Hey @KingBiBiK and other fellow Daoists, it seems like the conspiracy theory is quite popular in the community. Frankly, I totally understood your guys’ concerns and distrust. I will be the one of you if there would be such a dumb situation happened to me or my close friends. However, the whole story is quite simple, there is none of scams at all. Let me clarified the facts and hope it will help KingBiBiK feel better.
Back to the time when we decide to arrange an event, we only have a very simple goal that is inviting one of our readers to attend 2018 China Original Culture Billboard Awards Ceremony on 19 Jan 2018. I must say this, there are tons of way to find out the candidate, the easiest way will be requiring readers to repost the event post with a hash tag in social network, then we randomly pick one of them will be good enough. It is not only the easiest method, but also the best strategy to promote our site and brand since the participation barrier would be quite low. Who would refuse this great opportunity to earn a free 5D4N China tour, with just a simple repost? I can promise your guys that the impressions and traffics will be much greater than what we did currently.Â
Why we didn’t go that way? First, the reward is quite decent and the opportunity is super rare, we strongly hope the most motivated reader can win the game rather than a random lucky guy. Other hand, if we just go the simplest way, we might not able to ensure that the winner could arrange his/her schedule on time, especially in holiday season. Therefore, we decided to increase the entry barrier of the event and make it being complicated. That’s why you guys need to share the event on social network, then take a screenshot, upload into a online album, then build a post in the forum and then required to collect likes as much as you could. I have to say the participation path was way toooooooooo long. I don’t even recognize it would be an accepted event design.Â
Why I say this useless details? I just want to you guys know there was no scams at all. We just want to invite the right person to attend this event and we could meet with him face to face, that’s all. If we plan to promote ourselves, we have far more better methods to get larger traffic.
Let’s now back to the result. As you guys could see, Meh, one of our translators of RTW won the competition. It is really odd but when you back to review the rules, he did not violate any rules. To be honesty, we had a debate internally when we found a translator attended this competition. Most of our team members were planning to prohibit Meh’s qualification in the very beginning, however, it will lead to another kind of unfair treatment. For each translator and editor, they were readers initially, they will be creator then. In this case, how could we prevent our translators or editors to join the competition? Furthermore, even we could prevent translators and editors to compete with our readers directly, they could still easily get another account to participate. Therefore, we didn’t cancel his qualification. In addition, I guess many of you didn’t noticed that the official Webnovel account liked many other posts except Meh’s.Â
Back to the original intention of the event, we want the most motivated people to win. That’s why our rule is quite open. Readers are allowed to invite his family or friends to vote for him, even allowed (but not encouraged) to create many accounts to like himself/herself. We believe those actions are quite time consuming, if some one plans to do such things to get more votes, then go ahead and the time spent we believe it equals to efforts, also equals to motivation.Â
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One other suspicion was that QI might prefer to invite a translator rather than a regular reader. I would say… my dear friend…  Let’s calculate the cost of both way… Firstly, the financial cost of either translator or regular reader being invited would be almost the same. We have to pay the entire ticket and hotel cost. I guess it will be close to 5K USD at least. There is nothing different regarding of whom we invited. Secondly, I have to say most of our team could speak in English, might be not that good… but the communication will be at least okay…. Ultimately, CK and Starve will be invited as well… Even in the worst situation, they could be interpreters…
Lastly, I suppose the reason why you guys are unsatisfied is also because of the result auditing. I saw Alew complains about the time issues. Let me give you guys more details about how we calculate the final result. Firstly, as the announcement we have mentioned, the length of the competition will start from 20 Dec 2017 - 27 Dec 2017(GMT+8). It means we will calculate the result in Dec 27, 24:00 GMT+8. That's also why we would release the final result in dec 29th. Secondly, we didn’t count it by eyes, actually we query the database by using SQL. I will stick a screenshot of the queried final data here:Â
As you could easily see, the winner is the the 113rd post. That’s Meh’s, and he totally got 80 likes. The same time, Alew got 2 posts, 2nd and 31st, one being liked 78 times (with no imgs uploaded) and one another got 71 likes. KingBiBiK got 64 likes on that time in 19th post. Basically, that’s how we count the final result. I hope my explanation and the data will give you guys more clues of the story.
I understood the result would be not prefect. It is very hard to make everyone happy in the game. We just hope you guys could get enjoyments from the event and novels, instead of regrets or anger. Really wish all of you would have a great new year. We will always try our best to provide more and more immersive stories to you guys. Best wish to all of you. Happy new year.