Nominate. From: CJayC | Posted: 5/8/2006 12:22:59 AM | Message Detail You know you want to. http://www.gamefaqs.com/features/contest/contest_nominate.php --- The great thing about schadenfreude is that it's something everyone can enjoy. Well... almost everyone. --- Ask GameFAQs: From: CJayC | Posted: 6/2/2006 4:12:04 PM | Message Detail Woo! Zero-Queue days are happy times for all, giving double karma until they're all zeroed... The only big one left is the feedback queue, so there's a light at the end of the tunnel. And, for everyone who complained that they didn't get double karma on Tuesday, Monday was a holiday in the US. Fix-A-Day will start Monday, and planned highlights for the week include a server move and the launching of the next Bracket Battle. And now, for a few questions from the audience: Blackjack946 asks, "CJay, you bought an N-Gage, didn't you?" Yes, I did. Stop laughing, it was free. I needed a new cell phone at the time, so I figured what the heck. The only game of note on the system I ever actually played was Worms Armageddon, but even that gets old after a while. I definitely need a new phone, but I just haven't found one I like yet. At least I got the QD, so no sidetalkin' for me. wellington asks "What was the first games console you owned?" An old Pong system was in the closet for ages, although I barely remember playing it. The first real console I had, of course, was an Atari VCS (2600), and the first game I had for it was Space Invaders. And I remember accidentally finding the first "cheat" within a few weeks (hold reset when you power on the system for double shots). RingoBell asks, "Why isn't the login box secure (using SSL via HTTPS)? With all the talk of "identity theft" and complains from users whose accounts have been "hacked", it seems like this is long overdue." Ahh, a good question. Now, first of all, you have to understand what HTTPS really is: It encrypts information transmitted sent from your computer over the internet to another system. So, in theory, we could encrypt the user's name and password over HTTPS when they log in, and nobody in between could intercept it. Of course, in order to intercept the information sent from one computer to another over the Internet, it would take someone working at an ISP or someone who's already inside your home network to intercept that traffic, and let's face it, someone going to that much trouble isn't going to be looking for web site logins, but for bank account, eBay, and PayPal logins. Which is, of course, why those kind of logins are encrypted with HTTPS. Now, 99% of the accounts "hacked" on GameFAQs are compromised in one of three ways: 1) People re-use the same password on other sites (spinoff message boards, for the most part). Then when those sites inevitably have their databases cracked, all of those accounts are there for the taking. 2) "Hackers" send IM or e-mail messages from "GameFAQsAdmin9821@hotmail.com" to naive users, telling them that there was a database error and they need the user's password to reset their account. 3) The "hacker" breaks into the user's e-mail account (which tends to be easy when you know enough about a person), then gets the password reset from there. In fact, I've yet to hear of a case where an account was hacked that wasn't attributable to the user's own carelessness, lack of foresight, or Hotmail. No amount of security we implement on the site can prevent that. To tell the truth, HTTPS can often fool users into thinking they are more secure, when in fact it only protects them from one avenue of attack that requires much more effort than any of the above vectors. warfreak asks, "Why can't we have saves for certain games on PC? Things that have a storyline should have saves shouldn't it?" Good question, but there's several reasons we don't: 1) PC saves can carry viruses. It would be relatively simple to create an trojan horse as part of a save game, upload that to popular sites, and then infect hundreds or thousands of users. 2) Testing. We don't own every PC game, so we have no way to test each save to make sure it won't cause problems. For the most part, the worst thing a console save game could do is just plain not work, so there's no real problem there if we post a bad save. A bad PC game save could easily crash the game, your system, and it gets worse from there. 