During the first three weeks, Fnatic and Meet Your Makers were leading in the vote whilst the others swapped places several times.
Strange things began to happen with less than two weeks to go in the vote. The French team emuLate! managed to jump from a rather bad situation to the very top, leading the community wonder just how good their advertising campaign was.
Fans of many teams used the following method of showing their support:
But considering that you had to vote for two or three teams and not one, 6,305 votes were found missing and emuLate's leap looked very suspect.
Things began moving very rapidly from there, as on April 19, the poll for e-Star Seoul 2008 had another mass vote spam for nearly every team. Things got out of control.
On April 18, SK Gaming and Roccat gained 5,222 and 8,310 votes, respectively. The vote proportion rule (you had to vote for 2 or 3 teams) could not be used to determine whether those votes were fake votes or simply mass votes. But it was still suspicious.
Then, on April 20, within under two hours, emuLate's account rose by 16,895. To put this into perspective, this means that there were 2.68 votes cast for emuLate each second!
The French team's surplus also outnumbered the surplus of all the other teams by 12,634, which means that at least this many votes were fake (most likely, many more than that).
But it is not just emuLate with suspicious votes, ones that were mass-added in a short period of time. emuLate, are first in the list, with an approximate number of 37,000 votes, Roccat are following with 9,900 votes and SK is third with 6,850 votes. The other teams are not that far behind and the smallest number of suspicious votes is with for MYM who only have ~1,300 spam votes.
This does not mean that all of those votes were fake votes, but it definitely prompts to ask questions.
emuLate clearly leads the poll with a total of 24,770 votes that were proven to be fake votes. We arrived at this number with the assumption that everyone voted for two, not three teams. Assuming that 80% of voters picked three teams in the poll, this number almost doubles.
This does not mean that emuLate were the only team that got the help of an invisible hand. SK Gaming has 245 votes that were fakes. Other teams had suspicious leaps as well, but with the screenshots we have, we were not able to prove beyond doubt that ill play was involved.
Regardless of how this ends and what e-Stars does or does not do about it, everyone could agree - this poll was a bad idea.
Statistics:
April 17 22:30:47 CET
emuLate! - 18,511 votes (+2,432)
Fnatic - 15,367 votes (+3,399)
MYM - 16,103 votes (+2,758)
mousesports - 7,664 votes (+1,521)
mTw - 7,939 votes (+1,599)
SK - 9,352 votes (+2,072)
Alternate - 7,555 votes (+1,094)
Roccat - 8,883 votes (+1,436)
April 19 15:07:35 CET
Roccat - 17,193 votes (+8,310)
all other teams - 101,889 (+19,398)
emuLate! - 23,760 votes (+5,249)
Fnatic - 15,822 votes (+455)
MYM - 16,995 votes (+892)
mousesports - 10,745 votes (+3,081)
mTw - 9,832 votes (+1,893)
SK - 14,574 votes (+5,222)
Alternate - 10,161 votes (+2,606)
Growth margin:
Roccat: 17,193 - 8,883 = 8310
other teams: 101,889 - 82,491 = 19,398
Growth for other teams vs. growth for Roccat: 8310 - 19398 = -11088
Assuming that Roccat's voters all voted for two teams only: 8,310*2 = 16,620
19,398 - 16,620 = +2,778 votes left.
