Since it started it seemed like every other online contest. A popularity contest boiling down to:

* Who knows the most people and can elicit the most shares
* Who has the most people willing to vote tens to hundreds of times each and
* Who does the most efficient begging

It sounds kind of negative, but that's what it is. Even with threads on pinside asking for votes, and people saying the voted dozens of times.

Any contest like this needs a judging panel from the company to be done properly. But that takes company time and money so I understand why companies do it the way they do.

It truly isn't an ultimate fan contest at all. If that was the case, it would be judged by some sort of panel, not become a popularity contest. Stern's ultimate fan could be a total non social person who just bleeds Stern pinball. The whole who gets the most votes wins has nothing to do with being an ultimate fan.

I liked the idea when I first read about it. Now that I see "please vote for me" threads and similar posts on my local pinball group, I'm less interested. If the same group that deletes negative comments from Facebook is going to judge this, it's just an ass kissing contest. I do hope someone who truly is a fan wins this and enjoys the game.

Why are you bent over? Oh, I forgot it is Stern.

Completely agree with you. I am in the contest as well and have also stopped trying to get votes.

The Ultimate Stern Fan should have purchased either a Wheel of Fortune, WWF, KISS, or received a Ghostbusters with verified ghosting and chipping issues and still have the machine(s). That means they have been PATIENTLY awaiting code and/or like the games enough despite issues.

To me that kind of loyalty shows ultimate fandom and deserves a free Pro, not just because you bought several LE's and made a clever picture...

I think this one will be the winner.

1f5jw9 (resized).jpg

Heres a tip: want me to vote for for you to win a new, free pinball machine? Take a pic that doesn't show that you already own a bunch.

Great tip.

The leading vote getters all feature their huge pinball collections.

There's no logic to this thing, just annoying spam. I have actually been friended on FB by pinball people for sole purpose of procuring votes.

You know what, this is something I hadn't even thought of yet. The "Ultimate Stern Fan" is likely to own a bunch of machines already. By nature of being a superfan the odds are just higher that you'll own a lot of the related stuff. Whether it's band T-Shirts and albums, or in this case games.

So the logical conclusion to this contest is also one where the "rich get richer" so to speak.

How'd you get past my Canadian filter?!

I would have liked to enter but then I realized you have to already own like 5 to show off to even have a chance. Quite the contest they have going on there. It's the "who gave us the most money" contest.

I finally started watching this tonight, the voting counts seem....unnatural. Over 400 votes in 4 hours for one person, more than the other 19 people combined?

Reminds me of this contest one time where the voting was setup by IP address. So one of my friends just setup a pc that would log onto one of those ip redirect websites, go to the site, and vote again and again, every 5 minutes. It worked pretty well until one of the other contestants did the same thing, and they evidently had an even better process because they were able to add hundreds of votes per second whenever they wanted, lol. So like the top two people had over 10,000 votes and then everyone else had 1000 or less.

Not saying that's going on here, but it kind of looks like there may be voting abnormalities. Like that March madness voting thing that used to happen, where at the last second any Bally Williams machine that was losing to a Stern would magically get the 30 votes it needed to win in the last hour, lol.

They should have drawn from a hat or something, at least it would have been fair.

I'm in this. Hell I got my tattoo without knowing there was a contest.

I literally haven't checked where I am in the standings a single time since day one when I found out it was a popularity contest. I thought I had a real shot too since I have a pinball machine on my arm and some very very nice games but not dozens. I won't even keep the game if I win, I was going to sell it for a reasonable discount, donate half proceeds to pin charities and then keep half (which would inevitably be put back into the hobby)

Jared told me he would try to combat fraud. Let's see if that happens. They really should just get Gary, Gomez, Borg, Ritchie, Lyman, Dwight, etc in a room one day and take the 5-10 mins to figure it out as a panel.

Me:
https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/my-metallica-pinball-machine-tattoo

This doesn't seem to be a "fair" contest where people are voting for their favorite photos.

With so much money on the line, I'm not surprised to see some of the rigging, but at the same time this should have been expected and better planned for. It could have been simply to keep the vote counts hidden, and in the end the voting is only a "guideline" and final winner would be selected internally at Stern.

This^

who won?

I agree completely, if you don't have a huge game room full of Stern pinball machines then you haven't given them enough money to qualify for a free one. Total BS!!!

To be fair the contest was ultimate Stern fan