Board Thread:Game Discussion/@comment-29636239-20171019102935/@comment-28169398-20171020133539

Sirebel wrote: Amrosa What you are suggesting is fraud. I can't believe that EA/FM would be involved in that sort of activity. It's one thing fooling the players to get more participation, it's another rigging your player counts to make it look like you have more players.

If you look at the RR3 Wiki:Time Trial Participation page you can see they are also going through some sort of cull of old player stats. Why would they do that if they wanted to make it look like there were more players than there are?

Yes. You have a title that is nearly 5 years old, attempting to remain relevant and profitable with a great deal of new competition for players in the sim racing space. And you can say, but you can't compare mobile to console, but the one resource that is common to both is time and if players get their fix of virtual racing on a console and spend less and less time with the mobile game, then you basically have a dying brand. They are competing to get the same advertisers and sponsorship deals as all of the other design houses out there that are focused on the space.

Don't ever put it past anyone with that kind of competitive pressure on them to resort to dubious measures to try to get through. And it doesn't have to be organizational. It could be the actions of one or a few individuals whose heads are on the chopping block.

Barings Bank was a pinnacle of stability for over 200 years, until they didn't look hard enough at how Nick Leeson was being so successful. Enron was more systemic, and they used willing actors at Merrill Lynch to concoct the Nigerian Barge Deal. Merrill Lynch again got into trouble by dumping their problem child, Dan Gordon onto Allegheny Energy. Barclays rigged LIBOR. Plenty of banks during 2008-9 hid exposure. And in all of these situations, they occurred in heavily regulated industries that are under constant audit and surveillance. How many app developers and consumer product companies have bought hundreds or thousands of 5-Star reviews on App Stores or Amazon?

FM/EA would only likely get into trouble if they tried to rig user rates that they actually charged out to customers, such as manipulating the billing on In-App ad views, etc. The old disclaimer that Financial Investment firms add to all of their advertising to consumers, "Past results are no indication of future performance" will be slapped onto any marketing material to sponsors by their legal department, and when the next event only delivers a third to a half of the activity that this one suggested it would, they can easily just mark it up to a change in usage patterns and move on. Do you think that they didn't oversell their appeal as a platform to NASCAR and Formula E? And there, they didn't even need to fudge numbers, they just didn't need to do their homework on whether their core user base was interested in racing the same car with a different skin on ovals all day long or under-powered cars with a different game play dynamic on narrow ribbons of asphalt. Fraud by omission or lack of proper market research? Maybe. The French Family probably didn't care all that much as they seem to have licensed their own product in the Mobile App space now and Formula E will take any extra exposure they can get trying to become a relevant niche in motorsports.

Watching the pattern of participation, the numbers are too conveniently falling into line. And, for argument sake, let's say that they are not looking at this from the perspective that I have proposed, but are just "smoothing" out the curve of actual usage data to prevent spikes and time zone anomalies in usage and hacked laps (external to FM/EA), it still gives an impression of overall health in the game that doesn't really exist. Will some people make purchasing decisions, gold packs etc. based on their thought that the brand is healthy and will continue to be developed at past rates? Is that any better than fudging a slide in a PowerPoint presentation to prospective sponsors? Isn't that fraud as well? Likely worse, as players cannot do their own due diligence by auditing FM's data, an option that a prospective sponsor would likely have and require (if they were smart)?