I find MTW’s own account to be fairly insightful.
Four people with similar IP addresses voted on the same day for Bibliophile. Their scores were skewed to such a high degree in Bibliophile’s favor that it attracted Aaron’s attention. He reached out to verify them as real people, and none of them responded.
…what more could Aaron add to this account?
A possible, reasonable, solutions is simply deleting the 4 votes if they were proven biaised.
Now what if in the future someone casts high votes with some false accounts for one entry. Does it mean it will automatically disqualify it? Well, then it’s an easy solution for eliminating a strong opponent! Let’s just vote for him.
The fact that they voted for “The Bibliophile” doesn’t mean the author did this himself, or told his friends to do this. It can also just be awkward friends. MTW had the honesty to tell us “it was his friend”, so we can’t accuse a wicked opponent, but I still find it strange to disqualify his entry like this.
Well, to be honest there’s nothing in Aaron’s post which says he reached out to verify them as real people and they didn’t respond. I’m guessing that’s information he told you personally. If it had been in the original post, it would certainly have helped explain things a little more clearly.
Saying that, it adds a dangerous precedent. You don’t like a game in a competition, or you have a problem with the author for one reason or another, simply register several false e-mail addresses and vote for his game exclusively in an attempt to get him banned.
Not that I’m saying anything like that happened here, just that it could happen.
A lot of people seem to be giving Aaron grief for not providing evidence for the disqualification. Again, I think this is probably for the same reason that I think Killa asked people to drop the subject, because Aaron thought it would be unfair to say “This is the person I’ve disqualified, and this is what he did wrong and here’s a list of all the evidence I have to prove it! Now you can all talk about what a naughty, naughty boy he’s been.” Again, I don’t know why exactly the game was disqualified, or how much proof Aaron has that their was a rule violation, or if there was a rule violation at all, I just wouldn’t assume that the fact that Aaron didn’t elaborate on the reason for the disqualification means that it’s unfair.
It’s in MTW’s post.
All it says is that Aaron attempted to contact them. For all we know, they might have responded. It doesn’t say they’re not real people or MTW under 4 different usernames.
You’re right. I assumed this was a failure to respond, but that may be an inaccurate presumption.
But the core point stands - by MTW’s own account, Aaron did due diligence in reaching out to these voters by their comp-registered email addresses. And whatever response Aaron received was insufficient to satisfy his concerns.
As I said, the decision to throw out the votes was not taken lightly, and the decision to disqualify rather than silently discard them was very much so not taken lightly. There are very good reasons for both of these decisions and I understand that it’s frustrating to some people that I’m not sharing them publicly. One of the reasons I’ve chosen not to do so is I don’t want to leave a handy map for future Spring Thing cheaters to show them exactly how the last guy got caught. There are other reasons, too, some of which involve respecting Marshal’s privacy.
For the record, the vast majority of the work I did trying to figure out what had happened was to make absolutely sure this wasn’t somebody trying to impersonate Marshal or get his game disqualified. Yes, of course I contacted people. Yes, of course there’s more to the story than four votes. Yes, of course I gave Marshal a chance to resolve this matter without having to disqualify his game, and he chose to continue to lie to me. That’s pretty much the end of the story, and this is my last word on the matter.
Fair enough. I just wanted to know for my own piece of mind whether this was valid or simply the CYS guys trying to get MTW banned in payback for him trying to get their games banned.
Be interesting to see what MTW has to say about the matter and whether he has a good explanation for it all.
Uhh… Sorry to disappoint you but the CYS authors aren’t that immature. And when MTW gave his own account of why he was disqualified and why he thought it was unfair, he didn’t mention anything about any of the CYS authors being involved, so I have no idea why you’d jump to that conclusion. Infact he clearly said that the 4 writers who’s votes were questioned were all friends of his, so I don’t understand how CYS could be involved at all.
This thread is not a good look, gang.
Maturity? Yes, I see a lot of maturity on the CYS site:
Admittedly none of those comments are by you, and they’re probably by the CYS version of our dearly departed Pudlo, but a great deal of what’s posted there seems like one long flame war.
But anyway. Aaron’s spoken and given his reasons. If MTW wants to speak up in his own defence, he should do, but there doesn’t seem much point in the rest of us debating the subject much longer.
David Whyld, if the other forum has a lot of noise, that’s a good reason to not drag it into this one.
Just want to point out that when I said “The CYS authors aren’t that immature” I was referring to the authors involved in the competition. There are plenty of extremely immature members on CYS, but then every forum has immature members.
Also most of the immature comments were just people joking by over-exaggerating… Either that or they just really, really don’t like hexagons.
Aaron is full of shit. He hasn’t given me any evidence and I feel that I, for one, should actually see something of the sort. I never lied nor cheated. Aaron is obviously in no way competent to organize the Spring Thing event. Hopefully it will change hands next year. If he says I lied, then I’m fine with him telling me what I lied about public or not.
You really don’t like the members of CYS, do you?
Yeah, apologies for that. The whole “CYS aren’t immature” comment just bugged me.
While I would love for this conflict to be resolved in a way everyone is happy with, this topic will not contribute usefully to that.