I've been able to vote three times on the finale in the last 12 hours... Thought it was supposed to be once a day?
The same "petty, whiney, and self-centered" people in the other thread (500 SC) helped to keep SOE honest (good corporate practice). The whole thing is opaque. We had a reversal on the other brackets except for the Dark Elf Ranger's bracket. (Do not the people in support of Dark Elf Ranger have an equal motive for exploiting the system?). An explanation on methodology would alleviate concerns of rigging and fixing. Who wants the wool to be pulled over their eyes? Though, frequently, ignorance is bliss in a utopia.
I hope the DE ranger wins because there are just not enough evil rangers in this world. there are no evil races that can make a ranger. the idea of evil drow rangers is something that does not copy drizzt at all because drizzt is certainly not your typical vile dark elf, he is a traitor to the race and certainly evil dark elf rangers would want to kill all blueberries named 'drizzt', not emulate him.
I'll gladly vote for wood elf just to keep dark elf rangers off, even though they're both horrible choices. Sad really.
Well if there ever was a question before about this vote being fixed as the conspiracy theorists believed that question has no be answered. The reason you have the vote even if you are going to ignore the actual vote and make up the results to support whoever you actually want to win; is so that you can make the players (and everyone else on the planet) feel like they played a part in the decision even though they played no part whatsoever. You get to blame the playerbase when large numbers of people come and complain about the horrid class/race combo that got chosen. You can say, "Hey, we did a vote." Never mind that the entire vote has been a farce, and even when you discovered that it was horribly flawed instead of making use of one of the many secure, tried, and reliable methods that were open to replace this inherently flawed system you instead choose to stick with it. I'm sorry, but you have not monitored the results for fairness at all. The results were apparently wrong the entirety of every round; it was only after voting ended that you all went in and removed the "cheater" votes that the voting changed so hugely that close races became landslide wins the opposite way. I am sorry, but there are not that many people who are going to go to that much trouble to "stuff the ballot boxes" for a specific new EQ class/race combo. For that matter, you all identified the flaw, during Round 1 and by Round 2 you had a way to identify which votes were invalid. There is absolutely no reason why the Round 3 results should have needed to be altered after the fact. One of the following should have been done before the 3 Round voting even started: a front loaded filter in place that would prevent the existing exploit from working; the method of voting should have been completely changed to require that the person have a valid Station Name and be logged in to vote; or the vote should have been postponed until such a filter or a secure voting method could be established. Since all of you chose to use the broken voting system and just continue to drastically alter the voting after the end of every round to be, in most cases, the exact opposite of what was displayed when voting ended; you have pretty much supplied all the proof that is needed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the voting didn't mean anything to you all beyond a way to make people think they were having a say in which combo was going to be regardless of if that is true or not. There is also substantial circumstantial evidence supporting the idea that you all are fixing the voting to choose the race/class combo that you want to win. If any of you want the players to take you seriously about this or future similar activities, here is what you do right now: Completely scrap this entire voting system and all the present and previous rounds. Using the in-game voting system the following description is how the votes will be set up; each battle in a round will have 3 votes running for a week that people will be able to vote on. The voting will start the first day of a week and lasts a week; Vote 1 will be open to all membership levels; Vote 2 is only open to Silver and Gold; and Vote 3 is only open to Gold members. So Free members get 1 vote per battle per round, Silver members get 2 votes per battle per round, and Gold members get 3 votes per battle per round. Upon the completion of the voting the results should be displayed immediately and absolutely no changes should be made to them at all after the conclusion of the voting. The New Round 1 (consisting of the previous round 1 & 2 battles) should begin this Thursday/Friday at midnight and conclude the following Thursday/Friday at midnight. The New Round 2 (consisting of the battles between the winners of the new round 1 using the original bracket setup) should begin at noon on the Friday that the new round 1 ended and conclude the Friday after that at Noon. The New Round 3 (consisting of the final battle between the winners of the new round 3) should begin at midnight on the Friday/Saturday that the new round 2 ended and conclude the Friday/Saturday after that at midnight. This method ensures that no one can stuff the ballot box without having created a ton of Station accounts. Ideally all round of voting would only allow those accounts which existed before the start of the first round of voting to participate; that way people would not have any way to stuff the ballot box beyond the accounts they currently have in existence. People that pay also get more votes than those who play for free; and those who have never played the game (and never will play the game) do not get to vote.
What is a bit disconcerting is that there is no transparency to how many votes are being cast and how many illegal votes there are being cast. To assume that only illegal votes are for one side doesn't sound correct. A little bit of transparency would be appreciated.....otherwise this is a farce....and just announce your new class combos and be over it.
Also to assume that there was only voter fraud on 1 of the 2 votes is absurd....so the Dark elf Ranger wins (and was ahead by 15% to 20%) but the Iksar Berserker which was ahead by 10% to 15%) had voter fraud and didn't win is even more absurd....just end this farce of a vote and ram your new class down our throats even if we don't want it....just like you tried with your new SC system that went over so well with the community.
