Round 2 of the Ultimate F2P Tournament: A By-the-Numbers Recap
And then there were 16.
Only one-quarter of the games that started on this journey still remain, so we thought we'd reflect on some of the stats we've seen in the first two rounds with a few “best of” lists:
Most votes through two rounds:
SMITE – 18,965
Mabinogi – 12,648
Warframe – 7571+
Team Fortress 2 – 7,022
Aura Kingdom – 6,911 (first-round voting only!)
On the flip side, the lowest vote total by a round of 16 participant goes to DC Universe Online, with 1,282.
Largest total margin of victory (percentage points):
Path of Exile – 166-34
PlanetSide 2 – 151-49
Team Fortress 2 – 148-52
Star Wars: The Old Republic – 144-56
TERA – 142-58
Game types remaining:
RPG – 9
FPS – 4
MOBA – 3
Total value of seeds:
If all highest seeds were remaining – 40
If all lowest seeds were remaining – 232
Actual – 103
Also, there's been some, uh, “heated discussion” regarding cheating in the polls. To wit, some players have taken to using methods that might be considered underhanded by their opponents – some of whom have found out about them and promoted the same tactics to their community. While I won't go into the specifics, we can confirm that, yes, it's possible for one person to vote multiple times. We've been aware of the possibility since the start of the polls and, in all honesty, there's not much we can do to cure the disease that wouldn't be worse than the symptoms.
Suppose we implemented a form of strict IP blocking, for instance, so that no person could vote twice from the same computer, or even from the same building. You could still vote multiple times by voting from home, from work, from school, from a library, from your phone, from your laptop... It's easy to see how a person could vote several times to avoid such restrictions, and it could restrict legitimate voting, such as from two people living in the same household or voting from the same public computer or college campus.
Could we implement a kind of registration system to prevent people from voting more than once? Maybe, but you don't want to have to sign up/sign in every time you want to vote, and it's easy enough for people to put in fake names or e-mails (or create multiple free e-mail accounts). And even if we did have all these safeguards and some absolutely unquestionable, multi-million-dollar foolproof security system in place, some people would still cry “Hackers!” when their favorite game lost.
All that being said, we have found evidence of one user being able to cast more than a handful of votes for his game. According to what he said and the time frame he gives, he should have added a few hundred votes to his game's total, but, seeing as how his game won by several thousand votes, we've decided not to take action. However, we are implementing stricter anti-cheat controls for the final rounds of the poll. We didn't want to do this because of the warning that comes with the polling system that some legitimate votes might not be counted, but we've run a few tests and are crossing our fingers that this won't gum up the works too badly.
We don't believe that every upset or every loss is the result of cheaters, though. What we've seen in the case of games getting unusually high vote totals is plenty of evidence of passionate gamers and game companies promoting the contest via forums and social media (occasionally with bribes) to “get out the vote,” and that we have no problem with.
Also keep in mind that, if your game got beaten in the second round by someone who “cheated,” your game won its first round match-up – so fans of the game it beat could, without any hard evidence, accuse you of the same thing.
Finally, while we love this tournament – and a lot of you do, too, by the looks of it – it's not a life-or-death struggle. There isn't a large cash sum on the line, and we're not voting for anything like the president of the United States, or even something really important like the winner of American Idol. It's light and fun, and if your game loses... well, it'll be in good company. 64 games started this tournament, and 63 of them will be eliminated. Celebrate your victories and don't dwell too long on your defeats.
Vote in Round 3 here!
The winners of each division will face off to determine, once and for all, what is the best F2P game – or at least which game has the most rabid fans!
Schedule:
M 2/24: Warrior Division, Round 1
W 2/26: Cleric Division, Round 1
F 2/28: Rogue Division, Round 1
M 3/3: Wizard Division, Round 1
W 3/5: Warrior Division, Round 2
F 3/7: Cleric Division, Round 2
M 3/10: Rogue Division, Round 2
W 3/12: Wizard Division, Round 2
F 3/14: Warrior Division, Semi-Finals
M 3/17: Cleric Division, Semi-Finals
W 3/19: Rogue Division, Semi-Finals
F 3/21: Wizard Division, Semi-Finals
M 3/24: Warrior & Cleric Divisions, Finals
W 3/26: Rogue & Wizard Divisions, Finals
F 3/28: Warrior vs. Cleric Division winners, Rogue vs. Wizard Division winners
M 3/31: The Final Match-up!