Assuming that Roccat's voters all voted for three teams: 8,310*3 = 24,930
24,930 - 19,398 = 5,532 votes missing
April 19 16:52 CET
emuLate! - 40,655 votes (+16,895)
all other teams: 99,583 (+4,261)
Fnatic - 17,831 votes (+2,009)
MYM - 17,088 votes (+93)
mousesports - 10,786 votes (+41)
mTw - 9,883 votes (+51)
SK - 14,616 votes (+42)
Alternate - 10195 votes (+34)
Roccat - 19184 votes (+1,991)
Growth margin:
emuLate!: 40,655 - 23,760 = 16,895
other teams: 99,583 - 95,322 = 4,261
Growth for other teams vs. growth for emuLate: 16,895 - 4,261 = 12,634 votes missing
April 20 12:11:26 CET
emuLate! - 50,878 votes (+10,233)
all other teams - 103,985 (+4,402)
fnatic - 18,269 votes (+438)
MYM - 18,394 votes (+1,306)
mousesports - 11,249 votes (+463)
mTw - 10,623 votes (+740)
SK - 15,032 votes (+416)
Alternate - 10,900 votes (+705)
Roccat - 19,518 votes (+334)
Growth margin:
emuLate!: 50,878 - 40,655 = 10,233
other teams: 103,985 - 99,583 = 4,402
Growth for other teams vs. growth for emuLate: 10,233 - 4,402 = 5,831 votes missing
April 21 - End of voting
SK - 17,264 votes (+2,232)
all other teams - 144,536 (+4705)
emuLate! - 51,262 votes (+384)
Fnatic - 18,732 votes (+463)
MYM - 19,741 votes (+1347)
mousesports - 11,905 votes (+656)
mTw - 11,422 votes (+799)
Alternate - 11,430 votes (+530)
Roccat - 20,044 votes (+526)
Growth margin on April 20 18:16 CET:
SK: 17,205 - 15,032 = 2,173
other teams: 141,759 - 139,831 = 1,928
Growth for other teams vs. growth for SK Gaming: 2,173 - 1,928 = 245 votes missing
Missing votes:
emuLate! - 24,770
SK - 245
suspicious spam votes (added in rapid succession):
emuLate!: 13,000
Fnatic: 1,800
MYM: 1,300
mousesports: 2,600
mTw: 1,700
SK: 6,605
Alternate: 2,500
Roccat: 9,900
Total: 39,405
I know he could be talking random crap, but still.
Most likely it's just something that originated on a community site and went on from there.
Or, I could be an idealistic ignoramus ;o)
But no not really. Even if it looks like I'm hating someone, it's not true! Especially I don't have anything against the French. I mean im even learnign French, why would I want to do that if i hated them or didnt like their culture etc.
I'm pretty sure people would have reacted in other way if this would have been posted on a completly non team-related website, but you have to remember that SK-gaming is not only a team's website but a news website.
Yes, in the first posts I clearly pointed towards the French as at that moment they were the only team who had such weird jumps, but as you see with time more and more evidence poped up and more suspicious votes were found for all teams.
And about whether someone should or shouldn't write such news - it's clearly a must write.
There are gazilions of other such votes and other weird things that should be brought up. And hopefully things will change and more organisators will take this vote in mind that things should be ran more carefully. A register - vote, would have done better :)
MYM FTW!
SK ftw
Bad idea. When you make a poll and the outcome is that important, you make sure your poll is as secure as possible (requiring an account creation with captchas, use both cookies and IP logging, you can even get the NIC mac address and unique identifier from each machine out of the HTTP requests, to make sure that unless people start voting from different machines, each time creating a new account, there is no way to submit more than 1 vote)
Sad to see that there are still high ups who under-estimate the web.
I'mma have to give props to stormm for his investigation, even if the tone of the original articles article were a bit too anti-emulate (to the extent where Carmac had to post what was supposed to be an apology news ) but in the end you sticked to numbers, figures, facts and proofs, and that's not something anyone can argue against.
Cheaters
ahahah when the french is first , you rage and when you are 1st , you don't rage !!!
ahah jealous !
because person vote for you !
Any way as soon as France too badly does something of step in the electronic sport one always finds something to repeat.
When emL with win the WCG its badly made with the sites esport abroad write a news on the performance carried out….
.
2: You're probably one of the guys who spammed like shit to fuck the poll up.
No offense dear, but I do not think that's true.
But if someone is stupid enough to add over 25,000 votes for one team without adding votes for others, then it's plain and simple to count it if you have the screenshots from the right time.
If you remove 25k votes ONLY to emL they're still in front.. right?