2013: I do not say anything, you black black gun sister

2013's Anime Saimoe Tournament is already deep into round 3, and I haven't updated. Well, this sort of thing happens to anime characters all the time, you know, you're walking down the street on an ordinary day in an ordinary town, and suddenly you find yourself in a mysterious world of danger, magical girl battles, and yuri antics for exactly the duration of the Summer season.

But never mind that, what you're probably concerned about is whether Saimoe is an outrageous clusterfuck this year, and yes it is.

This BiriBiri spam, which flooded a voting thread, may remind you of A Certain Scientific Cheating Scandal from 2011.

The title of this post is a Google translated quote from one of the villains behind that round of cheating. It looks like they're still busy giving the Saimoe admins trouble, and the admins are striking back with iron-fisted brutality.

"May You Live In Interesting Tournaments" Is An Ancient Chinese Curse

There was a changing of the guard among the saimoe leadership after the old boss had enough of this little fellow: ( ヽ´ω｀) The current leadership made major changes, including adding a repechage round this year, which allows defeated characters to come back into the tournament if the one who defeated them makes it through the group finals. Another thing they've been doing differently, of course, is restricting voting heavy-handedly and kicking out all the foreigners. Surely you can imagine how they feel about Chinese spammers with a history of large-scale cheating. The admins recently established a new rule (in the middle of the tournament) that allows them to throw out votes they consider suspicious even if the codes are valid. This process has no transparency and the criteria for elimination are unclear.

Haramura Nodoka's 10/09 match was a day when cheating was a threat. Nodoka, who got 302 votes in an otherwise quiet day in the first round, beat Misaka Mikoto 398-345, which means the cheaters need to push Nodoka to victory if they want to resurrect Mikoto in repechage. Here's the results, with fakes and final count:

The combination of suspicious vote removal and an even harsher code generator popped Nodoka's balloons and gave her a reduction all the way down to size 196, an uncharacteristic total for her and 133 votes below her fakes-included count of 329. There's reports of valid votes being removed, and rumors of Saki fans boycotting the tournament in response. It's safe to assume that any vote suspected of being from a non-Japanese poster got thrown out, but nobody knows what else is getting votes axed. There were no suspicious votes removed in the following day's match. This leaves us with a problem: On one hand, known cheaters were doing their best to interfere with the match, but on the other hand, the admins are subjectively swinging matches in a totally non-transparent way, creating the possibility for outright rigging.

The bottom line is nobody knows what's going on, and the tournament's validity is in question. Low vote totals make it all too easy to swing matches with a little bit of fudging, and the barriers against foreigners aren't going to loosen.

Is It Ruined For Marriage?

Perhaps the real underlying issue is that Saimoe's model of internet polling, based on using IP addresses as ID, is fundamentally insufficient. Unfortunately, alternatives are in short supply. The most interesting idea so far, using captcha-style human labor and very brief voting windows scattered throughout the day to make automated voting and spamming impractical, has the critical disadvantage of making voting hard work and driving away participants.

It's not clear what Saimoe's future will look like, but we can declare this era to be the twilight of old-fashioned internet polling. If someone invents a better mousetrap, make sure you use its power for what really matters: Proving to fags that your moe girl is better than their moe girl.

As for who's going to win Saimoe 2013? Saki is in the hospital with Toki. Supporters are disappointed by the clusterfuck and last year's miracle rush is causing both fan exhaustion and anti-voting. Madoka's broad fanbase makes it easier for them to recruit new, casual voters who haven't been banned yet. The real test will come when Madoka characters face the strongest of the new contestants under the "we'll ban suspicious votes if we feel like it" system. That'll be 10/14 when Kyoko faces Azuki Azusa. Prepare your lolis.