3) Support. There isn't a standard save game format. Some games put information in files, some in the registry, some in different directories, and so on. Not only does it take technical knowledge to find the save location, but it takes just as much knowledge to install it. We already hear from more than enough people who can't figure out how to use a PS2 save, despite how ridiculously easy Datel/Mad Catz have made them to use. And there ya go. See you on Monday... --- The great thing about schadenfreude is that it's something everyone can enjoy. Well... almost everyone. --- Bracket From: CJayC | Posted: 6/8/2006 5:27:55 PM | Message Detail http://www.gamefaqs.com/features/contest/bse.html --- The great thing about schadenfreude is that it's something everyone can enjoy. Well... almost everyone. --- From: UltimaterializerX | Posted: 6/27/2006 9:58:56 PM | Message Detail Message From Ultima_X at 2006-06-27 03:43:01 So with the new contest slated to start on Saturday (I'd push it to Monday to avoid starting it on a weekend like you did once before, but that's beside the point), I have two related suggestions. One, I stand by the opinion that the poll start/end time should go back to 1 a.m. EST. It would make it _so_ much better for us East Coast people to follow the best part of every poll, plus it's not like this hasn't been in place before. As for the "It's just a poll, go to bed" defense, uh.... that's irrelevant <_< On a more serious note, I just tested the ol' multi-vote poll glitch with one alt. Can that glitch truly not be fixed without turning every poll into what originally happened with Pokemon/Xenogears? It just makes it too easy for people to cheat, even if everyone knows about it and an alleged balance exists when everyone is doing it. Balance or not, polls have been close enough for the glitch to matter. People just start whoring for whatever they have in their bracket, and Board 8 consensus opinion winds up mattering more than everything else. With that said, if I absolutely had to pick one of these to be worked on before Saturday, I'd definitely choose the former. 3 a.m. is just hell over here. Two hours backwards. People would like it and/or get used to it quickly, I promose =p Anyway, good luck and have fun running another one of those things. Hopefully nothing happens that will make you regret doing it. Message From GameFAQs at 2006-06-27 19:33:50 Looking into it, and I wouldn't worry about the vote stuffing. ~*ST*~ --- Winner of the Spring 2004 "Best. Game. Ever." Contest Currently Playing: Resident Evil 4, KH:COM (Sora), Larussa 92 (NYY), FE8, WC3: Frozen Throne --- Brackets due Saturday at 6PM. Voting starts at 9PM. From: CJayC | Posted: 6/29/2006 11:49:53 PM | Message Detail Woo. --- Once upon a time everything was lovely, but that was before I had to deal with people. --- Brackets due Saturday at 5PM. Voting starts at 9PM. From: CJayC | Posted: 6/29/2006 11:59:34 PM | Message Detail Pacific. Yes, I originally said 6PM. I'm tired. --- Once upon a time everything was lovely, but that was before I had to deal with people. --- Ask GameFAQs: It's time for a made-up question... From: CJayC | Posted: 6/29/2006 11:58:21 PM | Message Detail Just because I know it's going to be asked... Why is the contest voting going to start at 9PM Pacific instead of midnight? Several reasons: 1) There are more people awake and using the site at 9PM 2) I don't have to stay up until midnight (and beyond) to babysit the poll then things go wrong. 3) Hey, it's still midnight somewhere... 4) When I have to travel to the East Coast, staying up until 3AM isn't fun. This is a permanent change; the poll will be rolling over at 9PM starting Friday through whenever I feel like changing it back, probably not anytime soon. So, today's and tomorrow's fix is all about getting the contest ready to roll on Saturday, and the queues were zeroed out early and often today. --- Once upon a time everything was lovely, but that was before I had to deal with people. --- Everybody got 17th! From: CJayC | Posted: 7/1/2006 10:03:18 PM | Message Detail The poll cache works as such: Every 2 seconds for the first 60 seconds, then every 5 minutes for the rest of the day. Which means 17 people voted in the first 2 seconds. 46,198 entries. Is that a record? --- Once upon a time everything was lovely, but that was before I had to deal with people. --- Ask GameFAQs: Contest Questions From: CJayC | Posted: 7/10/2006 9:28:28 PM | Message Detail New Bounties and Clear Queues, it's all good. Aust asks, "If there are more than 50 entries with the same score, what determines who appears on the 'Top 50 Entires' list?" Order of entry, set as the last time the bracket was modified. And, for the curious, I wasn't the first on the list this time because I kept fiddling with my own entry after the initial test. trannyscience asks, "Got a bracket this year? If so, what's it look like?" Yes, but I keep it private, as I don't want anybody to think that it would influence how the contest is run in any way. I regularly over/under-estimate the popularity of characters and games, so it's not like it's ever a very good bracket anyway. Ultima13 