Ok, first off I have to say that this week poll was ridiculous. Previously, there record for one of these polls was 216 votes and last week I made a big thing about the fact that the winner got over 100 votes. Well this week, the person who came in 5th place got more votes than last week winner and the total vote count ended up at 626 votes, more than double the previous record. I have absolutely no idea where all those votes came from, but it did make the contest interesting. Every single entrant was in front at some point during the week and it ended up with there being only one point between first and second. But of course, one point makes all the difference, especially for this weeks winner, Blunt Object and his team the Deaths Head Squadron. Congrats Blunt Object, make sure you see dblade about your prize, and well done to all of our other entrants, especially the finalists, you obviously impressed this week.
I would like to thank everyone who voted for my entry in this week’s CDC. I greatly appreciate your support. However, I suspect, and I believe several others do as well, that there was a bit of chicanery afoot with this week’s voting. Just last week, Vectorman316 won with a whopping 109 votes–the most accumulated by an entrant to date. This week, even the lowest vote getter surpassed that mark. Whereas it would be nice if that many folks were truly frequenting the website and participating, I’ve got my suspicions that that is not the case. As such, to accept the prize under those circumstances, I feel, would be a disservice to the other extremely talented entrants who participate in the CDC each week. Therefore, I have decided that I am going to forego accepting this week’s prize.
Honestly, I am not certain why someone would want to game the system for a contest that is ultimately just for fun, but apparently that has, in fact, occurred. None-the-less, I think we all can agree that none of us want to win a contest by any means other than on the merits of the piece entered. So we will all just move on and hope that this was a onetime occurrence. Again, many thanks for those of you who voted for my entry this week.
I woukd like to say thank you for the great site that Heromachine is.
I was happy at first when I saw that I was selected for the contest, but then I realised that maybe some people doesn’t want me to win.
Every time I was first on the poll 50 votes came out of nowhere to kick me to the last place in just few minutes. I’m pretty impress.
I’m not angry, it’s just to bad. I don’t think I have to congrats Blunt for his win.
I’m a new, well I use Heromachine for a long time, but I’m new on contest and since there are regular people on contest or forums, it can be understood that some people would like to kick the new off.
I really hope that there will be more fairplay in contest. It’s a great site don’t ruint it.
See you on the next one.
@CosmicComics- I certainly don’t think there was any conspiracy amongst site members to keep you from winning and nobody here dislikes seeing first time entrants win. Only a couple of months ago Valyndril won the first contest she entered and since then we’ve had BabyVroomVroom & Yautja who I believe were both first time entrants/ winners as well. As I said, this poll kept going back and forth so it’s no surprise people kept going from high positions to low positions, I think it happened to everyone this week. Still don’t understand the voting numbers though.
@ Blunt Object
Kudos for that mature and very well put together response. You have my respect, for what it’s worth.
@JR – is there anyway to see who voted? There must be a way to monitor who has input votes and what their source is. You might have to find out to secure the Integrity of the voting process.
@AMS- There is, but it’s Polldaddy premium content, which would require me to be paying $200 per year. I’m not paying that for something I only use once a week, I’d rather spend it on other stuff.
@ JR: I don’t know it that’s what happened here, but to circumvate IP blocks and thus cheat on polls (or spam in forums you’re banned from) is rather easy as I learned from own bad experience.
@ ams: You can for example use an onion browser (won’t tell details since I don’t want to give any ideas), so good luck finding out who has input votes and what their real source is.
Sucks when some anal cavity mucks around with your stuff. Hopefully the childish wretch (who obviously needs Viagra) has stepped in front of an express bus by now. I think Blunt deserves a prize just for sportsmanship. Maybe you should keep track of the score, so you can just drop back to whatever level it was before whoever starts their antics again?
On the one hand, I can remember days of running the HotW Poll on UGO that I would have (figuratively) KILLED to get 100 (total) votes on one Poll… So, to the extent that this represents an increase in participation… GREAT! On the other hand, some people are insanely competitive, and we did have cheaters back then… Ugo had a setting that enabled me to see who voted, and that seemed to help a lot. Sorry to hear PollDaddy is not up to the (ahem!) fine standards of UGO…
Cosmic, IF there was any Hanky-panky going on with this, it’s probably not about ‘not wanting you to win’, so much as it was about ‘wanting someone ELSE to win’… and it might be that the winner just had a lot more friends than you. I don’t know, we can’t tell, and really, there’s no prize for these things, so just keep trying. If someone IS cheating, they’ll get tired of it, eventually…
Blunt Object. If you reconsider the prize please post your request in my Whiz Bang thread.
http://www.heromachine.com/forums/topic/dblades-whiz-bang-item-dispenser/
For what it’s worth I voted for your piece and I have no issue with fulfilling the prize request.