⛔️ Draining the point system - MW quietly invalidating points without informing!

MakerWorld
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  • Update: MakerWorld has responded to this topic.
  • Please be sure to read the attached comment, which has been marked as solution.

Now that we’ve gathered a substantial number of cases and received Bambu’s official statement, it’s time to let users know that MakerWorld has quietly begun not counting all downloads anymore. The points system has been devalued. It doesn’t affect everyone equally - some users barely notice it, others are hit quite hard - but it affects many.

You can see this most clearly in the growing discrepancy between the download numbers shown for the actual 3D model and those shown for the print profile. These figures are drifting further and further apart. In its statement, Bambu even admitted that this behavior is intentional.

Below are just a few examples out of many; anyone can verify this themselves. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a long‑time user or a newcomer. The cases documented so far show that between 10 and 50 percent of all downloads were not counted.

Screenshot 2026-09-12 003556
Screenshot 2026-09-12 0035562245×758 176 KB

Screenshot 2026-09-12 003329
Screenshot 2026-09-12 0033292259×1053 224 KB

There were also users who had already reported this to Bambu and MakerWorld. Bambu says this is normal behavior, but doesn’t offer any explanation. As usual, it’s just a generic, empty statement - and most importantly, they explicitly say the issue will not be fixed, which strongly suggests that it’s intentional.

Hi there,
Thanks for contacting MakerWorld Team.

Model download counts and print profile download counts are tracked separately on the platform. To prevent malicious downloading or printing behavior, the system applies certain limits on how many downloads or prints from a single user can be counted toward both model downloads and profile downloads. As a result, it is normal for the download counts of print profiles and models to show inconsistencies.

Regarding the specific counting logic, we’re sorry that we’re unable to share more detailed information. That said, our team continuously reviews data and user feedback to improve the overall experience. This measure is currently applied universally across the platform to prevent abuse, and to maintain fairness and accuracy in the counting system. We apologize for any confusion or inconvenience this may have caused.

We appreciate your contributions to our platform.
If you require any further information or have any questions, please feel free to contact us. If you do not have further questions for this case, we will make the ticket as “resolved”. Should you have any further issues, you may reopen this ticket by replying directly to this email. For new requests, please submit a new ticket through our support portal：https://makerworld.com/en/my/support/tickets

Best regards,
MakerWorld

Maybe Bambu or MakerWorld would like to comment directly on what’s actually happening here, rather than issuing another generic, empty statement to the affected users. Why did Bambu intentionally stop counting all downloads and fail to openly inform users about it?

@BambuLab @SupportAssistant

I really encourage everyone to take a moment to review their own profiles and keep track of anything that looks unusual. The more users document these discrepancies, the clearer the overall picture becomes - and the harder it is for the issue to be dismissed.

Feel free to post your cases here under this topic if this applies to you as well.

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[Here’s a place to add additional information]

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This is what doesn’t pass the smell test -

To prevent malicious downloading or printing behavior, the system applies certain limits on how many downloads or prints from a single user can be counted toward both model downloads and profile downloads.

What are the conditions that result in a download or print not being counted? It would seem that MakerWorld is saying 10% to 50% of downloads are malicious? I have a lot of trouble believing that.

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That’s actually a contradiction in itself: if Bambu assumes, for example, that 30% of downloads are malicious, then why are the numbers calculated differently for the 3D model and the print profile? If that were truly the case, both figures should be reduced equally.

Furthermore, users should be informed about this - instead of having done it secretly for months, and probably even a year by now - only now are users starting to notice it.

With this statement, Bambu essentially admits that it’s contradicting its own logic.

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In my case the difference adds up to 3k downloads across the models.

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Same here. A Quick look on my best model shows: 183 model Downloads, 287 print Profile Downloads. (Only one print Profile provided)

LoopLoom

One possible explanation could be: MW has a fixed Budget to pay out per day/week/month/whatever to All users as a whole. When the daily budget is reached (in terms of download counts), the rest of the download are not counted, until the next day.

It would be economic nonsense (for MW) if they wouldn’t cap the incentives, I think.

Edit: On the other hand, it would be easier for MW to count the downloads correctly and then apply their secret unknown formula to calculate the payout points, which they already do. So my theory is rather pointless.

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I think it’s always been obvious (to me at least) that MW payouts are funded by the marketing budget at Bambu in order to establish the platform, and likely was not sustainable.

Obviously everyone here also likely knows this, and it’s interesting (to me) to see how Bambu are doing it, and if the community will move to other platforms, or start charging money for higher quality files.

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I have this issue with almost all of my models! I thought that it might have something to do with the double downloads. (One user downloading the same model multiple times) Or it might count each print profile for each user but only once for the model, but it seems like some people with only 1 print profile are having this issue to. Also, one of my models surprisingly has it the other way around it must be because of the new rules because it’s an old model that hasn’t gotten a lot of prints recently. I also think that print profile downloads don’t count for as much as they used to.

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Also if you take a look at your creator center you can see the total difference in print profile and model downloads, mines almost 50%!!

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What I can’t for the life of me figure out is that if you are going to fudge the numbers, why not just go all out and actually fudge the numbers? We have no way of knowing what is actually downloaded. If you don’t want to pay out, just make up a number right from the beginning. We can’t tell. The two numbers not matching just draw questions that have no good answer.

@MakerWorld @BambuLab I think we all here hope you really are listening and care about us! I know that I for one appreciate your printer and website as a good product that work together really well. However, your competition is catching up with their own excellent hardware, and if you sabotage your own website what are you going to have left? You still have the edge, don’t give it all up now!

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This is the stuff that makes me absolutely crazy with Bambu. On one hand, their printers are generally quite simple to use. Wiki is good, explanations are good, how-to articles are good…stuff is generally well-thought out.

