Here’s a number we’ve never shared before: this year, roughly one in every three votes cast on our RSPS list was fake. Bots, proxies, paid votes, people hammering the vote button and hoping we wouldn’t notice. We noticed. That’s kind of our whole thing.
Our methodology makes a deal with you: we won’t tell you how vote verification works (that would just be a tutorial for cheaters), but we will always show you the results. So here they are. Four years of them.
The numbers
Since January 2022, players cast 10.5 million verified votes on the RSPS list. In the same period, we caught and removed 3.9 million fake vote attempts. That is not a small leak. That is an industry.
| Year | Verified votes | Rejected attempts | Rejected share |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | 2,203,315 | 387,011 | 14.9% |
| 2023 | 2,160,363 | 743,683 | 25.6% |
| 2024 | 1,144,109 | 512,718 | 30.9%* |
| 2025 | 2,968,926 | 1,275,768 | 30.1% |
| 2026 (partial) | 2,057,038 | 1,001,849 | 32.8% |
*Being honest: our daily logging had an outage in four months of 2024 (Feb, Mar, Aug, Sep). Those months are missing, not estimated. So 2024’s totals are incomplete, but the percentages only count months we actually measured. You’ll see the gaps in the chart too. We’d rather show you a broken line than a pretty lie.
The trend is the real story. In January 2022, about 2% of votes got rejected. Those were the quiet days. By late 2022 it passed 20%. That’s around the time two known commercial vote-bot services showed up in the scene, selling “guaranteed” votes to server owners. Two of them launched in this period alone. (We detect them. They just keep selling anyway.) And it’s not just bots: there’s big servers in the scene that takes no action when its players double-vote for extra rewards. We do. Those votes get removed. Since late 2023 it has stayed in a 30–38% band and never come back down. Vote fraud didn’t spike for one bad month. It climbed, and it never left.
Why so much cheating?
Because rankings are worth something. A top-10 spot puts your server in front of thousands of players looking for their next grind, and where there’s traffic, there’s someone trying to fake their way to it. Some attempts are lazy: the same person just voting again. Others are full-scale bot setups built to look like a crowd of real players.
Our current verification system has been live since 2021, and it has one property cheaters hate more than anything: a vote that counts right now can still get deleted later. Some checks fire the moment you vote. Others wait on purpose, minutes or hours, until patterns show up that no single vote gives away. So that paid vote a seller promised would stick? It looked fine at 9pm. By midnight it was gone.
Every one of those 3.9 million rejected votes was someone’s time, money, or bot. All for nothing.
If you’re a player
The rankings you see are real people. When a server hits #1, it’s because more verified players voted for it this month than for anyone else. That’s it. That’s the whole trick. And you don’t have to take our word for it: every server’s statistics page shows its daily audit: how many invalid votes got removed, and when.
If you’re a server owner
Two things. One: if some service promises to sell you votes and push your server up our list, save your money. It does not work here. We removed 3.9 million fake votes, and every single one of them was wasted money for someone. Two, and this is the part that really matters: your real votes are not drowning in someone else’s fake ones. You’re competing on the only scoreboard where the score is real.
What’s next
This same dataset tells a bigger story about the scene itself, including one finding that honestly surprised us: legit voting activity seems to be at its highest level in the past four years we’ve measured. Yes, really. We’re still investigating the data… the full picture lands in our first quarterly State of the RSPS Scene report this October.
Got questions about the data? Come argue on Discord.
All figures cover RSPS listings only and are fully aggregated; we never publish individual voting data. “Rejected” means vote attempts identified as invalid by our verification and audit systems.