Yeah I mean wouldn’t the ultimate stern pinball fan really be the guy/gal who has bought like every LE and SLE ever made? Haha
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I bet there might even be some crazed superfan who’s bought a bunch of machines with money they don’t have.
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Awaiting the voting purge and end totals.
No purges… you have your top 3…
Wow, just wow.
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If people were in fact paying for votes (lets assume they were for the sake of this discussion), then this opens up an interesting game theory problem for the finals. Because the question doesn’t become “Do I want a free pinball machine?” but “How much am I willing to pay for a new pinball machine?” and further “Who is willing to pay the most for a new pinball machine?” This reminds me a lot of the Dollar Auction
There are three finalists. Lets say they are all willing to buy votes. Only the one who spends the most will win a pinball machine, the other two will not only not win a pinball machine, but lose the money they spent on votes. At what point do you give up and accept your losses? At what point does it make sense to spend $cost_of_game + $100 when the alternative is losing $cost_of_game?
It is entirely possibly this is the nerdiest thing I’ve ever posted in this forum.
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Very interesting indeed. I’ve mentioned the game theory angle before, but at that point I thought it was just botting and not paying for votes.
Too bad the game theory party is over, though, since Stern removed public vote counts. Time to put away the popcorn, I guess.
I’ll bet the final vote counts of this round won’t ever be published, either. (No way to actually find out, though. If reasonable numbers are published in the end, no one is going to argue that they actually had a million votes.)
Oh I didn’t realize they removed the public vote count from the finals. That’s too bad.
In the meantime, while talking to @pinwizj, I realized that the sanest course of action is for the three finalists to get together and agree to not spend any money on votes, and instead sell the game and split the proceeds three ways. Taking that a step further, really, the smart thing to do in the semis would have been for three people to get together an spend a couple hundred dollars each on votes at the very last minute, then when they all make the semis they just sit back and let whatever happens happen and sell the game and split the proceeds.
Would you actually have expected anything more?
To me, this seems pretty well par for the course with Stern. They pretty much DGAF about much of anything, especially since their customers started lining up to pay $10k+ for pinball machines site unseen. As a company, Stern behaves more like a college fraternity then a multi million dollar manufacturing business. Some of the public behavior I’ve seen from them over the last few years would have had people fired anywhere I’ve worked over the last 14.
I hope whoever does “win” this game doesn’t forget that they will most likely have to pay taxes on the full retail purchase price. I think about 80% of states tax winnings as income.
Edit: love Greg’s idea above but I highly doubt the ego’s involved would allow that to happen.
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Sounds like a good strategy, but only if there’s some external incentive to cooperate and actually honor the agreement in the end.
Well if the alternative is “spend a bunch of money you have a 2/3 chance of losing” I’d say that’s a pretty deep incentive.
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Also it solves the tax problem too.
That’s sort of what I meant: if there isn’t some external incentive to cooperate, how would I make sure the winner actually splits the proceeds and doesn’t just keep the machine? It might work if there are three contestants that know each other well enough, so they might have that external incentive of not wanting to mess up their friendship.
I can’t imagine anyone paying for votes is paid much. Writing a script to hammer on WizeHive looks to be trivial. If one wanted to be sneaky it also wouldn’t be hard to run said script behind something like Tor to mask vote origin.
I suppose the bottleneck is IP addresses, so using Tor, you’d at least have to switch exit nodes after each vote.
That said, it looks like the IP address restriction is gone completely for this last voting round, which opens the contest up to a whole new bunch of shenanigans. Seems like it’s just cookies and captcha now.