Voting for the Fan Favorite poll is now closed. Because of the problems we’ve tracked over the last two weeks, along with concerns raised by voters and candidates on these boards, Wizards of the Coast is treating these results as unofficial for the time being.
We hope to be able to post official results by Thursday afternoon. However, the process of verifying votes isn’t a quick one, and we will be diligent in our attempts to eliminate votes cast by obviously fraudulent accounts. When we announce the official results, we will also detail our methodology used to throw out specific votes.
We deeply apologize for the confusion and stress caused by this year’s poll. We set up a flawed system and then in our efforts to deal with the situation, we had to resort to a system flawed in a different way. We have learned from these mistakes and an overhaul of the system is in process for next year’s balloting. In the meantime, I would encourage all of you to be mad at us and not at the candidates. We created a system with no clear rules and many legitimate interpretations of the spirit of the rules. Even in the event where votes for players are thrown out due to fraud, we hope people will understand that the fault there is with those who cast the fraudulent votes, not the players themselves.
To avoid inappropriate comments while the results are still unofficial (particularly attacks on the players themselves regarding issues they had no control over), and to make sure this post is the one people see in the interim, this thread will be locked until the official results have been posted. Once we have them, we will post the official results here, as well as on the Magic Invitational main page and the Fan Favorite ballot page. At that time, we’ll reopen this board for new posts from the readers.
Thanks for voting, and also thanks for caring so much. As trying as a situation like this can be, at the end of the day we know it happens because the game means so much to so many of you. Reader participation has always been and will continue to be one of the most important aspects of magicthegathering.com. We deeply regret the problems we've run into with the Fan Favorite vote, and will be putting a high priority on finding better ways to be able to give you, the readers, the chance to continue to participate in polls and influence magicthegathering.com as well as Magic itself.
Scott Johns
Producer, magicthegathering.com
|