I know you have been impatient to find out what's going on about the contests. Since we have had so many problems once more with sending out the certificates, we stopped the contests for a while, to give our programmers another chance to figure out the problem.
Now after a serious amount of digging, our programmers actually believe they have discovered the source of the problem, and also why it only occurred on the English, but not on the German server.
Being no programmer I cannot give you the details so they would make sense, but basically it turned out that 2 different processes blocked each other and led to a deletion of all contest certificates that were sent out, around the time the cronscript is run every night (midnight).
Those who accepted the certificates before the cronscript was run received their prizes, all players who logged in afterwards didn't. Since I received a confirmation mail right after the contracts had been mailed out, I naturally got the result that every player received their contracts - hence the misunderstandings.
So, GoldenEye is going to set up another contest, to make sure everything works out this time, and if it really does, we can go back to having our regular contests without any further problems. And believe me, the admin and mod team will be happier about this than anybody else here!
Thanks to you all for bearing with us!
Best regards,
your Kapilands-team