Sudden popularity

[SSH]

No offence to these games, but suddenly, the numbers for some games are more than 10x usual:

Most popular last week:
Shifter's Box - Outside In
(1528 downloads)
A Tale of Two Kingdoms
(985 downloads)
The Book of Spells
(817 downloads)
The Glorious Realm of Thendor
(567 downloads)
The Long Trip
(561 downloads)

CJ, any ideas?

[Jakerpot]

well, the creators may have many friends 

[SSH]

Those in position 3, 4 and 5 all have broken DL links...

[Jakerpot]

... you got a point.

[LimpingFish]

Yep, seems suspect. Those links have been broken for some time too. The IP logs for each of those downloads should shed some light on it.

[Pumaman]

Thanks for spotting this, SSH.

Shifter's Box was a new release and got a lot of hits from http://www.indiegames.com/blog/ and http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/ where it was featured.

A Tale of Two Kingdoms is usually the most downloaded game of the week and its statistics look normal.

Book of Spells, Glorious Realm of Thendor and The Long Trip were the result of a concerted attempt by somebody to manipulate their download counts. I have the IP of the person who did it and it doens't match anyone on the forum, but I've banned them from the games page and adjusted the download counts of those games back to cancel out what they did.

I really hate that somebody has done that, I have better things to do with my time than go round cleaning up their mess. If you're reading this, I hope you're happy that you've wasted both my, and your, time for no good reason.

[Andail]

The fact that somebody tries to manipulate Book of Spells and Thendor is utterly and completely mysterious.
I can understand if new people want to boost the downloads of their latest creations, but those two...totally beyond me.

Frankly, I'm only embarrassed by Thendor getting attention nowadays.

[Babar]

Book of Spells?!

That ancient 4-part game by some greek guy? It deserves it more downloads!

[Le Woltaire]

Since all three downloads were broken it might be possible, that a frustrated guy, kept clicking on the download button because he insisted in playing these games...

At least it is a funny thought for me, that a guy continously clicks on a download button while he angrily shouts: "I want to play this!"

Code: ags

function repeatedly_execute(){ 

         if (cFrustratedGuy.frustration < 1000) {
                  cFrustratedGuy.ClickDownloadButton("The Book of Spells");
                  cFrustratedGuy.ClickDownloadButton("The Glorious Realm of Thendor");
                  cFrustratedGuy.ClickDownloadButton("The Long Trip");
                  cFrustratedGuy.Say("I want to play this!");
                  cFrustratedGuy.frustration = cFrustratedGuy.frustration + 1;}

    else if (cFrustratedGuy.frustration == 1000) {
                  cFrustratedGuy.Die();}
}

[Stumblebum]

Since all three downloads were broken it might be possible, that a frustrated guy, kept clicking on the download button because he insisted in playing these games...

At least it is a funny thought for me, that a guy continously clicks on a download button while he angrily shouts: "I want to play this!"

Sounds like me when I was trying to download "The Farm" a few months back.

[m0ds]

Spyros is undead! How awesome would that be