Favorites Boosting Accounts: Ranking Recalculations

Main Points
Last year, we implemented a system to combat illegitimate (duplicate) accounts manipulating scores. While we were aware of some character favorites boosting incidents then, over the last year the problem has become increasingly worse.

Thus, the development team has implemented a system to discount favorites boosted by illegitimate (aka duplicate) accounts.

• Character favorites and the updated ranking will be recalculated today.
  
• Corrections to favorites for the other DBs (Anime/Manga/People) should be released next week.

Scope of the Problem
As expected, the Character DB has been primarily targeted by favorites boosting trolls. Approximately 33% of all favorites given to the Top 50 Characters have been determined to be duplicate accounts. This is more than double the 13% for Anime, and 9% for Manga and People.



Most Affected Top 50 Favorites

• Anime: Kimetsu no Yaiba (33%) & Shingeki no Kyojin: The Final Season (33%)
  
• Manga: Death Note (23%) & Naruto (18%)
  
• Characters: Ichigo (Darling in the Franxx) (84%) & Emilia (Re:Zero) (69%)

Characters DB
As expected, the Top 10 Characters have all been boosted by various competing factions and the recalculated ranking does not change much.



Expanding to the Top 50, we also see a pattern of characters/series that were well-known to have been boosted.

• One Piece: Luffy (46%), Zoro (42%), Sanji (46%), Nico (62%)
  
• Naruto: Naruto (30%), Itachi (38%), Kakashi (29%), Sasuke (48%)
  
• Kaguya-sama: Chika (68%), Kaguya (56%), Ishigami (54%)
  
• Re:Zero: Rem (48%), Emilia (68%)
  
• Oregairu: Hachiman (35%), Yukino (38%)
  
• etc...

Final Thoughts

• In the Top 50 Character Favorites alone, 1,068,471 votes were given by duplicate accounts for boosting purposes.
  
• Assuming each account boosted ~3 characters, that gives an estimation of 356,157 accounts created to boost favorites...

Malicious users are still trying to get around the fix to the scoring system we released last year, and we expect they will try to do the same with favorites. Thus, we do not expect today's fix to be a one time "catch-all". We will continue to monitor the data and act swiftly to counter malicious attempts to influence our community rankings.

Thank you for your patience awaiting this much-needed fix.

Me hoping for Zeke to be in top 10.

wow this is a great thing, nice to see Okabe shoot up the top 10

also did not think Ichigo would have that many bot favorites lmao

lol its about damn time MAL developers but better late than never

I was waiting for this.It was really about damn time.

I've been on this website for over a decade and honestly didn't know about the top favorite character thing. Or maybe I forgot at some point. That's how little I actually care for these top favorites. It is nice to see some changes for the people who actually care though.

Niceee finally, i gotta say tho why would anyone boost ichigo (DITF) by 84% lmao

Some of these drops/jumps are wild. Ishigami from Kaguya sama going from top 50 to outside the top 100.

Really glad to see everyone 'going back' to their positions. You should probably take a look at Nanami Mami too, there's no way she has any favorites lol.

Finally, someone is taking the necessary steps. I was already finding it bizarre to see Ichigo with the same number of favorites as Zero Two. It doesn't make sense, no matter how you see it.

Thank you dev. team!!
I'm happy still my boi Levi is popular <3

My focus just to...

Most Affected Top 50 Favorites
Anime: Kimetsu no Yaiba (33%) & Shingeki no Kyojin: The Final Season (33%)
Manga: Death Note (23%) & Naruto (18%)
Characters: Ichigo (Darling in the Franxx) (84%) & Emilia (Re:Zero) (69%)

Great news,nice to see accurate ranking now.

I knew Luffy and Light were botted af, but 46% for Luffy? Wow. I think Levi deserves the second spot after all. I'm not even surprised Shingeki Final season favorites are 33% bots, that's actually lower than expected.

Thank you for your hard work!

They did it bois they did it! At last they fixed the damn character rankings.

Thanks for the great work.

You should also take a look at the Score for some anime / manga. I have already identified several people giving low marks just to see their favorite show in a higher position.

Damn Luffy was botted way more than I thought. Nice to see the fix though. It's been a problem for quite a while.

Ichigo - 84%
Emilia - 68%
Nico Robin - 62%
Luffy - 46%

😂😂😂😂😂😂 no fucking way!!!

A welcome fix. Damn, Ichigo got tanked with the bots

Emilia and 15 go down so hard, holy cow

That should put an end to the ''but the favs are all bots'' argument. Good job mal. Go Leviiiiiiii!!!

