When exploiting in-game is not enough, they chose to exploit in fan art contest instead. Haha, these ppl are ridiculous.
Thank you for your hard work in making this report @Kihseki.
We will take it into consideration before making the final announcement.
Great investigation!
I found out that those new account names look likely being from Vietnamese guy(s) because in Vietnamese we have the name Nguyen Ngoc Tai (a name for a boy btw). It is the same as other names like nguyenhai (Nguyen Hai). This is totally a shame. Free TP drives people mad and doing shameful thing.
Well the 6. GreenTangerine - 101 [49 + 6 new account votes]. This guy is Vietnamese player too…
I ran across the prime suspect’s FB account (it’s not the actual participant) and he actually advertises and runs bot programs for a living. It wasn’t a joke when I mentioned that, unfortunately.
EDIT: Yes the participant and account duper is vietnamese and they seem to be FB friends (relatives probably). Good thing he started off with making multiple accounts with the same name, it made it obvious that it wasn’t just a bunch of relatives pouring support but instead one person trying to compensate for something.
I see so theres a shout previously on telsial regarding this matter…
#JustIMCthings
Best if IMC could trace the ip address of these new account owner before make any justification
There are already limitations when it comes to making a new post on the forum as a new account. All they have to do to make this sort of fake voting harder is to set the same limitation to liking a post as well.
It will not stop the problem completely, but it will at least make it so the cheaters have to spend more effort on making new accounts.
This guy started posting with his alt accounts after his first attempt was foiled, so exploiters gonna exploit. I believe clearer rules and a more watchful moderation is required among many other things, or an entirely new way of holding these contests that we aren’t used to. (Like a daily dungeon that you need to finish to cast a vote)
I have 2 questions.
1- This contest for forum users only or all TOS players? If tos player never use forum before, how can they vote for your friend art?
2- If I have 100 oldbie forum accounts and vote for 1 art. Is it legit?
@STAFF_Letitia
Make forum account need mobile phone number to verify. Problem is solved
Or remove the public voting altogether, and just hold a raffle of all entries, shown as a youtube video so it is proven that there has been no rigging of the raffle.
Leaving a phone number is just an intrusion on privacy, as you give away more personal information than should be just to prevent a simple loophole of having multiaccounts with no post-history to vote up an entry, contesting for virtual prize currency&a title.
I’d not like to give my phone number to people who might sell it/have it stolen [i.e. by getting hacked]and then sold to send spam messages/fishing messages to my phone simply because someone rigged a forum-intern fanart contest.
That’s an aweful solution for an even more aweful concept of a fanart contest (& it doesn’t prevent the plagiarism issue)…
I’m selling 500k of mobile number for spamming message
nooo not the randomized entries! that’s never gonna make everyone happy. Also I bet people would make multiple accounts and multiple submissions if the rewards can be transferred even partially.
Basically, Voting is not fair
If skill no longer has anything to do with who wins, why spend any more than 5min putting together something in Paint?
We do have the two categories of winners as a compromise for this (staff pick and votes). I just had to expose the multi account spamming guy cause this was quite obviously cheating
This forum is based on discourse. There is no mobile phone number single sign on option in the API, so would be impossible adding the mobile phone verification. However, there is an option on our settings, which we can setup ‘in-game name’. To verify bot or not, poll/vote could filter the accounts who have set their in-game name. Just my thought.
but you can ramdomly fill it
Yes, but if IMC is willing to put their effort in determining bots/padders, they could cross-check the voter via their game server database. The form also includes “server”, so they could trace this IGN.
In the end, its the IMC efforts on how they deal with the vote padders and bots.