After suspicions were raised around the Sonic community regarding abnormalities in the voting patterns in SEGA’s Sonic 4 Birthday Contest, the company has suspended voting on the contest’s poll page. A statement says that SEGA has looked into the situation and confirmed the alleged abnormalities. More details are expected in a future update. SEGA’s statement from the contest’s website reads:
SEGA has been monitoring the voting patterns and discovered irregularities on July 16th. On review, we have confirmed the irregularities and have therefore suspended all voting. Please stay tuned for a more detailed update.
We’ll keep an eye out for that update and inform you of SEGA’s plans for the contest’s future. Voting for the contest was originally scheduled to end July 27th and the winners declared soon after. Where do you think SEGA should go from here? Let us know in the comments.
Thanks to ENVY16 at the SSMB for the heads up!
Details and disqualifcations plz.
You can’t disqualify people because you can’t prove that those who uploaded their vids were the ones cheating.
Yeah, hopefully they’ll just judge it themselves. It’ll save a lot of hassle!
Go elephant man!
Nice to hear that.
I wouldn’t put the fault to the finalists.
Let’s see how this ends…
I still haven’t seen the UK entries. Anyone know how an american can view them?
Back on topic, that is so lame that someone would try to cheat the system like that. If I were SEGA I would get a cyber detective on the case with intent to disqualify the culprit. If I made it to the top ten (Naka knows I wish I did), I’d be pretty ticked off to find one of my fellow finalists was cheating.
Do we know if the cheater was a US entry or a UK entry?
@ sonicstoast:
No-one knows if any of the finalists were cheating, the problem lay more in the websites coding. If you made your 1 daily vote allowed and then cleared your browsers cache and cookies the website would then allow you to vote again. You could rinse and repeat that as many times you wanted. If a voter really wanted someone to win they could keep doing that and every vote would get added to the total, so this is more the fault of poor website coding and some of the voters abusing a glitch.
i can not go in the site
@ Shadzter
If someone was repeatedly abusing a glitch in order to gain more votes, that is STILL cheating because the person knew exactly what they were doing.
It’s a good thing Sega is doing something about this. But rather than picking the winner themselves, Sega should just use a sturdier voting system and redo voting. I liked the idea of us choosing the winner.
Scandalous! *shot*
@Cerium But can you prove that it was the said finalist doing it to his own entry? Or was he doing it to others in a bid to get them disqualified? Or was it even any of the finalists doing the cheating? Was it a third party?
I think Sega should just pick. That is the fairest way.
Yeah, it would be safer for Sega to pick.
@ Cerium:
What I meant was what Casanova’s said, we don’t know if it was the finalists abusing the glitch for their own videos, them attempting to get others disqualified or if it wasn’t the finalists at all but a third party instead or just the public voters themselves simply trying to get their favourite to win. So you see, anyone at all could be to blame. The finalists may not have used the glitch at all.
I believe Sega will say that is an economic decision eventually.
Nah not really.
It was clear that people were cheating because for the first 2 days people barely made it past 200. Then all of a sudden, (without naming names) 2 contestants started shooting up by hundreds of votes at a time. About 4 days in (when Sega noticed the ‘abnormal’ voting) a certain person shot up by 1000 votes in one single burst to become first place when they were about 8th.
@ Kevin
without naming names, was that a U.K. finalist or a U.S. finalist?
I can’t believe people would sink as low as cheating. Think about it, Imagine if you won the trip because you cheated. Your going to feel really, really horrible when you get to Japan because you know you didn’t win that trip in a fair manner. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I did that.
@sonictoast
I believe 7 of the 10 U.S. entries experienced ‘surges’ in their votes at some point during the voting process, so it wasn’t just one or two people. I have no way of knowing what’s up with the UK people, ’cause I can’t view the entries.
I think that, from here, SEGA should do one of two things:
1. Start voting again, but limit the votes to one per IP address, period. Don’t even bother with the ‘once a day’ stuff. It’ll just get out of hand.
OR
2. Just have SEGA judge it, but give each contestant a chance to make a statement as to why their video should be chosen.
When it’s that easy to spam, and the prize is that big, I’m really not surprised people started abusing the votes. SEGA probably should have seen this coming.
I don’t see anything wrong with the finals being decided by votes, just as long as those votes have a solid regulation.
If the cheating isn’t solved, then I agree with Khyber on the fact that Sega should just judge the whole thing, and let the contestants say why they should win. Heck, maybe that’s what should’ve been done to begin with.
No wonder they did it, the lamest entry was going to win.
Meanwhile… in Late 2010…
“If the cheating isn’t solved, then I agree with Khyber on the fact that Sega should just judge the whole thing, and let the contestants say why they should win.”
Nice idea, but the whole point of the original video was to convince Sega why the contestant thinks he/she should win. The objective was to make a video about how much of a Sonic fan you were, after all. It would be a bit cheeky for Sega to suddenly turn around and ask every finalist to put in -more- work than they already have done. If they go to internal judging, it should just be on the quality of the original entries.
How about they just reprogram the voting system to 1-per-IP-address? That would work…
Im not trying to sound like a sore loser, but it kind of upsets me that some of the finalists didnt talk about there love for sonic in the video, no offence to them it just kind of bugs me. This is interesting to say the least.
@Daniel
That’s because the finalists SHOWED their love for Sonic in the video. Not every tribute to Sonic has to start out with “The reason I love Sonic is…”
I think the effort put into these videos is enough of a statement. Of course these people love Sonic. Why else would they spend so many hours on their videos? Or spend so much time humiliating themselves in public? 🙂
@Rale
I agree with that for the most part.
But theres allot of money involved and a trip to tokyo.
And allot of people like sonic…I just hope the people that are truly passionate about him get to go.
I’m astounded they even let people do 1 vote a day thing. Some people (and groups of people) will vote day, after day, after day. Not a very sensible, robust or fair voting system.
But what my inner voice wants actually me to say is “That’s just Stoooopid”.
Honestly, I am surprised that SEGA West hasn’t implemented a CAPTCHA in the poll. Have they not learned from TIME Magazine and their 2009 TIME 100???
I had a feeling something like this would happen, what with such a big prize on the line. Hopefully they’ll be able to clear it up, find out who did it and take some action upon them. If it’s one of the contestants, I’ll be very dissapointed in them and I hope they are disqualified and punished accordingly.