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Xbox Live Indie Games Rating Manipulation
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft seems to be turning a blind eye to the Xbox Live Indie game area. Certain indie developers have found a way to abuse the independent game ranking system in order to down-vote popular indie titles while up-voting their own. Due to this, games are falling out of the valuable top 20 slot and the value of the ranking system is jeopardized."
Just to be clear: the developers of CL2011 asked their fans to vote up CL2011; they didn't ask them to vote down other games and have since put up a note on Facebook asking their fans to play nicely. So this appears to be down to overzealous loony fan-boys, rather than anything else.
(however, it has been suggested that several other developers have gone down the fake-account-vote route to try and boost their initial ranking. There's certainly been a number of recent games rated at 4+, which I'd personally rate at 2 or 3. Though to be fair, I am a bitter and jaded gamer...)
In any case, Microsoft need to fix this sharpish, as the problem isn't restricted to XBLIG, but also applies to XBLA and the rest of Microsoft's DLC empire - it's just more visible on XBLIG as the average number of votes/game is low. In fact, the odds are good that there's at least one marketing company ready and willing to drop a votebomb, inbetween spamming social networks with tales of how great basic_bejewelled_clone_5 is...