MMOBomb’s Ultimate Free-to-play Showdown has named Warframe the victor in a popular vote spanning 64 online games.
The final tally, 81,225 votes, beating other finalist SMITE‘s 80,071, with total percentages of 50.358% to 49.642%. Much of that voting was at the very deadline, due to urges from the company.
Digital Extremes, developer and publisher of Warframe, announced an in-game message on Friday urging players to vote in the finals. They thanked their fans for their support in a statement on Monday.
“Although we were down initially, you can never count our Tenno out.” DE said. “It was an honourable contest throughout, with formidable contenders and we are impressed with the passion of everyone’s fans. The contest was great fun and the Digital Extremes office was filled with Dev team cheers at the outcome of the closest race. Thank you to the SMITE community for making it a real nail-biter till the end!”
Hi-Rez Studios had no comment on their site, but had also announced the poll with in-game notifications.
Brackets were organized into four divisions of 16 games each, regardless of the free-to-play game’s genre. Polling was done through an online service that required no authentication.
Because it did not require any sign-up, this led to instances of players voting multiple times in an attempt to inflate their count in some games. MMObomb said they would monitor multiple-voters and remove them if they’d influence the poll, but implementing authentications were not an option.
“While I won’t go into the specifics, we can confirm that, yes, it’s possible for one person to vote multiple times.” it was written on the MMObomb entry for the second round. “We’ve been aware of the possibility since the start of the polls and, in all honesty, there’s not much we can do to cure the disease that wouldn’t be worse than the symptoms.”
Vote-spamming was report in the early rounds, when Mabinogi, an anime-styled online RPG received a huge influx of votes against competitor Ragnarok Online, which responded with its own botting. The final round was allegedly heavily monitored by MMObomb officials.
Mabinogi and Ragnarok Online both offered players in-game rewards if they won the tournament, in the form of extra affinity (experience), and item drops, which became a point of contention in discussion. Neither SMITE developer Hi-Rez Studios nor Warframe‘s Digital Extremes offered in-game rewards.