One Piece / KNY / Death Note FANBOYS DON'T KILL YOURSELVES Plz

FINALLY. Glad to see that MAL is finally taking proper measures.

I had faith in MAL Team to Stop this phenomenon for a year now and they didn't disappoint . MY Favorite Platform

Glad to see the botting all being taken care of. The absurd rise in favourites of the Kaguya-Sama and Re:Zero characters in such a short span of time always seemed pretty unnatural to me as much as I'm a huge fan of both series.

A little sad to my boy Ed still remaining at #8 after the correction though, I was expecting him to go back to #4/5 where he once used to be. :(

Emperor Lelouch's #1 spot was always very genuine though, I hope that has been proved more than well-enough now.

No more kaguya-sama fuck yeah

edit: i got tamed, original comment said AOT

Thanks. The boosting was very obvious.

It got a lot lonelier over here in ichigo-is-best-girl-in-ditf land. Although seeing sasuke lose half of his favorites makes up for it

what do you mean bud? Levi rose to no. 2 and mikasa and eren are at 16 and 17 respectively. AoT is still the only show with 3 characters in top 20. I think 'no more bot supremacy' is more accurate.

lol. I feel bad for the fanboys who put soooooo much effort to makes their fav shows and characters rise in rankings. But it was all for nothing. Go and cry in a corner.

It's funny that even though Hachiman had so many bots he kept exactly the same position after the purge.

Well reminder that Levi is at #2 now, beating Luffy & L, amd whilst Eren & Mikasa did suffer a notable drop, they are still quite high....so not sure where you are coming from.

Better statement would be no more Kaguya-Sama & Re:Zero supremacy, their characters suffered the biggest drop, especially the former.

You just can't possibly tell me that out of Goku's 46,000 favorites, 24,000 were bots. That's just impossible, no one cares about DB in this site for that to have been the case.

Now he's soon gonna be out of the top 50. Fucking gross.

Just found out that even Akira Natsume of Ex Arm got nerfed, although by just 2 favorites.

Also, do something about the Vivy bots! They are artificially inflating the score of the anime while deflating the score of nearly every other anime airing this season.

Well color me surprised. I thought the people complaining about character favorites being bots were just being paranoid. Turns out some people are in fact insane and would actually boost something is insignificant as character favorites. Guess some people are just so insecure they need their taste to be validated by numbers on this website huh

Anyways gj mods for taking action.

Also Ichigo fans down bad lol

FINALLY OMG

Can we expect a recalculation on top shows that gets bombarded by 1 scores by accounts that does that and "coincidentally" rate their favorite 10 (normally the only one while the rest are 1)? Funny how that same accounts goes directly to the last season to put 1 but never scored or watched the rest, while also rated everything at the same day and watched everything at the same time.

Long story short, is the rated 1 brigade ever be sorted out?

LMAO. All those generic waifubaits fell pretty hard especially emilia and ichigo. OP characters and other sht shonen characters also fell bad.

More power to Gintoki and the characters who are actually good.

Good Job! Mods.

Lol . proof ? or you are just salty that your show isn't getting high rating but Vivy does.

emilia dropped pretty hard. Do you feel lonely now?

so did every character and why being toxic mate ? Did i said anything to you ? anyways have a great day.

Wow, I didn't think it was THIS bad for some characters. Thanks for fixing it. Didn't even know who that Ichigo girl was lmao.
Anticipating HanaKawa being most favourited person again.

Ok so if you don't like an anime and that has a high score it is done by bots?Lol people have different opinions.Grow up.

I heard this person had more favorites than Rimuru at one point so that must be pretty big

I ain't being toxic. I was myself sort of taken aback when I saw eren drop. So I was curious how the emilia stans are feeling at the moment. Sorry for not making myself clear.

How are Akashi from Kuroko and Eugeo from sao botted?
Akashi was 8k before but now he's at 5k (approx. 35%)
Eugeo was 10k before but now he's at 2k (approx. 80%)
I don't believe this

It was pretty obvious she was being botted along with every other character in top 100 on MAL , So it wasn't really surprise for me , heck even Rem lost around 36000 favourites and Emilia lost around the same amount. I know something like this will happen eventually only question how long will this go on before MAL does something and i am happy they did. (Also Emilia now has same amount of favourites as she does on Anilist , She is ranked 3rd on Anilist though in terms of favourites)

Mal removed bots for now, but how can they be so sure that characters won't be botted in the future?

RIP Geld, u deserved better