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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."
First they rebranded the XNA website as App Hub to help push Windows Phone 7, then they had XBLIG displayed after avatar clothing They did at least attempt to help support independent developers somewhat recently, so they have shown some sign of caring.
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.
It's been what, twenty years of top downloaded/most votes lists, and we still can't make a fair system? Shiiit. Android market, the appstore, now this, they all suffer from the same flaws and drawbacks. Why can't some interface/social-schmocial people figure out a way to get this right?!
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...
Castle Crashers was one of the first Xbox Live Arcade games
Uhm... say what now?
Xbox360: released November 22, 2005.
Castle Crashers: released August 27, 2008.
Almost THREE YEARS of Xbox Live Arcade games separates the two.
This has been a message from reality. As an additional message: please stop smoking crack.