EA Sports issues statement on Twitter regarding the Cover Vote irregularities

Submitted by Trauber19 on

I'm sure there are plenty of people tired of this appearing on the board, but here is what EA Sports had to say about Texas A&M exploiting a loophole.

https://twitter.com/EANCAAFootball/status/310059529549262848

https://twitter.com/EANCAAFootball/status/310059812476035075

"We are aware of the voting irregularities around the #NCAACoverVote. We are in touch with the schools involved in the final round voting and in the spirit of integrity and fair play, are in agreement that only votes from legitimate accounts will be counted in the vote."

So take that for whatever it's worth.  Apparently the complaining and losing a 14K lead in one day did get their attention.

UPDATE:

https://twitter.com/EANCAAFootball/status/310101158918230016

"FYI - If you're still creating fake accounts and "causes" pages to vote from, you're wasting your time. #NCAACoverVote"

Not sure how they can decipher between all of it or whatever, but they just issued this on Twitter at 2 pm.

Wolverine Devotee

March 8th, 2013 at 12:16 PM ^

Denard should win this if the fakers are cancelled. He was killing swope before the cheaters came in.

Thank God. We may have our 4th cover man guys!!

stopthewnba

March 8th, 2013 at 12:59 PM ^

This thread has close to 100 posts, while the Purdue game recap had only 40.

That being said, it's Friday and I'm tremendously bored @ work, hence my reading through pretty much anything of remote interest on the Web today.

A Lot of Milk

March 8th, 2013 at 1:41 PM ^

God I don't know if they can actually determine which accounts are real or not...I would say only vote legitimately now, but a few fake votes can't hurt just in case...

jaylee714

March 8th, 2013 at 1:41 PM ^

What's up with the up vote/down vote mgopoints business? I am unable to do any of that... Is that only for MGoVeterens?

Wolverine Devotee

March 8th, 2013 at 2:06 PM ^

aka the a&m fans and their poorly designed message board.

Thankfully, we saved the competition. A MGoUser (sorry I don't have the name) pointed them out cheating, and cached the a&m thread before they deleted it. Then we spammed the EA page with the proof. 

 

Giff4484

March 8th, 2013 at 4:00 PM ^

Someone on scout had the A&M blog link to their cheating so I put it on here, Twitter and the Michigan football facebook page. Sorry but Denard is from my area South Florida and he is not get punked by first year SEC tools.

Soulfire21

March 8th, 2013 at 2:41 PM ^

I do have a legimitate 'business' page on Fbook (actually it's for our old house in AA that we used to basically convey party information to our friends, still in use for the current residents of the house), and I did use that to vote.  So I suppose technically Denard got 2 votes from me, but if they discount my 2nd one, oh well.

Glad they acknowledged the fishiness of Denard losing a 16k (or 14k?) lead over night.  I emphasize the night part as well, because there's no way that many people would be voting at night time. 

chatster

March 8th, 2013 at 4:41 PM ^

Took them several hours to solve the problem of deciding how to deal with the voting irregularities, and, sadly for Denard and all Michigan fans, they're giving the cover to this guy

 

Soulfire21

March 8th, 2013 at 5:13 PM ^

Here's my theory, just a theory:

Assumptions:  Information like vote, profile, date profile created, etc. is all stored in a large database (or, more likely, multiple databases); Facebook will cooperate with EA Sports in finding this data; each page (like a cause, business, etc.) is owned by another Facebook profile

EA Sports will take the raw votes for each player and apply filters on them, for example:

  • Give me the # of votes for each player by profiles created before March 7th, 2013 (or something similar)
  • From these profiles, give me the number of votes for each player from "unique" profiles, that is, eliminate pages (like causes, businesses, etc.) from the vote tally, because each page is owned by a single facebook profile

If EA Sports really wants to be fair about this, they probably need to ask Facebook for some assistance with this.  But it can be done, and fairly easily.  I've of course made many assumptions in what I said, but I think they can manage something very similar. 

Going about it this way would eliminate votes from fake profiles created just for voting, and eliminate duplicate voters by enforcing "uniqueness."  If they're really in contact with the schools it seems like EA Sports is fairly serious about this issue.

wolfman81

March 8th, 2013 at 7:28 PM ^

I was going to write this post. I totally agree. It would be easy to get that data. It'd probably take someone an hour to fix it if they knew what they were doing.

But seriously, FB has to have that data, and if they don't they are stupid. I think one of the ways that they make money is by selling targeted advertising,and knowing that you prefer DRob to whatshisname would tell an advertiser something about what they should try to sell you. (Hint: It isn't a TAMU jersey.)