Explaining – and Fixing – iGV’s Face-Off Controversy
Over the past few days you might’ve caught wind of some controversy stemming from iGV’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.
What’s the Deal with Face-Offs?
iGV rolled out a new version of our Face-Off tool earlier this year, 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. It then generates a list of your personal rankings, while also mashing your votes together with everybody else to create a community ranking. It’s far from perfect, and we hope to iterate on it so that it becomes a better experience that creates a more accurate personal list for you in fewer matches. Even so, it’s been a lot of fun to mess with and find interesting ways to use it – and to watch people agonize over tough choices between two things they love.
How the Controversy Began
On February 22, after a few big 2024 games had launched, I started the as an experiment to see how the running tally would look if we’re adding new games as they come out. This was an informal test that asked a casual question about how people are feeling in the moment, and it was never presented as our . We still plan to do that the old-fashioned way later this year, and it will be entirely separate from this. This use case technically wasn’t what the tool was built for, but I wanted to see if it would work – and the results have been promising.
What Went Wrong
Until recently, the GOTY So Far Face-Off wasn’t exactly lighting the world on fire in terms of traffic numbers (not a ton of people are looking for Game of the Year content in April). Still, it had been humming along nicely, racking up hundreds of thousands of votes. Then, late last week, it dramatically blew up: The Black Myth: Wukong fandom discovered the Face-Off page and, seeing that their favorite game was within striking distance of the top of the list, rallied around it. We saw a massive influx of traffic from Chinese and other Asian sources to that page, and over the weekend Black Myth’s win percentage went from a very respectable showing in the 60s all the way up to an absolutely astronomical 90.4%, blowing past Rebirth’s relatively meager 72%. We never saw that coming, and what had been a relatively stable list was upended so quickly our scheduled social media repromotion of a Playlist built to reflect the top games – as they had been – was caught flat-footed and caused major confusion because it hadn’t been updated yet. Face-Offs are dynamic and react to the community; Playlists are not and must be manually updated. We’ve learned from this that the two probably should not mix!
The Fallout
Another truth is that the more people pay attention to something, the more likely it is that a bad actor tries to ruin the fun. In this case, it appears that someone – probably fully aware of how closely this page was being watched – figured out a way to quickly dump tens of thousands of votes against Black Myth: Wukong into the system, dropping it back down into the high 60s in a matter of hours. If trolling the Black Myth: Wukong fanbase during a moment of triumph was the goal here, it was extremely effective. We’ve seen a lot of anger and accusations of altering the results leveled at us, which is disappointing because again, this was all supposed to be for fun.
iGV’s Response
To be explicitly clear, no one at iGV tampered with the results of this Face-Off in any way during this period. We’ve spent the past few days investigating what happened, and how we can keep Face-Offs making people happy instead of mad going forward. Here’s what the voting activity looked like on September 21 through 24, by the hour, from the top regions where people were participating.
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.
Looking Forward
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!
Leave a Reply