How VAINKEURZ rankings are made
A VAINKEURZ world ranking aggregates the duels the community has settled between two items and converts them into an ELO score for each item.
This page explains every step, without a formula: the duel, the score, why a ranking moves, what "world" means, and the moderation rules.
What is a duel?
A VAINKEURZ duel pits two items of the same TopList against each other, and the player picks the one they prefer.
Players never have to rate or order a whole list: they answer one question at a time, "which of the two?". Each answer implies others: if A beats B and B beats C, then A is placed above C without anyone being asked. At the end the player gets their own ranking, and their choices also count toward the world ranking.
The ELO score, in four sentences
The ELO score of an item measures its relative strength: it goes up when the item wins a duel and down when it loses one.
How far it moves depends on the opponent: beating a top-ranked item earns a lot, beating a weak one earns little. An item that has faced few opponents moves faster than one that is already established, so its score settles quickly and then stops swinging on every duel. It is the principle behind chess player ratings, applied here to characters, games, songs or dishes.
Why a ranking changes
A world ranking changes because new duels keep being added, and each one nudges the score of the two items involved.
An item that climbs has won duels against well-placed opponents; an item that drops has lost them. Movements are larger at the bottom of the table, where items have been faced less often, than on the podium. Every world ranking page shows the date of its last calculation.
What does "world ranking" mean?
The world ranking of a TopList aggregates the duels of all players, with or without an account, rather than the order of a single person.
Unlike a personal TopList, which reflects one player's choices, the world ranking reflects the community. It is only published past 30 completed plays, so that a verdict never rests on a handful of votes.
VAINKEURZ in figures
VAINKEURZ has 5,983 published TopList and 13,536,176 duels voted by the community.
- published TopList
- 5,983
- published world rankings
- 2,585
- duels voted
- 13,536,176
- players
- 13,302
- categories
- 17
- languages
- 5
Figures computed on October 9, 2026.
Moderation and refusals
No TopList enters the catalogue without being validated, either by the moderation team or by a trusted creator authorised to validate their own.
Refused content includes hate speech, explicit violence, sexual content, harassment aimed at private individuals, illegal content, spam, stolen or clearly copyrighted images, misleading titles and incomprehensible subjects. A refusal always comes with a reason: the creator can fix their TopList and submit it again.