I was trying to say (and did a horrible job at it
) that these polls are not the ONLY way Sideshow gauges public interest. We do hope everyone realizes that internet polling is NOT the most ideal way to gain fan incite. The fact is, people campaign for "their" character, and just like in real politics, some people are simply much better at campaigning (or have a lot of time on their hands to create false accounts...or clear their cookes...and keep voting for the same one over and over). This then skews the results. (we limit by IP address, but this is not fool-proof, by a long shot... what with rotating IPs and clearing cookies.)
It's happened many times (like in the Star Wars E.U. poll we ran a while back... when Padme won, to our great surprise, but we had promised to make whoever won, so we did... but we release Asajj first
) And with Marvel and other licenses as well. The only difference is, now we don't PROMISE to make the winner
(BECAUSE we know it can be skewed... so we take other things into account, not just "who won?")
Most of the incite actually comes from forums and comments... and then they have to weigh in licensor requests/desires, the artists' own personal renderings, production realities, etc etc. Sometimes things that we know are MOST wanted are a longer time in coming than we would like due to all of the above
That being said, the polls ARE fun and sometimes there are exciting and unexpected results...whether they are skewed or not, well, most of the artists are also fans, so usually they can tell when some heavy 'campaigning' has been going on