the “thumbs down” will get pushed down the Games page, even if they are being visited frequently. For now, we recommend you take a look at the public sentiment toward a game before you decide to spend time visiting it. If it seems as though ROBLOXians don’t like it, it might be the kind of place that, for instance, uses a misleading thumbnail image or title to attract your attention.

This is a simple feature with big-time potential. While we haven’t taken it full-circle quite yet – that’ll happen when we integrate game ratings into the Games page sorts and extend the feature to all assets on the site (models, comments, gear and the like) – it does already establish a very visible barometer of quality for games and places.