That section says that Stern Pinball is the arbiter of all voting. So, they get to decide what is or isn’t allowed, and we have no information otherwise.
Your link doesn’t go anywhere but the generic Stern FB page.
Right there is nothing that says whether or not it is legal to vote from multiple ips multiple times a day or not or whatever. Given this, one can only assume that whatever is technologically allowed is legal. I still highly doubt stern will filter any significant number of votes.
Curious what they’ll consider to be “fraudulent”.
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I guess we’all find out soon! If I were an entrant and I was doin everything technologically possible to win, and there were no rules specifically against that, and then those votes were thrown out, I would be super pissed.
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@heyrocker
But it does. This is a direct quote from section 10 which I will break down:
“…to void votes for any reason, including, but not limited to; multiple votes from the same user from different IP addresses;”
(that’s pretty cut and dry. That would cover home connection and switching over to your mobile phone. That would also cover using a VPN like HMA.)
“…multiple votes from the same computer in excess of that allowed by contest rules;”
(That’s pretty clear too. It’s 1 vote per 24 hours. You vote for someone and the green check mark stays there for 24 hours via a cookie dropped in the browser. If you try to vote for someone else, a popup says, ‘You have already reached your maximum number of votes for this 24 hour period.’ It’s very simple. One vote per person per day.)
“fraudulent entry votes;”
(totally agree this is vague and could mean anything)
“…or the use of bots, macros or scripts or other technical means for voting.”
(this means programmatic methods that don’t involve a browser, deleting your cookies, or using private/incognito modes that disable cookies or don’t save them. basically doing anything that disables/circumvents the cookie system they have in place to ensure one vote per person per day)
@bkerins
that’s weird. It still works for me. Here is a screenshot for you.
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Something weird is up because I do not see any of that wording in section 10 of the rules on the site or in any other section.
strange. The USPF.com site is just iframing a wizehive page related to the account Stern has with them (i’m sure you already know that.)
The page that the contest rules page goes to for me is: https://iframe.wizehive.com/contests/582f7585-5a90-45f1-ac8a-5e760a887d73/rules
Is that the page that is loading for you?
1 - How does it benefit Stern to have a few people in a bubble changing ip’s and voting for the same person?
2 - How does it benefit Stern to advertise off the ifpapinball.com site where the majority of the ifpapinball.com visitors are already aware of Stern?
How does either of these two create more brand awareness for Stern?
The Ultimate Stern Pinball Fan is a popularity contest that should be mutually beneficial for Stern by increasing its brand awareness and by giving the participant a free pin for completing this task the best. I don’t see how this is accomplished if someone is engaging in the actions of 1 & 2 i mentioned above.
This was a low cost marketing campaign intended to generate a little social media buzz for the brand. Stern doesn’t care about the outcome of the vote but rather the like/retweet numbers on Twitter/Facebook.
The noise generated on pinball oriented sites like here, pinside, and the ifpa website is just an unfortunate side effect.
No value in the spirit of the rules?
There is ‘legal within the rules’ and immoral given the common expectation.
If the contest was how to defeat websites… ok… but its not.
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Just because it’s legal doesn’t mean it’s ethical.
Anyways, should it be legal to tilt for GREED letters or not??
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I’ve always though tilting for GREED was legal: it was even part of the rule sheet for the game. It’s part of the rules as I would describe it to others, and if I tilted on an early ball, I’d explain to anyone why I did it.
Maybe 5 years ago (?) the PAPA and IFPA rules declared you couldn’t tilt for benefit. So now it’s not legal. The rule is clear and written.
Part of the point here is that the contest hasn’t been described in enough detail for people to know whether multiple voting is or isn’t allowed.
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The whole contest is a joke.
The biggest cheaters will win.
That Ghostbusters photoshop picture got 2500 votes in one day (last Sunday). So they put themself in a safe position in a few hours…
:-/
With the current leader from Quebec, hopefully Stern has registered with the … uh … Regie des alcools, des courses, et des jeux … and that the official rules are also available in French.
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Talked to the Quebec contestant today, very little french other than Bonjour. Gregor from Austria made me brush up on my German from 30+ years ago. 6 semi-finalists will be heard on Pinball Profile this weekend…and the contest rules verification from Stern Pinball themselves! Stay tuned…
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Just finished recording 6 of the 20 semi-finalists for the Ultimate Stern Pinball Fan contest…plus a special guest. I invited anyone to participate. Some respectfully declined. You’ll hear (in random order): Cristin, Vince, Gregor, Jason, Adam, and Imoto and their reasons why they should win this contest.
This extra long edition of Pinball Profile will be released on Friday, Dec. 9. All episodes are available on iTunes (please subscribe). Also on www.podcastgarden.com/podcast/pinballprofile
Thanks for listening!
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I don’t see this happening. Here’s what Jody Dankberg had to say on the issue in the profile podcast:
(…) if someone had a 100,000 votes and everybody else had, you know, maybe just a couple thousand votes, you might see an anomaly there, but the software does allow you to vote multiple times, and it does allow you to do that from different IP addresses, so as long as everybody’s on an equal playing field, we encourage people to try to get as many votes as possible, and vote as many times.
(…) the software allows for you to vote multiple times, and it also allows you to vote from multiple IP addresses. We feel that if everybody has the same advantage, then it’s looking good (…)
Sounds like everything “the software” allows is fair game, unless someone’s bot votes are so blatantly off the charts that it might actually look bad for Stern to let that person go on in the contest.
So, basically, it’s the “cheat just enough” free-for-all many expected it to be. Anyway, I’m still very interested to watch what’s going to happen the last couple days, if just from a game theory point of view. What’s the best strategy for botters racing to the top to come out top 3 with as close a margin as possible, so it doesn’t look fraudulent? Any botters keeping intentionally behind, because they gamble on a big enough vote difference between botters and non-botters to cause enough social media backlash for a vote purge?
Looking forward to see how this plays out, especially since the contest doesn’t stop there – anything happening here just sets the playing field and implicitly defines the rules for the top 3 vote. I’m torn between wanting this to be a fair contest, and just wanting botters in the next round, to see how their strategies adapt.
(Disclaimer: I don’t have any skin in the game, and I’m not accusing any individual of cheating (whatever that means in this setup). I’m just going by probabilities here, and a bunch of entries have gained an unproportional number of votes since last I looked.)
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A couple Fans have received over 8K votes in 2 days. Unreal.
It looks a lot like (some) people may have PAID for online votes? There are lots of places to do that online if you’ve got the cash to do it. I would really be curious to see the daily votes of the semi-finalists, because there are some serious spikes.
At the end of the contest, Stern is giving away a Premium game to someone…that’s amazing. It’s their contest, and it’s their choice on how they want to A) Run the contest, and B) qualify what to them is “The Ultimate Stern Pinball Fan”.
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Interesting. In a twisted way, it makes sense for the “Ultimate Stern Pinball Fan” to be someone with enough disposable income to pay for votes.
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