Progress Report, Scenario Polling Issues, 15/12 - 23 (Patreon)

Hello everyone and welcome to another in the line of progress reports.

I was recently alerted by backers that there's a recent(?) phenomena of vote tampering going about in various Patreon circles, where multiple accounts are created for the purposes of skewing the vote in favor of certain outcomes. To my great shame I hadn't even considered this as a possibility, if anything owing to the tier structuring of my work, but when I sat down to look at the statistics it quickly and sadly became apparent that this is indeed the case with the most recent Scenario poll. As you can see from the outline above, these accounts, which joined on the same day that they also voted on and who have had zero previous engagement with my Patreon, all voted within minutes of each other and, barring a small spread of other votes, consistently gave zero votes to 2B (which was the previous poll lead) while all of them voted for Liara. This is fundamentally what catapulted Liara from second place to securing victory in the poll by a margin of 2 votes in the last 2 days of the poll, which would not have happened without these 9 accounts putting their thumb on the scale. The fact that these are all tied to anonaddy emails, which is a service that, from my understanding, allows for the setup of multiple email aliases in quick succession, while many of them have names corresponding with their vote choices, simply makes the case even clearer.

I want to apologize to you all as this mistake is on me as a creator, and I have no excuses for it. It stings particularly as someone with an academic background in statistics, where it's blatantly obvious that I should have treaded more carefully and scrutinized the data with a closer eye instead of simply presuming that the tier cost itself would dissuade something like this. I've discussed this extensively over on the Discord already, and as I'm rather out of the loop of the workings of other creators, backers have educated me on the matter by noting that various bank chargebacks or other means of getting one's money back is commonly employed after something like this occurs, alternatively that those engaging in this behavior simply consider it a (heavily) discounted commission of sorts. Something that remains unclear is whether this is a singular individual or a coordinated effort from some forum or server somewhere, but as I have no means of actually gauging this, it will simply remain in the realm of speculation.

While I realize that those who were looking forward to a Liara special for Christmas (myself included) will be disappointed, I simply cannot in good conscience proceed with the way things are.  Thus, as of writing this report, the accounts in question have been banned, and I have poured all my spare time into a 2B Scenario in a bid to make up for lost time, which sadly means that I have little in the way of news when it comes to the Ivy project for this week, most of that time having instead gone towards this endeavor, something I must apologize for as well.

To be clear: I of course do not want to dissuade people from talking to each other, but any form of voting collaboration will face crackdown as it undermines the entire prospect of polling in the first place, and is distinctly unfair to ordinary participants of the process. Thankfully this isn't something that I have seen previously in my work, and while I haven't had the time to go back far into the past to see if this multi-email approach has been employed previously, I can say that the latest loop poll vote where Jill Valentine won does not appear to have suffered this issue, so it is possible that this is entirely new. Regardless, I apologize once more and promise to be more vigilant in the future, so as to ensure this does not happen again.

I hope to have some screens to show for the 2B piece come next week, most likely for the Friday, with the release being on Sunday the 24:th.

All this said, thank you, as always, for your continued support and for all of your kind words. The winter weather holds up, like some kind of christmas miracle, so fingers crossed it can hold on for just another week or two. Hope you're doing well out there, wherever you are, and my apologies once more.

Take care of yourselves, and each other!
/DH