Over the past few days you might’ve caught wind of some controversy stemming from IGN’s community game of the year Face-Off. It’s become a full-on drama, complete with literal ups and downs, shocking twists, and accusations of foul play flying. There’s also quite a bit of confusion, so to clear it up a bit I’m going to walk you through how we got here, and how we’re making it right.
Early this year IGN rolled out a new version of our Face-Off tool, and it’s become a pet project of mine to use it to get our community to create ranked lists of games, movies, TV shows, and literally everything else that people have opinions about. It works by showing you two things and letting you pick whichever you think should win, whether that’s
You can see the massive, sustained influx of pro-Black Myth: Wukong voters who pushed it to the top of the list, followed by a short but potent spike. That corresponds to the period where it fell back down.
The fact that Black Myth’s vote total so quickly surpassed that of games that had been accruing votes for months before it was added to the list of games strongly suggests that someone exploited the system to allow them to vote only on one specific game – something the randomization of matches is intended to prevent. Likewise, that double-elimination bracket system means you should only be able to vote against a game twice in a run before it stops showing up, since it clearly wasn’t going to be your favorite, but that also seems to have been bypassed to achieve this volume of losses in such a short time.
Unfortunately, since Face-Offs aren’t limited to logged-in users it’s not obvious which votes are real and which are fake, so we can’t simply delete the exact number of suspicious votes. However, in the interest of fairness, we’ve decided to remove all of the negative votes from the period that the Black Myth: Wukong community and our engineers have identified as the most likely to be fraudulent, during which the win percentage fell at what should’ve been an impossible rate – a total of 46,000 losses. As of this writing, that change moves Black Myth: Wukong back into the #1 position on the list, with a 76% win rate. It’s unfortunate to lose any valid votes that were caught up in the mix, but this is the best solution we have given the information available.
Over the next few months we’ll keep an eye on this Face-Off to guard against other efforts to manipulate the results. This being the internet, there’s no realistic way to prevent someone who knows what they’re doing from playing dirty tricks on a anonymous online poll, but we’ve taken steps to at least mitigate their effectiveness going forward, and we hope to continue to improve Face-Offs in a lot of different ways to make them even more fun to engage with. I hope you continue to enjoy them!
In the meantime, our What’s Your Game of the Year So Far? Face-Off continues: Yesterday I added The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom (to both this Face-Off and our Zelda-specific one), so if you’re playing and have an idea of where it belongs relative to other 2024 games, we’d love to have your vote. If you’re passionate about movies or TV shows this year, check out our Face-Offs for those as well. And share them with your friends – I’m trying to make these a thing.
Dan Stapleton is IGN’s Director of Reviews and self-proclaimed Chief Face-Officer. Follow him on Bluesky.
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