What They Are For
They set the order servers are listed in. A rating blends two signals, votes at 60 percent and reviews at 40, because a vote is somebody coming back while a review is written once and then sits there.
Voting
You do not need an account. Type the gamertag you play as, and one Bedrock player can vote once per server every 24 hours. The window rolls from your last vote rather than resetting at midnight.
Votes from a single connection are capped each day as well, so a household or a school sharing an address can run out before everybody has voted.
A vote from a gamertag proved by a linked Xbox account counts in full. One that was only typed counts a quarter, which makes farming unprofitable without erasing the many real players who have never linked.
Reviews
A review is one to five stars and needs a linked Xbox account, so a rating means a real player wrote it. You cannot review a server you own.
A server with only a handful of reviews sits near the middle until enough people have said something to move it, which is what stops one five star review outranking fifty four star ones.
Why the Top Server Does Not Stay There Forever
Votes are worth less each as they pile up. The vote half of the score reaches half its ceiling at around 25 weighted votes and only creeps up from there, so a large server cannot sit at the top permanently and flatten everything under it.
Rewarding Voters
Rewarding players for voting is fine and manufacturing votes is not. If you run a server and hand out rewards, key them on the Xbox ID rather than the gamertag, because a gamertag can change and an Xbox ID cannot.
Did this answer your question?