What's happening with the character contest? (Patreon)

As most of you know from the discord and/or ekas, the third round of voting for the character contest was called off early because I found solid evidence that someone was manipulating the vote by spamming new accounts. I spent the past couple days thinking about how to handle the rest of the contest given the situation, and I've settled on my plan of action.

Although it's very upsetting(for me at least), after thinking it over I've decided that going Patreon only is the only doable, secure solution for handling the final(and now only legitimate) round of the contest. Someone has proven they're willing to cheat the ekas vote, and I have to assume someone dedicated enough to waste time creating new accounts to vote on ekas would be willing and capable to cheat any external polling service I could use with either the same tactics or a VPN to get around IP dupe protection. The only other alternative for the public vote would be to force people to vote in a way that I can verify them as real accounts, such as replying to the ekas thread with their vote or directly messaging me. One would spoil the thread with voting spam and kill any discussion, the other would destroy my inbox(which I use for communicating with some patrons), and both would be a huge time commitment on my part to manually tally. So, we're going forward with the final poll as Patreon only, where I can be sure everything is legitimate.

How will the final round work now?

Round three never finished, and there's strong reason to suspect that round two was tampered with as well, leaving us with four characters still remaining and one very likely illegitimately voted out. While the first round seems to have been genuine, knowing what we know now I don't think it would be fair to accept those results either. So this final round is going to have all six entries back in the running.

Rather than extend the contest, I'm going to compress the intended voting period into this single week using alternate/preferential voting. What that means is that when the voting begins on Monday, there won't be a typical poll like you're used to, and instead there will be a normal text post asking you to comment your votes. Rather than a single vote, you'll be ranking your top four character choices in order of preference. When the voting period is over, I'll tally all the votes using everyone's first place choice, then eliminate whoever had the least votes. Then I'll tally the votes again, but using the second choice for those who's first choice was eliminated, and so on until we're down to just three characters, at which point a winner will be selected. Juniors and Seniors will have their votes counted as double/triple when things are tallied to account for their usual extra votes.

Sorry things had to turn out this way, but I hope you've all still enjoyed the contest!

~Orchid