How ranking actually works here

GameSelectHQ doesn't hand-pick which servers look good. Every game's own server list, and the sitewide Top Servers page, use the exact same ranking order:

1. Status — an active, responding server always outranks a pending or offline one.
2. Promotion tier — a paid promotion (see below) moves a server ahead of non-promoted ones, but never past the honesty of status above.
3. Uptime over the last 7 days — a real, measured percentage from repeated automatic queries, not a self-reported number.
4. Live players right now — pulled from the same query that confirms the server is online.
5. Community vote score, then average review rating — the lowest- priority signals, used only to break ties once every live-health signal above already matched.

Nothing on this list is invented. If a server has low uptime, it will not outrank a more reliable one no matter how many votes it has.

What promotion actually changes

A promotion (VIP / boosted placement, available from Pricing) buys priority in the ranking order above — a real, visible position boost — and a badge marking the server as promoted. It does not fabricate uptime, player counts, or reviews, and it does not hide a server's real status if it goes offline.

Community rank on Communities

A community's rank (Newcomer / Rising / Notable / Elite) is recomputed on a schedule from the same kind of real numbers: how many active servers it has attached, their combined live player count, and its review rating. A verified badge is the one manually-set exception — an admin can toggle it, but it never changes the computed rank itself.

Why this matters if you're deciding whether to promote

If your server is genuinely reliable and populated, it will already rank well without paying for anything. Promotion is for visibility — jumping ahead of comparable servers in the same tier — not a way to disguise a server that's actually unreliable. That's a deliberate choice: a ranking system only stays useful if the top of the list is still trustworthy.