I'm going to have to respectfully disagree. Whatever we do, if we have players vote on it or not, is our responsibility and we'll take the blame either way. The exact same scenario happened when we had the Corpse Run poll on the time locked progression servers. People complained the vote was rigged, etc, using the in game voting system. In this case we don't have deep opinions about any of the choices pro or con. I don't particularly want to see dark elf rangers win, I think they are boring. I'll be pulling for beastlords. Any of the choices that were in the competition was one we'd be happy to include in game however. I figured it would be Dark Elf Ranger as one of the final choices because I figured the proponents would vote for it. I hope the counter vote wins out in the end. If we wanted to have Dark Elf Rangers in game, we'd just do it. Kinda like frog monks.
I'd like people to keep in mind Drizzt isn't a true ranger, hes actually a FIGHTER/ranger so unless the game suddenly allows multi-classing we should be ok. Infact I probably wouldn't even call him a ranger, he simply worships Mielikki ( goddess of autumn, druids, dryads, forests, forest creatures, and rangers.) He is an acceptional tracker but to call him a true ranger i feel like is a stretch, so really there is no need for this class in game.
If you guys actually read the explanation, it is like American Idol...when you have the same person voting multiple times for their favorite singer. It doesn't mean that by having the most votes is the clear winner, but if you factor out just one vote per person, it is the popular vote. I can see where if you vote once per account, yes, but when I was able to vote for more than one, it clearly made me feel like what is the point, when others can vote multiple times. It becomes who can vote the most, compared to who people really want to see as the winner. It didn't matter to me, as these are probably not what I will go out and make a toon right away. I already have enough toons on 3 accounts.
Explaining how we detect the fraudulent voting would have the net effect of making it easier for those who want to cheat to cheat more.
If Sony's going to clean up the votes before the final tally (weed out the folks who accidentally or on-purpose submitted multiple votes on the same day), I think they should do it once a day if it can't be done live, rather than waiting for the entire round to be over, to give a better idea of the results on an ongoing basis. Another option? Say "THANKS FOR VOTING!" and don't tell us who's winning. Keep it a mystery if the displayed info is going to be wrong, what's the point of showing it? That would give some people something else to complain about, but would stop some of the current flavor of complaints. While I think the Wood Elf Beastlord would be a much more interesting choice than Dark Elf Ranger (mostly curious what pet there would be), I'm not that invested in it. They'll introduce new combinations periodically, and none will please everyone.
wether soe wanted any of these to win or not is irrelevant by leaving "fraudulent" results viewable to the public, it impacted the vote. iksar berserker was my vote, and it was well ahead, so i didnt vote each day. just an example. there is always going to be people tha tclaim "rigged" on any vote. but leaving the vote open to the public on a website is going to be much less accurate than using the actual working in game polling system. questioning the validity of these polls is entirely reasonable imo. that said, i dont know why eqs 15th anniversary isnt worthy of more than 1 new class/race combo, much like when they rolled out gnome sk/paladin, halfing paladin and ranger, and those combinations at once. more barbarian paladin btw, since ya know, mithaniel marr created the race. lore is good.
There will be two. The one that won the vote, and the one that they already decided and announced before the vote even opened which is a Froglok Monk. Was announced with the first vote. It's a treant. Regardless, one of two things will likely happen with this last vote. 1. The same cheaters who ruined the vote the first two times will continue to try to skew the vote because stupid people don't learn. This will cause the votes to have to be adjusted and there will be more tin foil hat wearing people on the boards complaining. or 2. DE Rangers will lose just because of the hipster outlook on them.
Why, if the outcome was rigged, would they display results saying anything other than what they want it to say? Also why would they care about the outcome of any of the other votes besides those involving their chosen winner? Maybe if this vote ends in a tie, and they add both combos, I might start to believe something fishy, but probably not. A re-vote would do nothing, regardless of the methods. If the results stayed the same, you would still say it was rigged and that any results displayed were just faked. If the results changed people on the other side would say the same thing and that SOE was just trying to appease those crying about the first votes.
On the last day of voting, The Iksar Berserker had 65% votes cast now today when I click on them it's only 38% ( realizing that the Iksar are no longer in the running mind you) My question is, how can a class that has 65% of votes cast on the last day, go down to 38%? regardless, The voting should NOT have been open and should have been voted on when you logged into the forums, ensuring both A) ALL votes cast are one person only B) ALL votes that are cast are from JUST the player base* I really don't understand the need for the voting to be open or for the need of multiple votes. *I realize the numbers would be slightly skewed because of boxers, but still you get ONE vote per account. The results would still be more accurate because your account has voted and NOT your browser. If you have several browsers ( yes some people do) then they can get 2+ votes per day depending on the amount of browsers they use to vote with ( since you don't have to log in) So in theory, if you really wanted a certain class to win, the person could install numerous browsers and have multiple votes per day. The forums have the ability to poll, so I would ask why was this not used. By NO means am I saying S.O.E. rigged this, but S.O.E HAS stated that there were some cheaters ( and yet SOE continued anyway)
