Great Attendance for Fan Faire

[Roleld]

<p>Looks like the next Fan Faire is going to be in Vagas, Was not my first pick but with over 6,500 people comming to the next Fan-Faire it is going to be a lot of fun.  Or atleast we should see the 4,000+  That voted for Vegas...</p>

[Bunda]

The 2003 Vegas Fan Faire had the highest attendance of any that SOE has had I believe. There were something like 3500 official attendees plus about 1000 more people who showed up just to hang out with the rest of us and have fun...A lot of people go to the Fan Faire without actually buying their pass, so they miss out on the dinner and such, but they hang with the other players and have fun anyway. I don't think you will see 6000 people there. Remember, the voting is open to anyone who has a station pass, and many many people have multiple accounts...BUT I bet if Vegas is actually declared the winner there will be somewhere between 3000 and 4000 people attending...Vegas is inexpensive to get to and there are a lot of things to do there so lots of people attend...

[trood]

<p>Honestly I hope they just honor the original poll.  Anyone find it odd that Denver beat Vegas, even if you add up the votes for all 3 Vegas dates, by more than 100 votes in the first poll, but it lost by a 40% margin in the 2nd?  Seems fishy to me... not to mention the vote volume of the 2nd poll was almost triple the first, which should be a red flag right there.</p><p> Will definitely go if it comes to Denver.  If it's in Vegas, I might go anyway, but it will be more diffucult and expensive to arrange, so odds are less.</p>

[Bunda]

You have to read all the posts here about those polls. The first poll was manipulated like the second one, just not to the same extent...the poll needs to be made IN GAME to prevent cheating.

[Sassums]

<cite>Bunda wrote:</cite><blockquote>You have to read all the posts here about those polls. The first poll was manipulated like the second one, just not to the same extent...the poll needs to be made IN GAME to prevent cheating. </blockquote>Even ingame players have more then 1 account.  But Ashlanne told us not to bicker about this, as it is open to anyone with an active account.

[Bunda]

And ANYONE can creat a STATION ID and vote on the station boards. You don't even have to play the game. Yes, people do have multiple accounts and if they are paying for them the would be able to vote in game mutple times. It's not totally fair, BUT it's better than letting anyone create hundreds of stations IDs and vote with them. An IN GAME poll is the most fair way to run this. Someone will ALWAYS find a way to hack a web poll...

[Zygw]

I am not sure in game polls are more faire. It might have been back when there was only Everquest but with the station pass some people will be able to vote on multiple games. The amount of code they would have to write to ensure only one vote per account is non trivial. Secondly, if this board is sufficiently advanced enougth, they should be able to track the IP address and accounts for each vote cast. So if someone caste more than one vote they can either cancel all their votes or all but one. Yes, someone can try to create multiple Station IDs etc etc but the amount of sofistication required to avoid detection when trying to abuse the system in this way is greater than what the average player is capable of doing. Unless someone really has no life, skewing a Fan Faire poll by this means without being caught is more effort than its worth. Thus SoE will probably be able to screen for people trying to abuse the system in this way too.

[Sassums]

<cite>Bunda wrote:</cite><blockquote> And ANYONE can creat a STATION ID and vote on the station boards. You don't even have to play the game. Yes, people do have multiple accounts and if they are paying for them the would be able to vote in game mutple times. It's not totally fair, BUT it's better than letting anyone create hundreds of stations IDs and vote with them. An IN GAME poll is the most fair way to run this. Someone will ALWAYS find a way to hack a web poll... </blockquote>Well now that you said how to do it, everyone knows.  That hadnt even crossed my mind until you blurted it out for the whole world to see.

[ocam]

<cite>Zygwen wrote:</cite><blockquote>I am not sure in game polls are more faire. It might have been back when there was only Everquest but with the station pass some people will be able to vote on multiple games. The amount of code they would have to write to ensure only one vote per account is non trivial. Secondly, if this board is sufficiently advanced enougth, they should be able to track the IP address and accounts for each vote cast. So if someone caste more than one vote they can either cancel all their votes or all but one. Yes, someone can try to create multiple Station IDs etc etc but the amount of sofistication required to avoid detection when trying to abuse the system in this way is greater than what the average player is capable of doing. Unless someone really has no life, skewing a Fan Faire poll by this means without being caught is more effort than its worth. Thus SoE will probably be able to screen for people trying to abuse the system in this way too. </blockquote>As Bunda said, the most fair way of doing this poll would be in game, let me share with you why... You first point is incorrect. It would be very simple to flag an account as already voted, and as long as the person with multiple games played all of them under one staion ID then they would only get one vote...IF they have multiple accounts, then yes, they would get multiple votes...There is no way to prevent that, because as far as SOE and the servers are concerned, they are multiple players...Is it fair? Not really, but niether is making up  multiple Staion IDs and voting over and over, and yes SASSUMS many many people already know about that, it's been that way for a very long time..So Bunda didn't really let the cat out of the bag.. Second point How are you going to prevent those people with dial up accounts from voting more than once since their IP address changes every time they dial in? Or how are you going to prevent someone going to work or school or a friends house and voting multiple times...SURE SOE gets the IP address but if it comes from a computer that an SOE game is not played on, then what can they do about it? One vote per IP would never work...I personally share one wireless account with 3 other people who play SOE games, So what? we get one vote between us? What about those people who play from college dorms? They will all show up as using the same IP address...do they only get one vote between them? How about people who play from work or any other place that shares one IP on a network? Do they only get one vote between them? Creating multiple STATION IDs from a computer that doesn't play SOE games and then voting with those accounts makes your 3rd point null and void because they can't make a "one IP one VOTE"  rule..(please see above for the reasons) So the only way to avoid people manipulating the vote by hundreds of votes is to hold in game polls.. of course the only TRUE way to be completely fair about it is for SOE to just tell us where it will be held, instead of causing all of this bickering and drama in the first place...

