G4W Top - free self-service server list with live status and honest voting (feedback welcome)

[loveslips]

Hi everyone,

We run a few shards (ModernUO, a ServUO one and a Sphere one) and kept running into the same thing with existing top lists: player counts that are typed in by hand and never change, paid placement, and vote farms. So we built our own list and opened it to everybody, free: G4W Top — game server rankings: Ultima Online, Lineage 2, WoW, Minecraft

What is different:
- Every listing is probed automatically every 5 minutes (TCP connect, or your own status JSON if you have one). Online count, uptime % and the chart are measured, not self-reported.
- Voting: one vote per server per 12 hours, proof-of-work instead of a picture captcha, limits per IP and per browser. A replayed or forged vote is rejected.
- Listing is instant and free. No moderator queue, no paid tiers. If your game is not in the catalogue you can add it yourself.
- For shard owners: live banner image for your site, HMAC-signed vote postback (so you can hand out in-game rewards), an API to check whether a player voted, several worlds under a single listing, ownership verification by meta tag or DNS.
- 15 interface languages.

It went live yesterday, so I would rather hear the rough edges now than later: anything broken, anything missing, anything that looks gameable - tell me and I will fix it.

If you run a shard, you are welcome to add it: G4W Top — game server rankings: Ultima Online, Lineage 2, WoW, Minecraft

 

[PyrO]

Ok, I wonder what you are trying to solve (this way)

"player counts that are typed in by hand and never change"
How would your / the AI's solution help you? You are still getting the player count from the server.
If I wanted to I could still feed you whatever number I like

Voting once per X hours is also a default thing, and it comes with the same limits, stated by the AI, as any other. You are basing it on the IP and cookies from the browser, so someone can just use a vpn and use the privacy windows of the browser and already bypasses the limit.

"if your game is not in the catalogue you can add it yourself"
Uhh idk about that, nefarious intend can add bad things with that option

I also don't think having several worlds / shards grouped into one is a good idea.
Why? Because if one shard is good, and the others are not to their liking, you will not display that correctly with the votes, nor the online count.
And if you play on more than 1 shard of the group you can still only vote once, and get only 1 reward even though you play more servers.

"ownership verification by meta tag or DNS"
No idea what a DNS has to do with verfication?


Thats just direct feedback, wish you luck with the project though