EA Staff (Retired)I think the game has been hacked, which is why china town was won by the same person as festival.
i think the star rating works as how many votes you got compared to the top score. Suppose top won 10 votes and you got 6, top gets 5 stars, you get 3. Fair, to a point, assuming both of you get the same number of voting opportunities.
now suppose the winner hacked the system and submitted 100 votes for their city. Your 6 is now barely half a star.
assuming this is the way voting works (and it neatly explains someone winning twice with 2 poor cities and the rest getting a low rating), there is an easy fix:
1) keep tack of how many times a design is put out for vote.
2) keep track of how many votes each design won and how many it lost
3) if lost + win is not the same as chances to vote, the designer is a cheat. They should be banned from the game.
i believe their cheating has cost me a free land expansion ... doubt I would have got much further but still ...
all us cheat victims should be given some compensation ... say a boost in blueprints ... or a free land expansion?
Probably the winner was the one of EA/track20 developers. Guess the winner was already decided even before the voting started.
Doesn’t really make sense to hack the system in this beta stage. You can’t hack to be picked for the early access, how can they vote 100 times? They just want to parade of what they can do?
But either it was a fixed-game or hacked, I agree all test players should get rewards especially the nice looking castle!!
The hack is conceptually easy. A vote is simply a message from your machine to the server. Grab a copy of the message, change the content (e.g. change the player ID for the city you vote on to your player ID) and send. Vote for you. And repeat.
as for why hack? The war concept got hacked to death though it has been a while since we’ve encountered obvious cheats. Mayors pass has had its fair share of cheats too. Any competition like this, someone somewhere will try to hack, even in beta testing.
for reference I have attached a screen shot of my china town attempt. Not worthy of a win, but better than most I saw. Population just under 70k, 85% happiness.
@DunsnoozinBut how could you explain that someone got 3 stars? Did he also cheat? In the comments of the linked post:
https://www.reddit.com/r/SCBuildIt/comments/lsvllq/a_test_is_a_testit_is_the_same_winner_and/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
Many of my clubs only got a rating of 0.5. I think this voting system is broken.
The average score does not reflect the score before the previous time.
In addition, the message "Results have been obtained!" Does not disappear and they cannot receive the reward. Please fix this problem.
@MichealYun The answer to that is very simple: there are two competitions being run - one on chinatown and one on green valley. The post you refer to does say "more japanese than chinatown" but if you look at the image supplied it has several green valley buildings and no tokyo buildings / red wall / japanese-style parks or landscape etc. The person who got 3 stars was almost certainly in the green valley half of the competition which wasn't hacked and therefore they got the correct number of stars ... and from the image posted, 3 is probably about right.
If you look at the various complaints, they are, from what I can see, exclusively to the chinatown half.
I stand by my claims of "hacked" and have reported Mars1001001 as a cheat through the "contact us" part of the help tool. My track record for reporting cheats is 6-0 (though that is in wars).
As for the "they are a developer" option, if so, why don't they build a masterpiece like the images provided when launching the challenge. A developer would surely have access to all the best stuff ...
@Dunsnoozin I posted 3 pictures before, all got half star. 2 are in green valley and 1 chinatpwn. I was in the green valley group and got half star with many other green valley competitors. the voting system is broken. Here is my half star rated green valley