asks, "Why did you decide to change the polls from being updated instantly to being updated every 5 minutes?" Well, it's been like that for well over a year now, even on normal polls. When contest polls updated instantly, people hit refresh over and over and over and over again, tracking every single vote. Thousands of hits on the poll results page from single users, multiplied by hundreds of users (especially near the end times), and it's not good for anybody. Plus, it makes it a lot harder for anyone trying to stuff votes to tell if they're actually making a difference or not. RockMFR 5 asks, "Who does the artwork for the contest battle pics?" Me, PhotoShop, and GIS do the daily battle pics, except when we invite users to send in their submissions. And, for everybody who complains about the quality of the images posted for each battle, you should see some of the "gems" I have to weed through during user submissions. :) --- Once upon a time everything was lovely, but that was before I had to deal with people. --- Battle #10 Analysis: For the HOOOOORDE! From: CJayC | Posted: 7/11/2006 10:06:25 PM | Message Detail As with the last few contests, I'll try to do this whenever a vote is extremely close (under 1% difference). 13 users got axed for egregious vote stuffing (i.e. can't even begin to argue it was accidental, or that their brother, cousin, friend, and dog just happened to vote on the same computer). 12 of them were stuffing for GTA. And, just for the conspiracy theorists, all the fraudulent votes we caught put together would have added just 600 votes for GTA, still not enough to put them over the top. Most Ironic Account Name Banned: "SC2K6Champ". Warcraft benefited from a massive day-long rally, spurred on by World of Warcraft itself, but there were no unusual voting patterns or anything suspect about the vote totals; external influences are allowed, as we simply can't control the rest of the Internet, and you can never underestimate the number of Blizzard fans (although I don't give it a snowball's chance against Mario). There were no unexplained spikes, no mass proxy use, no strange voting patterns, and while traffic was much higher today than for other contests, it was expected to be so and was well within the norm. --- Once upon a time everything was lovely, but that was before I had to deal with people. --- Ask GameFAQs: A few more contest questions... From: CJayC | Posted: 7/14/2006 9:56:42 PM | Message Detail Clear queues, and tons of little fixes relating to the new pages. It's moving along smoothly, so we'll upgrade some more pages next week: Look for new and upgraded Contributor and Company pages first. UltimaterializerX asks, "For the contests, how do you determine seeding and bracket placement?" For each contest, I tally up all the nominations, and place them in order, and group them pretty much in that order into #1 seeds, #2 seeds, and so on. Sometimes, I bump games/characters to a higher or lower seed, depending on mitigating factors (lower seeds for "rallied" characters that won't do as well among the general public, higher seeds for ones appearing in brand new games). From there, I toss them into the bracket fairly randomly, trying to set up what seems like the most interesting matches (i.e. separating favorites so they don't meet too early). There's no real science involved, I just sort of feel my way through it. KleenexTissue50 asks, "Is there any particular reason Chrono didn't get into the Best Series contest? The nominations were obviously only open to board users, and I know for a fact that Chrono received almost as many nominations from the contest board as Final Fantasy and Zelda. It seems odd that a series whose first game almost won the Best Game Ever contest and who almost had a character win the last Character Battle didn't get into this contest over some series. Wow, that was a long-winded question." Yes, yes it was. People forget that the nominations are tallied up by machine count, and that spelling counts. Going back now, if I tally up all the people who nominated both "Crono", "Chrono", and "Crhono" ... (does some math)... the game might have been a 7 seed, but still more than likely doomed for an early exit. Then again, that's not counting up all of the misspellings of all the higher seeded games, which means that it might not have made it in anyway. Most all of the games that made it into the bracket had two (and often more) strong iterations, while Chrono Cross isn't nearly as well loved as the original. Chilly_Academic asks, "How do you like your steak done?" Medium rare. And, before anybody else asks: Loaded, Caesar, Pepperoni, Iced Tea, Chocolate, Banana, and Green. --- Once upon a time everything was lovely, but that was before I had to