Cheating in the Runway

[Pathetically Done]

Technically, I don't know if any rules were ever posted about voting etiquette in Runway, so this may not even be technically cheating according to Gaia, but I assume we all have a little common sense.

With participation as low as it is (21 entries in yesterday's GC theme?!?!), it's pretty easy to try to sway votes in your favor by continuously voting for yourself. I believe some people have noticed this and are taking advantage of it. (I mostly only enter the GC and gold themes, I'm sure this isn't as much of a problem in the free themes)
I won't say any names and I'm not saying that everyone is cheating or that every winner is cheating, but it becomes pretty obvious when you're in the top 5 or looking at them for any amount of time that some people aren't playing by the rules. Maybe 5000 gcash is simply too tempting for some people and they don't care that it ruins the fun for the rest of the contestants?



I think more transparency could help this. If at the end of the Runway, we could see how many votes the other contestants got, this might dissuade people from artificially raising their votes, as it will be very obvious when an avi suddenly has hundreds more votes than any of the other entries. (Remember when the winners used to be as few as 2 votes away from each other?)


EDIT: This thread was mainly about the GC themes, yet quite a few people are like, "But that'd be so difficult in the free entry." Yes, I'm well aware, that's why it wasn't really mentioned as much.

[Soul of Kyr]

Pathetically Done

It is actually really hard to vote for yourself. In the 2 hours I have been voting, Yes I am voting for more people than just myself, I have seen myself....maybe 3-4 times. The 3-4 times I might of voted for myself, would never get me to where I am now. Which is fluctuating between 3rd, 4th and 5th Place. I am not very social on Gaia, so I don't have tons of friends to vote for me either, in fact I have at most 10 friends on Gaia and none of them have been on in the last 2 hours. Thus none of them could be voting for me a lot.

Which means....some people out there must like my Entry, thus no cheating.
Though I assume that around 9am(Gaia's time zone), when the voting starts upping more, that I shall fall off the Top 5 entirely....that is how it usually goes for me.

Edit: Oh I am in the Gold Theme lol.

[Wolf Princess ofthe Moon]

There isn't anything stopping a person from voting for themselves when they manage to ever find themselves. I've said this before in another thread but I'm kinda selfish and only vote in themes I enter because I like to try to find myself, which can take a while. From the times I vote in the gold theme, I probably see my self 5-10 times out of 500 votes. I haven't entered a GC theme in a while because I haven't been able to make an avie I like to enter so I can't really say much on that runway. The last time I did, I didn't entirely like the avie I submitted so I didn't expect a lot of votes from it anyways.

I will agree though in wishing to be able to see how many votes everyone else got so I could see how close I am to others.

[Bich Puddin]

Yeah, on the free ones, you barely see the same ava. I guess some people are just tired of the cash and gold ones. I kinda am. I dont even like voting anymore cause I vote for a few people, suddenly it's saying I'm voting too fast, cause the same 12 show up.I wouldn't og known about it though, if you wouldnt of brought it up.

[PrincessKitteh]

This is the reason why I'm extremely hesitant to try entering the GC themes as of late. With a pool of so few avatars, it is beyond easy to continuously vote for yourself because unless you have that avatar that likes to show up 1/100 votes, you could very easily refresh constantly until you find it and vote for yourself about once a minute at the least. Obviously, voting etiquette would dissuade the average user from doing something like that, but if someone really wanted the GC and there's nothing stopping them?
Personally, I'm skeptical because within the last couple weeks I've seen winning avatars that just did not feel like winners at all compared to their competition, or held their spots a little too strongly throughout the day with little sway between placing. Obviously it could just be a matter of low voter participation, but I'm nonetheless inclined to sit here in a corner with my little tinfoil hat.

[grayworm]

I can definitely see this happening in the gcash runway. The entry pool is so small it's incredibly easy to find yourself and vote only for yourself countless times. It seems like the same avatar shows up once every 20 rounds about, so you could theoretically vote for yourself 3 times per minite, 180 times per hour, and 4320 times in one 24 hour period. While I don't expect someone to vote for literally the entire voting period and be that incredibly lucky to get the perfect distribution, someone who had the time to do so could definitely vote themselves into the top spot, and 5000 gcash is a pretty hefty chunk of change. I also agree with the above poster that some recent winners/high placing avatars have not been particulalrly great. It seems a little suspicious.
Then again, if you're willing to dedicate that much time to Gaia and clicking refresh for hours on end maybe you deserve to win.

[XonyMudd]

Free runway, I don't see how anyone could cheat unless they're using some sort of advanced computer algorithm or are hacking or something like that to artificially inflate their numbers, but since even the first place winner might not even average more than a couple hundred votes, too high a number would be suspicious, but more so than that, the prizes are a pitiful amount of gold and not worth the effort of cheating.

Gold runway, yah, a little more so worth the effect if you can guarantee a place in the top 3, but likely cheating would still be a waste of effort even in that.

GC, now that's where the money's at, in more ways than one. But even with as few people competing, its gonna take some effort to boost your votes. Not saying its impossible, but there is definitely more incentive to cheat. Assuming there's no hacking or bots involved, you'll have to have 1) a lot of time, 2) a lot of luck (at the end of one GC runway voting 80-100 times with 0 refreshes, when I checked the museum, out of the at most 25 participants, I still managed to find 1 entry that I had not even seen once), and 3) a lot of friends who also have a lot of time on their hands who are willing to vote for you and aren't competing with you (unless its you and two friends who have no life and you're all focused on making sure the 3 of you end up in the top 3).


Not saying there isn't cheating going on, but cheating wouldn't be easy to pull off, but there is definitely incentive for it in the GC runway. Of course, another possibility is a user being "in bed" with programmers who help ensure that their friends appear more frequently in the votes, but this seems unlikely, but still a possibility.