Note: The schedule for opening new polls in the semi-final rounds and beyond has been altered slightly, to speed up the overall pace of the tournament. All polls will remain open for two days (three on weekends) except for the final match-up. We apologize for the confusion.
Vote early, vote often, but whatever you do, just vote!
About the Author
Michael Dunaway has been part of the MMOBomb team for years and has covered practically every major Free-to-Play MMO title since 2009.
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"There are only two in the top 100 offending IPs. They each have 84 and 75 votes respectively."
"Just to be clear, although the majority of the bots on that list are RO, there are some Mabi at the bottom as well, although only a few."
"I'd say 300+ votes from one proxy TOR IP is quite enough evidence to deem that RO vote illegitimate. See our earlier tweets."
This was about Mabinogi voters. RO is doing this hardcore mang.
No offense though, RO was a good game back in the days. But jebus, so much flame from both sides.
Oh look, i know how to copy pasta, yay me.
// D.
I don't like mab to bright and confusing.
Ro - ok lets bot 50 votes
Mab - THERE CHEATING!!!!
Mab - lets bot 100 votes
RO - OMERGERD 2 can play this game!
RO - Bots 2000 votes
MAB - HOLY COW bots 3000 votes
REAL MAB - OMERGERD RO CHEATING
Ro - DUMMIES
MAB - BEAT THIS 4000 VOTES
RO- 2000 + 2000 votes
REAL MAB - LETS WIN THIS votes 1500
RO - HECK no votes 4000
REAL MAB - GUYS STOP U MAKING US LOOK BAD
RO - KEEP ON
MY FRIEND ( ofical player) WAS ABLE TO INTERCEPT A RO AND THEY ARE SENDING US VOTES TO MAKE US THE BAD GUYS
that's all back to u chad
RO: 49 MABI: 51 TOTAL: 19319 at 5:43
RO: 49 MABI: 51 TOTAL: 19542 at 5:53
For these, the change in total votes was: 223 for the period of 10 minutes, which is about .366 per second.
RO: 49 MABI: 51 TOTAL: 19746 at 6:03
For the third count, the change in total votes (Which I'll call C from now on) was 204 which is .34 votes per second (VpS).
Before I continue, I want to say that when I started collecting this data, I was about halfway through the minute, which may have skewed data, but if it does, we will see it in further counts.
RO: 50 MABI: 50 total 19919 at 6:13
C is 173
VpS is .28833
The amount of votes per second is decreasing, and they are in favor of RO.
I will post more later.
Thought it seems RO starting it. they got in 10 hrsfrom 11% to 45.. this is faster than the first vote.
I am not joking when I say that 4 hours ago there were exactly half the votes the poll currently has (about 7000+), at the time I am writing this, the poll is currently nearing 15000 votes.
And there seems to be an average of 100+ votes a minute. This seems fishy.
Voting for the Rouge Division Semi-Finals isn't supposed to start until FRIDAY!
It's a complete deadlock, and 1,951 votes, it'd be nice to see how many votes each side got.
Go TERA !
Instead of calling it the Cleric, Rogue, Wizard, etc., just call them the Shooter, Roleplay, Arena, and Puzzle or something divisions. You can still seed them based upon their popularity, but only for their own division.
It's not perfect, but it'd give games a much easier time when trying to decide which game is better.
Fortunately before the poll actually ended, they changed how the poll tracks votes and thus my method no longer worked. Therefor, I'm going to be only voting once for APB when our round starts :) Good luck, Warframe!
THE FALLDOWN OF LEAGUE OF LEGENDS IS COMING!
Hopefully Smite wins otherwise. Fantastic game.
I've played them both. And airmech is garbage.