UNUSUALLY HIGH PRESENT COUNTS
It doesn't necessarily mean that they're cheating. I'm on about 11k presents because I rushed a few of the tasks initially, I have a friend with 20k who probably rushed most, if not all, of the tasks.
Forum Discussion
With all due respect to the respondents to the OP, while there may be some percentage - a small one, I would think - of people who throw that kind of cash for donuts to rush event counts and unlock all the items, mostly that explanation is almost total *.
The most direct answer is the one that the OP cites, namely people playing with a hacked account.
Here is a screenshot from my game I took less than 48 hours after the 2014 Holiday Event began. (I have the original with the metadata, but I have edited player names for privacy.) Over 14,000 presents in less than 2 days. Nice.
http://s15.postimg.org/79e1ym6tn/tstohack.jpg
So what's EA to do about the thieves? They don't want to lose whales and other premium players, and banning a hacked account will just cause the banned person to go create a new one. EA can't incentivize paying premium players with special content, because while that would be nice, the hackers would just get the code and insert it into their games. What EA could do would be to analyze player accounts, see who is actually paying, and gift these players with a certain percentage of their yearly purchases back as free donuts. Yeah, yeah, I can already hear the naysayers, but if the problem is big enough, this is a way to reward premium, non-thieving players without unduly imbalancing the game as well as doing something that the hackers can't really get any benefit from (and it's probably far easier to monitor legit, paying players than try to play whack-a-mole with the hackers).
The most direct answer is the one that the OP cites, namely people playing with a hacked account.
Here is a screenshot from my game I took less than 48 hours after the 2014 Holiday Event began. (I have the original with the metadata, but I have edited player names for privacy.) Over 14,000 presents in less than 2 days. Nice.
http://s15.postimg.org/79e1ym6tn/tstohack.jpg
So what's EA to do about the thieves? They don't want to lose whales and other premium players, and banning a hacked account will just cause the banned person to go create a new one. EA can't incentivize paying premium players with special content, because while that would be nice, the hackers would just get the code and insert it into their games. What EA could do would be to analyze player accounts, see who is actually paying, and gift these players with a certain percentage of their yearly purchases back as free donuts. Yeah, yeah, I can already hear the naysayers, but if the problem is big enough, this is a way to reward premium, non-thieving players without unduly imbalancing the game as well as doing something that the hackers can't really get any benefit from (and it's probably far easier to monitor legit, paying players than try to play whack-a-mole with the hackers).
