How we rank — and our never-paid-placement pledge
Every leaderboard on MMOLove is ordered by real, counted hearts from real players — never by who paid the most. Here is exactly how a heart becomes a rank, the votes we throw out, and the single paid slot we always label as such.
How the leaderboard is ordered
Every ranking on MMOLove is ordered by one thing: real, counted hearts. A heart is one player vouching for one server. Servers are ranked by their hearts in the current calendar month, highest first, and that count resets at the start of every month — so the board is a live picture of which communities are thriving right now, not a frozen hall of fame. We keep an all-time total alongside it for posterity. Money, ad spend, and subscriptions have no effect on this order. Read how hearts, streaks and rewards work for the full player-facing picture.
How hearts work
You can give each server one heart per day— no more. Because a heart costs a day, a high total can only come from many different people coming back day after day, not one person (or one script) hammering the button. Hearts are tracked per voter and per server. A server's monthly count rolls over to zero at the start of each month, while its all-time total is kept.
The votes we throw out
Before a heart is counted it is scored for fraud, and votes that look automated are flagged and excluded from the public rankings. In plain terms, we throw out:
- votes from known bot or crawler user-agents;
- bursts of votes from a single network address in a short window;
- a single browser fingerprint fanning out across many servers within an hour;
- and we treat a vote with no browser fingerprint as more suspicious.
Flagged votes are stored for auditing but never addedto a server's counted total, so a high heart count reflects genuine support. We describe this honestly: these checks catch obvious automation and we keep improving them — we do not claim to catch every possible fake, because no honest system can.
Our “never paid placement” pledge
Rankings are never for sale. We do not sell rank, weight, or position, and we never will. A server can subscribe to MMOLove Plus for presentation features, but Plus does not move a server up any ranking. The order is decided by counted hearts alone.
The one paid slot: the Daily Spotlight
We have exactly one paid placement, and we want to be completely straight about it. The daily Spotlight is a promoted slot a server owner can bid on. It is always labelled as promoted, shown separately from the ranked list, and it never changes a server's rank. Being open about the one thing money can buy is how you can trust everything money can't.
Why this is different from the industry norm
Across the wider game-server toplist industry, paying for position is a common, openly advertised business model — many toplists sell premium tiers, “bonus votes”, or paid rank boosts. That is precisely the practice we reject, and it isn't only a matter of taste. In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission took action against the rankings site LendEDUfor selling placement while presenting its lists as objective and unbiased. So “never paid placement” is a legal-integrity claim for us, not a slogan: when we say hearts decide the order, undisclosed paid rank would be exactly the conduct regulators have sanctioned. We state this as a general, verifiable fact about the industry and a matter of public record — we make no accusation about any particular named competitor.
How to check us
We'd rather you verify than take our word for it. Pick any leaderboard and read it against this policy: the order should track each server's monthly hearts with no exceptions, and the only thing sitting outside the ranked list should be the clearly-labelled Daily Spotlight. Subscribing to Plus should never move a server up. If you ever find a ranked position that hearts don't explain, email hello@mmolove.ggand we'll show our working — and fix it if we're wrong. Journalists and researchers are welcome to do the same.
Every server also has a public integrity record— a month-by-month log of exactly how many hearts were counted and how many were flagged and thrown out. Visit any server's detail page and follow the “public integrity record” link, or navigate directly to /[game]/[server]/integrity. The record is aggregate-only: no individual voter data is ever exposed.