Courtesy of Wikepedia

The original Minecraft game was released in 2009. Since then, it has garnered a fanbase of over 140 million monthly active players.

Ignoring the proposed boycott, Mojang still held their annual mob vote Sunday. The game development company stated that over 5 million people voted and the armadillo beat out the crab and penguin with over 40% of the votes. More people seem to have voted this time around than they did in 2022, when the sniffer won the mob vote with over 50% of the 3.5 million votes. This goes against the boycott that players proposed after Mojang revealed all three mob vote options this year and its associated petition, which has over 500,000 signatures.

With the vote done and the boycott having no discernible effect on the vote, Mojang seemingly sidestepped the controversy this year. However, some members of the Minecraft community became suspicious of the vote after noticing the differences in voter turnout between 2022 and 2023. They began to accuse bots of tampering with the vote.

More fuel was poured onto the outrage fire when YouTuber TheMisterEpic posted a video entitled “The Minecraft Mob Vote Was BOTTED – I Have Potential Evidence.” In the video, which has over 400,000 views, the YouTuber explains that through a series of coding errors and leaks, voters–especially those using IOS devices–could have theoretically voted an infinite number of times. 

In a statement written by a Minecraft developer in an exclusive Discord server, they confirm that there were attempts to rig the vote but “that these attempts did not impact the results” and that “this year’s winner accurately reflects the results of the vote.”

This is far from the first time there have been accusations of tampering with the mob vote, with popular Minecraft YouTuber Dream being accused of rigging the mob vote in 2020 and 2021. This outrage resulted in him being banned from Twitter the entire day of the 2021 mob vote.

While TheMisterEpic does not state whether the vote was rigged or not in his video, he does leave it up to the viewers, and judging by the comment section, they have very strong opinions on the matter.

One commenter, @iansarmiento23, has over 1,500 likes for his comment, “I think saying there was more mob votes than last year is ignoring a crucial fact is that the voting servers were open for 48 hours compared to 1 hour. It allowed people who couldn’t attend Minecraft live to actually vote too”.

There are also those who are more critical of the idea of the mob vote in general, echoing the same arguments of the mob vote boycott.

User @rahj0 commented, “The mob vote is supposed to be a fun event, but with every year it feels like it’s going further away from it’s original intention. These cause so much hate and arguing that it’s probably a better idea to either remake the mob vote, or scrap it.” The comment has received over 9,200 likes.