Runet Prize. Who is stronger: a tank or a crook?

The popular vote, which determines the winner of the Runet Award in the nomination "Ten People", is nearing the end. For the 1st place there is a tense struggle between 2 massively multiplayer online games - “ Legend: Legacy of the Dragons ”, promoted by the largest communication portal of the Russian Internet Mail.ru and the new game “ World of Tanks ”.



It is this intense struggle and causes a lot of questions. Applicants for the 1st place are simply not comparable in terms of, we will use sports terminology, weight categories. Imagine a duel of 2 masters of sports - in sambo and rhythmic gymnastics. The victory of the fighter in any normal person will not cause doubts. In our case, everything is turned upside down. The organizers of the award either pretend that they do not notice outright cheating of the votes, or directly participate in this. Immediately make a reservation - I am not a user of either Legend or World of Tanks . My sympathies are on the side of the other game - HeroesWM . But what is happening now, this uncovered nothing cheating votes of the weakest team, can cause nothing but indignation.

Let's see who is who.

“ World of Tanks ” is a young game, launched in August 2010. However, despite such a “young” age, it has gained tremendous popularity in the world, demonstrating an unprecedented dynamic of user growth. World of Tanks hit the Guinness Book of Records, setting the world record for the simultaneous presence of players on one server several times: January - 91 thousand, March - 120 thousand, September - 212 thousand. There is information that the latest achievement is more than 240 thousand In July 2010, beta testing of the western version of the game was launched. In November 2010, the number of users reached 200 thousand people, and by May 2011 the number of users registered on the North American server exceeded one million. The list of awards received by World of Tanks in a short time is quite eloquent:

• The best client online game KRI-2010
• Prize for the best game concept (“Best New Concept”) from Massively.com portal at E3 2010
• The award "Crown" from the magazine "Best Computer Games"
• "Editors Choice" from the publication "Home PC"
• "Editors' Choice" from the game portal Gameguru
• The best free MMORPG game ("Best Free MMORPG") according to the MMO community of the MMORPG CENTER portal
• The most expected free MMORPG game ("Most Anticipated Free MMORPG") according to the MMO community of the MMORPG CENTER portal
• The most anticipated MMO game of 2010 (“Most Anticipated MMO in 2010”) based on user voting results on MMO portal MMOSITE
• The best strategic MMO game of 2010 (“Favorite Strategy MMO in 2010”) based on user voting results on MMO portal MMOSITE
• The best MMO game of 2010 according to readers and the editors of the portal Stopgame.ru
• Record on the simultaneous stay of players on one gaming MMO server according to the Guinness Book of Records
• The best MMO-game in 2010 according to readers and the editorial board of the newspaper "Virtual joys"
• "Gold Award" from the game portal Gamers Daily News
• The best game KRI-2011
• Audience Prize of KRI-2011 “Best„ Game that Needed the Award “Award” according to the version of Gamepro magazine according to the results of E3 2011
• "Rising Star Award for E3 2011" version mmorpg.com

“ Legend: Legacy of the Dragons ”, created in 2006, unfortunately, cannot boast anything of the kind. Symptomatic enough is the fact that those undertaken in 2008–2009. Attempts to promote the game to the foreign market actually ended in failure. The English, German, Spanish, Polish, Turkish, Chinese and French versions of the game created during this period, according to the authoritative Alexa - The WEB Information Company , have virtually no audience today. The only advantage of this game is the presence of the rich and very influential owner in RuNet - Mail.ru.

')

Mail.ru in its ranking positioned the " Legend: Legacy of the Dragons " as the absolute leader . In the six leaders there are only those who go to the third place in the voting, “ Heroes of war and money ”, “ World of Tanks ” is not at all . Let's see if the information Mail.ru is correct? The numbers are very doubtful.



Pay attention to the column “visits” in screenshots 1 and 2. Some kind of game, even if it would be extremely popular, cannot be only 3 times less on this indicator than, in fact, Mail.ru itself. One can believe that one of the closest competitors of Legends , Heroes of War and Money , with 2.8 million registered users, loses 36 times in the number of visits, but the Legenda’s 7-fold excess over search engine Rambler - this is from the realm of fantasy.

Screen 1

Screen 2

Let's turn to other sources. In Rambler TOP 100 , the “ Heroes of War and Money ” already mentioned are in 6th place out of 5569 resources, while “ Legend ” was at 859th place at 18:00 11/20/2011. The discrepancy is simply monstrous. We'll write it down to the Russian specifics of doing business, distorting information, unhealthy competition, etc. We turn to the authoritative analyst, which is absolutely indifferent to both Mail.ru, and Rambler and Legends, along with Tanks. Let's look at the situation in Alexa traffic rank “ Legend: Legacy of the Dragons ”, “ World of Tanks ” and “ Heroes of war and money ”:

	7 days	1 month	3 months	Rating in Russia
dwar.mail.ru	41 195	51 220	52 631	2 800
worldoftanks.ru	4,235	3,761	3,732	190
heroeswm.ru	9 871	9,434	10,055	554

It is evident that according to this indicator, the Legend very much loses even to the “ Heroes of War and Money ” and hopelessly World of Tanks . It is interesting to compare the position of these 3 teams in the overall rating of the Russian sector of the network, which gives Alexa: Yandex - 1, Mail.ru - 2, World of Tanks - 190, “ Heroes of war and money ” - 544 and “ Legend ” - 2800.



Now let's see the Reach figure. It is expressed as a percentage of the total (global) number of Internet users. For Google, this is 50% (i.e., every 2nd Internet user in the world looks at Google), for Yandex, about 3%, and what we have ...

	7 days	1 month	3 months
dwar.mail.ru	0,0033	0,0025	0,00243
worldoftanks.ru	0.03	0.0323	0.0317
heroeswm.ru	0.01	0,0102	0,0096

It is seen that the “ Legend ” users are 3 times less than the “Heroes of War and Money” and 10 times less than the “ World of Tanks ”. All this leads to quite definite conclusions. And if we take into account the instructions on vote wrapping posted on YouTube by Legend users ... And now the logical question arises - is the award organizing committee just turning a blind eye to an obvious scam or directly participating in it?



Co-authored with TVlad . Nothing stranger.

• PS Popular Vote 2011