deal with people. --- Congratulations, losers! From: CJayC | Posted: 7/17/2006 9:21:13 PM | Message Detail Let's have a big round of applause for lcadwallader, Allison_Pryce, and NotyouTwo, who successfully managed to get 0 scores for the contest. Of course, if they had only applied their knowledge for good and not evil, they'd have perfect brackets going into the second round. :) --- Once upon a time everything was lovely, but that was before I had to deal with people. --- Some interesting contest analysis info... From: CJayC | Posted: 7/21/2006 1:42:42 AM | Message Detail So, I went through and was doing some nice due diligence to make sure that there was no way fraudulent votes were getting through. I analyzed the data up and down, couldn't find the slightest hint of any voting patterns, anomalies, or even external influences for this one. So, I turned on advanced logging and captured a few thousand votes. The results kind of threw me. Gecko Engine (Firefox, Mozilla, etc): 56% for Castlevania. IE Engine: 53% for Kingdom Hearts. I have no idea how to interpret that. You guys take that and run with it, I'm not even going to try and guess what that means. And for the curious, Opera is 58%, Safari is 56%, both for CV. There were 11 votes from PSP users. I also saw one DreamCast, several Sidekicks, a couple of other mobile phones, and, you're never going to believe this, an N-Gage. ... Sorry, I got a little distracted there. But no real cheating I could find. Except for the one user that got axed earlier for vote stuffing, but his votes weren't counted anyway. --- Once upon a time everything was lovely, but that was before I had to deal with people. --- From: CJayC | Posted: 7/21/2006 11:55:20 PM | Message Detail And just to follow up, the same trends held up through the day, only that IE tends to account for around 60% of the site's traffic overall. No unusual trends, no proxy servers, nothing unexpected from the data. --- Once upon a time everything was lovely, but that was before I had to deal with people. --- Character Battle 5 Nominations From: CJayC | Posted: 7/26/2006 2:36:43 PM | Message Detail This year's twist will become readily apparent when you visit the following link. http://www.gamefaqs.com/features/contest/contest_nominate.php --- Once upon a time everything was lovely, but that was before I had to deal with people. --- Contest Nominations Character Battle V You may nominate up to 14 of what you consider to be the best video game characters of all time: 7 male, and 7 female. To nominate a character, simply enter the name below in the appropriate box. Please note the following ground rules: * Characters must be original creations for a video game, and not originally appearing in other sources. This excludes licensed characters (Spider-Man, Naruto) and real people (Tony Hawk, John Madden). * Once you enter a nomination, it is permanent, and you may not delete it. * Using multiple accounts to nominate more than 14 characters or the same character multiple times will invalidate all of your nominations. * If a character's gender isn't clear (i.e. they're never referenced as "he" or "she" and are totally and completely androgynous), assume they are male. * Use a character's full name when possible, and make sure you spell the character's name correctly, as it is used in the English-language version of the game (i.e. "Crono", "Aeris"). This ensures all votes are tabulated correctly. Entering the name of the game/series the character is from helps to clarify situations where a similarly named character appears in more than one game. * The following characters are guaranteed positions and do not need any nominations: Link, Cloud, Sephiroth, Mario. --- Poll closed on time, but the front page locked up. From: CJayC | Posted: 8/1/2006 10:12:52 PM | Message Detail A holdover from the night's network issues, so I had to manually push the new one out there. Will get the results updated and all will be right soon. --- Once upon a time everything was lovely, but that was before I had to deal with people. --- Best. Series. Ever. Winners Notes From: CJayC | Posted: 8/18/2006 3:52:59 PM | Message Detail As the winners of the BSE contest are announced, a few notes, just to remind everybody before we start the next contest. This year, three people chose to knock themselves out of contention for a gift certificate. They had the score, but not the desire, to win. One of them didn't manage to fill out their entry form completely, and two were caught red-handed voting multiple times. *shrug* Ah well, live and learn. Or don't. And congrats to mocktroid13, the first place winner with the perfect bracket! --- Once upon a time everything was lovely, but that was before I had to deal with people. ---