However, ultimately, its hard to tell if there even is any cheating going on, and if so, how can it be proved?

[Wolf Princess ofthe Moon]

So as an experiment, I decided to keep track of how many times I found myself in the GC theme ((Since I managed to make an avie I liked for the theme)) out of 500 votes. I might have made a mistake or two as I had to go to the bathroom and let the cat out and when I came back my avie was on the screen and I couldn't remember if I counted it or not. XD So it could be one less than what I wrote down if I made that mistake. XD Also after I hit the 200 mark I forgot to write how many votes and which number it was. >3<

I didn't refresh at all so I cast a vote for just about everybody. I'll be surprised if by tomorrow when I check how many votes I got that I find an avie or two that I never saw.

1
2
3
4
5
6 - 100
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14 - out of 200?
15 - out of 200?
16
17 immediatly after last one
18
19 - 297
20 - 300
21
22
23 - immediatly after last one
24
25
26 - 377
27 - 409
28
29
30
31 - 441
32 - 475
--------------------------500
33 - 541 ((After I hit 500 votes I wanted to see how long until I saw myself))

I started shortly after reset and it's 2:30am right now as I write up this post. 500 votes in roughly 2 hours, with a bathroom break, and multiple times where I got the message that I was voting to fast and had to slow down.

Also for curiosity's sake I took a pic of the top 5 when I started and when I stopped

When I started
When I finished

Also for laughs, I ran into this situation twice XD

I'd try this again with refreshing past everyone until I found myself but I might accidentally skip myself. It's early in the morning I don't believe doing it will affect my numbers too badly, but I dunno. Maybe next time there's a GC theme I can do I'll try it.

[Casua Aria]

I'll be honest, I vote for myself sometimes, but I also vote for others. I literally have no active friends anymore really.

I always just assumed people get a bunch of their friends to vote for them, which sucks for those who don't have any friends here that can vote. I've made it to the top 5 twice now I believe, and all of a sudden I am completely bumped out. It's frustrating and disappointing to never have a fair chance and some of the time...maybe most, I feel like some of the avis don't even really fit the theme.

Take Winter and Ice for example. I keep seeing snow used in ice and the actual ones who go all out with ice and actually fit the theme most seem to not get voted very much. Snow and ice go along the same element of course, but I feel like snow fits the winter theme more. I've also noticed favor of specific colors like white and pink for example. Seems too ironic really that mosre than half the time the top 5 avis are mostly white and/or pink.

[Eruden Ki]

I think it's likelier to happen in GC than any other Runway.

Though, I don't think 1 person could do it alone. Probably with the assistance of some help (family, friends, fans) someone could make some serious bank off the GC prizes in the GC Runway with the low entrant rate and the low natural voter turnout. With minimal competition and x amount of people voting for you every few themes - additionally, if you're smart about it, you'd try to rotate your other friends in on the GC action so it's not fishy that you're always winning/placing high.

If you want to argue "but only one person will get rewarded and the others will stop helping out of frustration," that's not necessarily true. While one person may get the GC, it'd be really easy for them to reward their friends/family/fans with GC bought items - and some of those fresh GC items get tons off the MP when they're first released, don't they?

But, personally, I can see friends simply voting for their friends just to be nice. I'm just thinking about the most profitable/worst-case scenario when it comes to manipulation in the Runway.

[Pathetically Done]

This thread was mostly referring to the Gaia Cash Themes where you are pretty much able to vote for yourself every 15 seconds, I'm sure the problem is less worrisome in Gold themes and non-existant in the Free themes. So, I don't really have anything to say to people talking about how this isn't possible in those themes or that it's highly unlikely, I agree with you (though it does still seem possible in gold, just not as possible)

In GC themes, this is not only easy as long as you have the time, but it is happening, that's not something I'm here to argue. Now, I'm not saying these people aren't completely undeserving, they must still get lots of normal votes as well. I'm also not saying to never vote for yourself, just that if you're just skipping and voting for yourself or voting for yourself hundreds of times, it's probably not a great thing.

Also, I'm not exactly sure why when people see a post talking about something bad happening, their first reaction is to say, "Well I don't do that!" Okay, good, then this isn't about you then. I hope there was no confusion and people understand that I'm not saying everyone cheats or even that every winner cheats. I'm just saying that in the GC runway, there are people cheating and it needs to be addressed, as this was just supposed to be fun and it's become...maybe a little too enticing for some people.

(Also, not sure why this is getting </3 votes, this wasn't meant as a callout thread or to attack any people specifically. I just want to make sure the runway is fair and fun for everyone, lol)

[The Dread Wolf]

The same people keep winning in the free runway. They are all in the same friend group. 12/9, 12/10, and 12/11 they've placed. There is no way it's just a coincidence.

edit: link to runway winners

[syoumei]

I was a bit skeptical, considering the vast number of entries that would need to be filtered through for the free runway...but then they kind of gave it away on their profiles sweatdrop

I wonder how many votes would be required to place...it doesn't seem like an easy feat to achieve .-.

The Dread Wolf

[The Dread Wolf]

syoumei

In the free runway (last time I checked) the average winning vote numbers were about ~250. So it would be considerably hard to sit there and continuously filter through avatars just to vote for your own.
Seeing that they are a fairly big group they probably can manage it by only voting for each others. Which would cover more of the entries.

They aren't in the top 5 atm as far as I know. So we'll see what happens. It's just so sketchy.

[Yuekazehime]

This was an issue from the start, and just grows more obvious with low-participation. There are no rules against it, and they're not out to curb it despite a few users getting large quantities of gc, so all I can really do is shrug.