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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."
You can hardly say that Microsoft is turning a blind eye to this only 3½ working days after announcing that they are looking into it. It will take time to process the logs to find the trends and then make some changes so this cannot happen again. The blogger from TFA has had longer to come up with some figures and still only says that he has a "personal hunch" that the figures have been manipulated based on what he thinks the games should be rated.
If you look at the first blog mentioning this they single out the fans of College Lacrosse 2011 to be the bad guys and yet the graphs shown a week later have the lacrosse game dropping in the ratings. With any rating system, I assume that there must be some attempts to fudge the figures, so it seems quite plausible that the blogger may end up being correct. But my point is that it takes time to find out what is really happening. They have to be more sure than just saying that something looks fishy before they take action.
MS should scrap the web front end for submitting game ratings.
Instead, it should only be possible to submit a game rating from the XBox itself, using an account that's unlocked at least one achievement from the game.
Since the XBLIG games are only accessible to people with an internet-enabled XBox and a Live account, that shouldn't disenfranchise anyone who's actually got a relevant opinion.