Explaining – and Fixing – IGN’s Face-Off Controversy

Over the past few days you might’ve caught wind of some controversy stemming from IGN’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.

Early this year IGN rolled out a new version of our Face-Off tool, 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, whether that’s The Empire Strikes Back vs Attack of the Clones, or Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (2011) vs Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (2023). 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.

On February 22, after a few big 2024 games had launched, I started the What’s Your Game of the Year So Far? Face-Off as an experiment to see how the running tally would look if we’re adding new games as they come out. Importantly, 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 official Game of the Year community vote. We still plan to do that the old-fashioned way later this year, and it will be entirely separate from this. (To answer the frequently asked question of why Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree is on the list when it’s a DLC expansion and not a full new game: Because there are no rules and I wanted to see what would happen! I’ll put Starfield: Shattered Space on there next week, too.) 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.

How the list shakes out is proving to be very interesting because the community ranking is based on the win/loss ratio, rather than the sheer number of votes a game receives. That means a new entry added in November can outrank something added in May simply because it wins more often, as opposed to more times. For instance, something that’s chosen as the winner in 6,500 out of 10,000 matches will outrank another item that wins 60,000 out of 100,000 matches. (It’s very silly when you add something new and it’s #1 with a 100% win ratio for a brief moment, but that quickly evens out.) So, while the hot new thing might get a lot of wins shortly after it comes out, after the honeymoon period expires and people move on to other games its ranking might fall if it’s more of a flash in the pan than something that sticks with you for a long time, as truly great games do. Ideally, people would only vote on games that they’ve actually played and disqualify the rest (using the little X in the corner of each card) so they’re not voting against something they don’t have an informed opinion on, but realistically I know the overwhelming majority is not going to do that. This is purely a popularity contest.

Even so, it’s been a treat to watch how things have played out, and the resulting ranking is a fascinating melding of thousands of different people’s opinions. Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth had held a steady lead most of the year, but Shadow of the Erdtree was nipping at its heels for months. (See? People wanted to vote for it.) When Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, Helldivers 2, Space Marine 2, Astro Bot, and Black Myth: Wukong, and other popular games came out, they shot up into the top half of the list and jockeyed for position. There were no hard rules (again, Face-Offs are a wild west territory for us!) but I mostly added games that either scored 8 or above on IGN or had proven themselves popular or at least interesting elsewhere. At the same time, I periodically pruned low-performing games from the bottom of the rankings that looked like they were never going to recover to make way for new entries and prevent the list of games from becoming unmanageably long – Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League didn’t make it, I’m afraid.

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, and I think there’s a lot of potential for it in the future.

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!

Aside from that wrinkle, this response to Face-Offs is exactly what I hoped would happen… but on an intensity level I hadn’t imagined. Our goal is for Face-Offs to be fun, and by golly, people were having an absolute blast with it – some were even livestreaming as they refreshed the page to see how high Black Myth could go! For the record, we don’t consider it cheating at all for fan communities to champion their game and support it by voting, and it’s actually encouraged for people to run through multiple times. (The double-bracket system we currently use means that a single run could possibly eliminate a #3 choice early on, and everything is not matched against everything, so more data gives a better picture of your preferences.) We were thrilled that so many Black Myth fans noticed the Face-Off and participated in force, and we’d love nothing more than for other fandoms to join in the fray. Friendly rivalries like that would be the best-case scenario for us, and we’d find out what other games those groups are into in the process by seeing how the rest of the list shook out. In the past few days we’ve gotten nearly twice as many votes on this Face-Off than it’d racked up in the previous six months.

But of course, this is the internet, and on the internet we know certain immutable truths. One is that online polling is not secure. Just about anything can be manipulated if someone puts their mind to it, especially if you’re not creating multiple layers of security and identity verification to lock it down. Face-Offs aren’t intended to be taken super seriously, so we don’t even require you to create an IGN account to participate – as we do with our traditional Community Game of the Year vote – because we want as many people to join in as possible. (We’d love it if you did create an account, though – it’ll save your progress on a run and your personal vote count if you’re signed in.)

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.

To be explicitly clear, no one at IGN 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.

You can see the massive, sustained influx of pro-Black Myth: Wukong voters who pushed it to the top of the list, followed by a short but potent spike. That corresponds to the period where it fell back down.

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.

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!

In the meantime, our What’s Your Game of the Year So Far? Face-Off continues: Yesterday I added The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom (to both this Face-Off and our Zelda-specific one), so if you’re playing and have an idea of where it belongs relative to other 2024 games, we’d love to have your vote. If you’re passionate about movies or TV shows this year, check out our Face-Offs for those as well. And share them with your friends – I’m trying to make these a thing.

Dan Stapleton is IGN’s Director of Reviews and self-proclaimed Chief Face-Officer. Follow him on Bluesky.