[Zygw]

If you read my post carefully, I said <u>IP address and accounts . </u> Obviously ip addresses are not sufficient to catch all possible cases of abuse. Multiple recently created accounts in the same IP D block would be suspicious. Inspecting the names and emails of those accounts can give clues as to whether the user is legit or not. Furthermor, if an account votes more than once that is obviously an error. Inspecting the membership list I can easily tell that someone was trying to creat multiple accounts to skew the votes and if I can find them SoE can too. They have a lot more information available with regards to this forum  than we do just like in EQ2 they have a lot more information about what is going on than players do in terms of chat logs etc. If you where wondering which accounts I am talking about <a href="http://forums.station.sony.com/station/user/profile.m?user_id=5457" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">denverischeating</a> - <a href="http://forums.station.sony.com/station/user/profile.m?user_id=5482" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">denverischeating13</a> all having emails of the form <a href="mailto:[email protected]">[email protected]</a> and <a href="http://forums.station.sony.com/station/user/profile.m?user_id=5429" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">denversucks</a> - <a href="http://forums.station.sony.com/station/user/profile.m?user_id=5456" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">denversucks3</a> also having the same emails. If you look at the registration times, it took him two days to create all those accounts plus any that he hid the name on the member list. The thing is that this person did a rather sloppy job because these accounts are easily identifyable as fake. If you wanted to skew the votes undetected you would have to try a lot harder than that person.

[ocam]

<cite>Zygwen wrote:</cite><blockquote>If you read my post carefully, I said <u>IP address and accounts . </u> Obviously ip addresses are not sufficient to catch all possible cases of abuse. Multiple recently created accounts in the same IP D block would be suspicious. Inspecting the names and emails of those accounts can give clues as to whether the user is legit or not. Furthermor, if an account votes more than once that is obviously an error. Inspecting the membership list I can easily tell that someone was trying to creat multiple accounts to skew the votes and if I can find them SoE can too. They have a lot more information available with regards to this forum  than we do just like in EQ2 they have a lot more information about what is going on than players do in terms of chat logs etc. If you where wondering which accounts I am talking about <a href="http://forums.station.sony.com/station/user/profile.m?user_id=5457" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">denverischeating</a> - <a href="http://forums.station.sony.com/station/user/profile.m?user_id=5482" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">denverischeating13</a> all having emails of the form <a href="mailto:[email protected]" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">[email protected]</a> and <a href="http://forums.station.sony.com/station/user/profile.m?user_id=5429" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">denversucks</a> - <a href="http://forums.station.sony.com/station/user/profile.m?user_id=5456" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">denversucks3</a> also having the same emails. If you look at the registration times, it took him two days to create all those accounts plus any that he hid the name on the member list. The thing is that this person did a rather sloppy job because these accounts are easily identifyable as fake. If you wanted to skew the votes undetected you would have to try a lot harder than that person. </blockquote>The poll was probably manipulated by an error in the code associated with the submit, or in this case VOTE button. Without going into details, I have been told by a very good web designer that submit buttons in HTML are easily fooled.  There was no way that several hundred acounts were voting from one IP in that short of a time span. Those poll numbers were increasing by 100 votes or more every 2-3 minutes. I had my web page refreshing every 5 minutes watching the progress of the polls because it was so exciting. Toward the end on the afternoon on the 25th I was manully updating my browser every minute and the numbers were going higher by 50+ votes nearly every time I refreshed. Whoever manipulated the poll in Vegas's favor did so in such a manner that they couldn't possibly believed that their votes would actually count. It was obvious from early on that some one was voting for Denver using the same method. Vegas would be ahead by 30-40 votes and on the very next refresh Denver would be ahead by 15 votes, just enough not to draw suspicion from the Moderator, but several of use saw it and a few people posted...That was when Ashlanne told them that there was no conspiracy theory...But apparently there was...I think whoever skewed the votes on the 25th was sending a message that the poll was being manipulated and the message WAS indeed heard by the Mods...They had to know that voting several thousand times would invalidate this poll. As far as I can tell, there can take steps here to have a more fair poll, by allowing only those with ACTIVE (as in they pay and play) and up to date accounts to vote once, stop allowing just anyone to create accounts and to stop the poll if it appears anyone is manipulating it...All of this will take a rework of their web page and vigilance... OR They can add a poll to all of their games on the login server which will only need to be written one time, and can be used for all of their games year after year. It would eliminate most mulitple voting  and ALL cheating. If they are going to decide via poll then that is how it should be done to be most fair. I still believe that SOE should just tell us where the thing is going to be held and we just attend if we wish too.