Script World Cup - An Unfortunate Situation

You can see me discussing this at the following link: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2490440806?t=00h03m29s

An unfortunate situation has arisen regarding the Script World Cup. In summary:

• About 48 hours ago, we identified an unusual and suspicious pattern of voting in the last few matches of the competition.

• On investigation, a large number of votes had been placed by one person who spent 30+ hours manually creating nearly 500 app accounts and placing votes.

• These votes materially changed the outcome of several knockout stage matches, but had no meaningful effect on any of the group stage matches.

• As soon as we became aware of the situation, we contacted the script authors directly to offer support & to understand their preferences as to the best way to resolve the competition.

• Keeping the script writers’ preferences at the forefront of our decision-making, we are going to re-run the semi-finals this weekend, on Jams’ and Arif's channel, with the final taking place next week on the official channel.

• Most importantly, all of the evidence points towards this having ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH ANY OF THE SCRIPT AUTHORS. The choices of who to 'back' were entirely arbitrary, with some scripts being both supported and opposed at various points in time.

In the final moments of the voting phase for specifically the World Cup final, we noticed a suspicious pattern of votes being cast. There were large blocks of time where votes were repeatedly made for one script in particular. After investigating, we discovered that all of these votes were made from a large number of newly created accounts. We were able to identify patterns in these new accounts that showed they were created manually by a single person, and from that we found a total of 477 app accounts that had been created this way, purely to make fraudulent votes in the World Cup. We do NOT suspect that this person was one of the script authors or anyone else involved in the World Cup, nor do we have any reason to believe they were working for or even supporting any particular script or author. Their choices were entirely arbitrary.

Once we’d found the accounts, we realised that this person had started trying to manipulate votes from much earlier in the competition. They first made additional votes in some group stage matches, and then as the competition progressed they created more fraudulent accounts to affect each round an increasing amount. This, combined with the use of temporary email accounts, burner phone numbers, VPNs and a number of other tools, is how they were able to slip under our radar until the closing stages of the tournament.

When we filtered out all the votes made by these accounts, we saw that TWO quarter-final results had been changed by these votes: In QF1, Buyer’s Remorse would have defeated Trained Killer 53 to 47, and in QF3, The Phantom Detectives beat The Djinn’s Bargain by a score of 58 to 42. Fraudulent votes were also cast in the other two QF matchups, but those votes did not change the outcome of the matchups. Taking into account just the valid votes, the semi-final matchups should have been:

Buyer’s Remorse vs Stowed Away

The Phantom Detectives vs The Ballad of Seat 7

As a result, last week’s final matchup would have featured different scripts if we had correctly identified these invalid votes in time.

Upon learning this, we immediately began talking with the 16 script authors so that we could come up with the fairest solution to this situation. From that discussion, we have determined that the folks in the competition would like us to re-run the semi-final and final matches, based on these correct results. This unfortunately means that some of our script authors have had their position in the competition reviewed, which is a truly awful thing to happen at this stage in the contest. I'd like to personally state how grateful I am to all of them for their maturity and understanding during this situation. Seriously, if you speak to any of these authors, buy them a beer. They've been absolute legends throughout the last 24 hours.

A couple of questions you might have about all of this:

Did these fraudulent votes affect the outcome of the group stages?
No, not in any significant way. We’re going to publish a list of the scores that changed, but the only material difference is that This Is Not My Beautiful House should have finished in 3rd position in group D instead of 4th, ahead of The Warrens. So the correct scripts made it through to the knockout stage and the quarter finals that took place can still stand with their corrected results.

How was it possible for one person to make so many additional accounts?
In the run-up to the World Cup, we added account verification and other kinds of protection against automated account creation and voting, because we knew that lots of people would be creating new accounts in order to vote on the World Cup. Developers will tell you it’s impossible to 100% secure things online - you can only make it harder for an attacker to take advantage of your system, and hope that adding extra layers of protection doesn’t get in the way of your genuine users. In this case, the perpetrator didn’t automate their account creation and voting. In fact they spent over 30 HOURS over the course of the competition, manually taking steps to circumvent our measures and individually making each separate vote. We honestly never considered that anyone would waste that much of their time defacing a competition that’s just designed to showcase creativity in a very niche community. It's extremely sad.

...and that's the note that I want to end on here. I personally feel extremely sad for everyone involved. I feel sad for the very talented Lachlan, who spent hours and hours designing all of the amazing art that made this World Cup look as cool and stylish as it did. I feel sad for Steffen and Gareth, who poured all of their expertise into integrating the voting system with the official app, which was no mean feat. I feel sad for my fellow streamers, who pulled together to make our inaugural app World Cup the huge community event that it was. But mostly I feel sad for the script authors, the ones who have been robbed of a place in the final despite having already made it there as far as they’re concerned, and for the ones who will now play in the final knowing that they’ve replaced someone else who is mourning their loss.

I also feel sad for the person who did all of this. Spending over 30 hours of your life to perpetrate a completely meaningless attack on a community of fans, for no discernible reason, is not the act of a happy or healthy mind. I hope they become better.