Im honestly sick of seeing these boring as heck platformers. They are not originally in any way, and they all have the same levels and the same design with just a different theme.

Yet games with actual good content and playability are often pushed back. Its highly annoying and its hurting the quality bar for scratch.

In prime scratch when games like Arena, Ultimate Game Creator 7, and Bone Battles were popular, the explore page was brimming with high quality games, all different in their own way. Games like Chest and Border Blast and Berzerker were popular, and trending.

Now? Now its just the same game, over and over and over and over. Nothing unique, just different themes. And i'm tired of it. I wish you HAD to be somewhat original. All you have to seem to do these days is find a platformer, remix it, change the theme to something else, and it'll probably get trending. I wish for another time when games were actually original, and not just the same thing.

It's hard to argue against the taste of the masses. People like what they like.

Half of it is young children who like platformers and don't care about originality, these are the type of people who won't read descriptions to figure out stuff when the gameplay is more complex than “hold right and jump” and that will comment “to hard, this stinks” whenever met with some semblance of challenge. These are a majority of scratchers on the explore page.

The other half is that the explore page algorithms are exploitable. Honorable, high-effort scratchers don't use these, but popularity farmers certainly do.

The third half is people that post Questions about Scratch in the wrong subform, I'll have it moved for you, don't you worry. he moved it before I could write this post!

The page does it's job - It shows what people are viewing most. It's not “pushing away” any projects, the projects being pushed in are getting a lot of attention in a short timespan.

Trending isn't sorted by the ST, it's an algorithm - That's why it's hidden away in Explore.

its largely from the number of the lazy platformers, and what others said above, I think. large numbers of them lead to at least one of them having a bigger chance to explode. there's only a limited number of original games, so there's a smaller number of them that can explode. also people doing things like tag spamming

SANDVICHISGOOD wrote:

Im honestly sick of seeing these boring as heck platformers. They are not originally in any way, and they all have the same levels and the same design with just a different theme.

Yet games with actual good content and playability are often pushed back. Its highly annoying and its hurting the quality bar for scratch.

In prime scratch when games like Arena, Ultimate Game Creator 7, and Bone Battles were popular, the explore page was brimming with high quality games, all different in their own way. Games like Chest and Border Blast and Berzerker were popular, and trending.

Now? Now its just the same game, over and over and over and over. Nothing unique, just different themes. And i'm tired of it. I wish you HAD to be somewhat original. All you have to seem to do these days is find a platformer, remix it, change the theme to something else, and it'll probably get trending. I wish for another time when games were actually original, and not just the same thing.

I mean Undertale: Floral Fatality was cool and without scrolling I saw some cool projects on trending/popular

Catscratcher07 wrote:

Half of it is young children who like platformers and don't care about originality, these are the type of people who won't read descriptions to figure out stuff when the gameplay is more complex than “hold right and jump” and that will comment “to hard, this stinks” whenever met with some semblance of challenge. These are a majority of scratchers on the explore page.

The other half is that the explore page algorithms are exploitable. Honorable, high-effort scratchers don't use these, but popularity farmers certainly do.

The third half is people that post Questions about Scratch in the wrong subform, I'll have it moved for you, don't you worry. he moved it before I could write this post!

I mean I seem to see some quality projects occasionally, and I feel there are more, also three halves are more than 100 percent

SANDVICHISGOOD wrote:

Im honestly sick of seeing these boring as heck platformers. They are not originally in any way, and they all have the same levels and the same design with just a different theme.

Yet games with actual good content and playability are often pushed back. Its highly annoying and its hurting the quality bar for scratch.

In prime scratch when games like Arena, Ultimate Game Creator 7, and Bone Battles were popular, the explore page was brimming with high quality games, all different in their own way. Games like Chest and Border Blast and Berzerker were popular, and trending.

Now? Now its just the same game, over and over and over and over. Nothing unique, just different themes. And i'm tired of it. I wish you HAD to be somewhat original. All you have to seem to do these days is find a platformer, remix it, change the theme to something else, and it'll probably get trending. I wish for another time when games were actually original, and not just the same thing.

“How do you get popular when your not popular” a quote from my friend.

What does that mean though, it means when you aren't already popular it becomes kind of hard to get noticed because no one knows you that much, and people that make projects don't share them a lot

Contraery wrote:

The page does it's job - It shows what people are viewing most. It's not “pushing away” any projects, the projects being pushed in are getting a lot of attention in a short timespan.

Trending isn't sorted by the ST, it's an algorithm - That's why it's hidden away in Explore.

I see.

But its still annoying that I have to scroll for thousands of minutes just to find a non platformer.

Paddle2See wrote:

It's hard to argue against the taste of the masses. People like what they like.

1. Agreed. I'm no fan of generic platformers, but apparently other people are.
2. For a lot of Scratchers, programming a platformer with a half-decent physics engine is extremely hard. Doing so is an accomplishment.
3. One also has to consider the number of Scratchers who want to be well-known. Because generic platformers are popular, people make generic
platformers in order to become more popular, which increases the number of generic platformers, making it appear that generic platformers are more
popular. As you can probably guess, this creates a never-ending loop of more and more generic platformers being made and played.
4. Some generic platformers, (often the ones that admit that they are generic platformers) are actually fun and worth playing. This makes people go to
other generic platformers (after they've completed the decent ones) in hopes of finding something similar, and they find another generic platformer
which they like, give it a like and favorite, and move on. This happens enough times that these platformers get on the explore page
5. Some Scratchers use advertising strategies such as advertising in the comments of featured or popular projects to get more people to view their
project. Chances are, at least some of them will give it a like and/or favorite.

SANDVICHISGOOD wrote:

Contraery wrote:

The page does it's job - It shows what people are viewing most. It's not “pushing away” any projects, the projects being pushed in are getting a lot of attention in a short timespan.

Trending isn't sorted by the ST, it's an algorithm - That's why it's hidden away in Explore.

I see.

But its still annoying that I have to scroll for thousands of minutes just to find a non platformer.

IDK what you see, but here are all the projects I saw instantly, until I saw a generic platformer:
(note that non-generic platformers are considered good in this case)
https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/942962737/ Minecraft: Non-Generic Platformer
https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/896102161/ Bouncy Ninja: Arcade-style Game
https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/836040447/ Mario Game: Non-Generic Platformer
https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/897617259/ (name in another language): MMO Platformer (Uses griffpatch MMO engine, however put visible effort into the project)
https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/873751294/ Things we All, Did as a Kid: Animation
https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/846176517/ Coffee Guess: Luck based game
https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/846176517/ Super Star: Arcade-style Game
https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/868722611/ Sky Dunks: Game with Coding Restrictions (1 Sprite, highly impressive if you play it!)
https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/880429873/ Mini Platformer: Generic-ish Platformer

It took 9 projects, all on the front, to find a generic platformer. 4 (5 if you count Bouncy Ninja) were platformers. I'd say it's easy to find good projects.