…and then you get stuff like this. Garbled, nonsensical, just a mess.

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Looking at my weekly stats it feels like something has shifted.
I know that the prints in red should be trailing the downloads in blue and with lower numbers as not everybody prints every download and some print on non-Bambu printers.
I’ve been adding models the past 9 months so it is difficult to know how the that changes the figures, but it feels like something happened in July. My prints were going up, but the downloads didn’t and since then the downloads keep getting lower with a steady number of prints.

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Math is math. If you are not posting STLs and all your models are available trough print profiles only the numbers have to match. Suspicious downloads? System shouldn’t count it in profile also. 10th download from the same person? Only the first, unique one should be counted. As simple as that. Now, I have another interesting finding. This isn’t an error, I’m sure it is intentional. Check your own account on Chinese version of Makerworld and compare same models on China vs Global.

That’s one of my models on Global site

Dynamite Detonator - Global
Dynamite Detonator - Global1007×316 73.1 KB

And this is the same model on China site

Dynamite Detonator - China
Dynamite Detonator - China1013×333 83 KB

So Makerworld can properly count all downloads! Yeah, but not on Global site. I really want to know the reasons…

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PandaFood his account has already been checked. There is no explanation for why his download numbers are different. The same goes for the other users. At first, I also suspected MakerWorld China, but that can actually be ruled out. You can see this everywhere on MakerWorld right now, even if the accounts aren’t synced with MakerWorld China.

Besides, that contradicts what Bambu posted - the statement.

I’ve also linked the relevant topics in case you want to read more about the matter. :grin: :+1:

Anyway, thank you very much for your input, and we’ll do our best to take everything into account.

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Looks the same for me. But I barely have any downloads and prints on the Chinese site (about 2%-3% of the global stats).

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At the very least, it should be displayed correctly in the Creator Center, one way or another - which isn’t the case, regardless of whether it’s China or not. Then Bambu would have included that in the explanation as well, instead of:

To prevent malicious downloading or printing behavior, the system applies certain limits on how many downloads or prints from a single user can be counted toward both model downloads and profile downloads.

It is explicitly stated that MakerWorld believes these are malicious downloads. However, this is slightly odd, because then downloads of both the 3D profile and the print profile should not be counted.

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Yeah, and this part scares me the most. I really want to hear them elaborating more about this “malicious downloads”. 57% of downloads of my model above was not counted. It’s not even in the 10-50% range. Do they think I have some hidden group of 400 people who have nothing else to do but bumping my download count on a single model? Well, I should ask them to bump the rest of my models too. And comparing this to China site, where everything is counted make it nearly an insult. What is this? Rotten western world vs. crystal clear, 100% trustworthy Chinese people?

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Thank you to every creator for your feedback. We have taken the issues discussed very seriously and investigated them together with our Engineer and Product teams. There are two main reasons:

1. An issue with the risk control system

Under normal rules, multiple downloads by the same user are only counted once. To prevent malicious download manipulation, we have a risk control mechanism in place. However, recently there was an issue with the risk control configuration for profile downloads, which caused some abnormal downloads to not be properly filtered out and to be incorrectly counted in profile download numbers. This resulted in inflated profile download counts.

At the same time, the risk control mechanism on the model side was operating normally, which is why model download counts appeared lower than profile download counts.

For reasons we still cannot fully understand, different creators and models have been affected by machine IP attacks to varying degrees. For some models, more than 30% of the data was problematic. In general, models with higher download counts are more likely to experience this issue.

The relevant risk control issue is currently being fixed. However, profile download counts that were already recorded in the past will not be removed. After the system returns to normal, the gap between profile downloads and model downloads should gradually narrow.

2. In multi-profile scenarios, model downloads and profile downloads are counted using different methodologies

When a model has multiple profiles, profile downloads are counted by 【designer】; while model downloads are counted by 【model】. In addition, multiple downloads of the same model by the same user are only counted once.

For example: a model has 3 profiles. The first 2 profiles are from Designer A, and the third profile is from Designer B. If a user downloads each profile once, Designer A’s profiles will count as 1 download after deduplication, and Designer B’s profile will also count as 1 download. However, the model download count will only count as 1 download.

Therefore, in multi-profile scenarios, profile downloads may be higher than model downloads.

In addition, we would also like to address several other topics that came up in the discussion.

  • MakerWorld will absolutely never tamper with users’ download data. Manipulating data is an unsustainable and deceptive practice that would only harm both the MakerWorld platform and creators, while bringing no real benefit. MakerWorld will never do such a thing.
  • MakerWorld does not have a fixed budget cap for points. We are still a fast-growing company, and a budget-driven operating approach would not be beneficial to MakerWorld’s development. Therefore, we continue to focus on business growth. As long as downloads and prints continue to grow, the points budget can continue to grow as well. Our business model fully supports this positive cycle.
  • Malicious download data does account for a significant portion of activity. For reasons beyond our knowledge, we detect unreasonable and sudden spikes in search, download, and print behavior almost every week. Sometimes, the data generated by these behaviors can account for more than 10% of the overall platform data, which has placed considerable pressure on us. As a result, we have had to invest resources into risk control.

Thank you again for the discussion. Your feedback helped us identify the issue, and you are indispensable partners of MakerWorld.

— MakerWorld Team

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Can you comment on the alleged 5 download count limit per user per day?

Many of us will download multiple files to build it out over a project.

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Thank you for the response.

I understand that there could be malicious downloads for many reasons. Could even be someone scraping the site collecting models to print and sell or publish somewhere else.
A question, how is a print malicious if someone actually prints the model and you can see that through your systems?
Could the traffic you see be models getting viral on social media and getting spikes on downloads and prints?