How ranking works

Short version: we measure everything ourselves, we rank by real people instead of raw votes, and money can't buy you up the ranking.

The pogmc score

Every server gets a score out of 100, worked out from three things we measure ourselves:

• Real voters (up to 50 points). How many different people voted this month. Voting every day still counts you once, so a server can't win by pushing the same players to spam the vote button, and bot votes barely move it.
• Real players (up to 35 points). The average number of players our pinger saw over 30 days. Time offline counts as zero players.
• Uptime (up to 15 points). How often the server answered our pings over 30 days.

Voters and players are on a log scale. Going from 0 to 50 voters is worth a lot more than going from 450 to 500, so small servers that people genuinely like can rank well, and stacking up fake numbers gets less and less useful. The voter part resets on the 1st of each month.

Every server page shows its own score breakdown, so owners can see exactly where their points come from.

Player counts and uptime

Our pinger in the UK connects to every server every 2 minutes, the same way your Minecraft client does when it shows the server list. That gives us the player count, version, MOTD and ping. Owners can't edit any of it.

Uptime is the share of our pings that got an answer over the last 30 days. Ping is how long the server took to reply to us, so it's a good guide if you're in the UK and a rough one if you're not.

One honest caveat: a server can lie about its own player count in its ping reply. When the numbers look off (lots of "players" but no votes, no Discord, nothing) report it and we'll look.

Votes

• One vote per server, per person, every 24 hours. We check both your connection and the username.
• Every vote goes through a captcha.
• Votes feed the score as unique voters, not raw totals. See above.

Flags

We look for vote patterns that don't add up: loads of votes from a handful of networks, or far more votes than the server has ever had players. If we spot one, the server shows Votes under review while a human checks it.

While a server's under review, its voter points are paused. If it turns out to be cheating, the dodgy votes get wiped and the server shows Flagged: vote cheating on its page and in the list, with a score of zero. Publicly. That's the point.

Owner verified

Owner verified means the person editing the listing proved they run the server, by putting a code we gave them in the server's MOTD. It's free and it isn't something you can buy.

Featured spots

Owners can pay a flat weekly price (£10 on the homepage, £5 in a category) to join that week's Featured rotation. There's no bidding: everyone pays the same, everyone gets the same share of views, each week is capped, and nobody can hold a spot more than 4 weeks in a row. Featured servers are always labelled and sit above the ranking, never inside it.

Small servers get seen

The homepage has a "Small servers worth a look" row that rotates every 30 minutes between servers that are online and either new or small. No payment involved. We also pick a server of the week.