Finals World Cup of Pokemon XI - Finals [Won by Team USA East]

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I feel as an individual in team tours to know the proof (logs) to lead to the bans. Not to question the td's actions but as part of the community to understand to what length or how little is needed to be said to be considered ghosting.
sugarhigh

Steve for example said: "hier maggy"


thats it.
 

Eo Ut Mortus

Elodin Smells
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Honestly, TDs dropped the ball on this one; that's why I quit. It is absolutely their responsibility to prosecute someone who compromised a third-party Skype account. It's also their responsibility to speak up and act out against hacking; it literally says says "Cyber Security Squad" in the badge description. I lead by example, and to this end, I have drafted several anti-hacking guidelines to avoid these situations in the future. It's a forum-wide problem, and I expect every moderator to post some version of these in their respective subforums.

1. Don't share your account with others. If you want to ghost, use screen-share.

2. Don't use easy-to-guess passwords. This is the second time Germany has been hacked by itself. Start using French passwords; when's the last time they've invaded something German?

3. Publicize all your private details. Ever notice that the people who are hacked have something to hide? It's not a coincidence; it's incentivized behavior.

4. Don't use the same passwords for multiple accounts. That's like using the same team twice for a best-of-three, which no self-respecting tournament player would ever do.

5. Don't sign in when someone might be looking over your shoulder. If you really have to sign into an account in public, pretend you're playing Pokemon, and alt-tab every time someone walks behind you.

6. Create decoy accounts with obvious vulnerabilities. If someone is looking to compromise you, they'll start with the most obvious breaches to try and gain a foothold to your main accounts. Lead them on a false trail, to defunct emails and sites. Plus, you'll be alerted that someone's out to get you once your first account is compromised, and you'll be able to reactively tighten security on all of your accounts.

7. Don't enter your password on third-party sites. I know, really, "who is dumb enough to do this?" Well, it's 2016, and people are still getting caught for ghosting, so...

8. Use two-factor authentication when available. Like, if there's a really OP strat dominating the meta, say BW Sun, you wouldn't just hope to beat it with your Tyranitar. You'd have a back-up check, like Heatran or something. You wouldn't just try and get it banned or anything...

9. Use multi-account security. Create ten alts and spread your ghosting out across all of them. If one of them is compromised, that's 1/10 as bad. That's the difference between a 6-month ban and a 1-year one.

10. Exercise caution when signing into public computers / networks. Not just because you could be key-logged, but because if you have an anime avatar and sign into a computer in a random New York library, we'll probably mistake you for a Bloo alt and ban you.

A final note: sometimes it's hard to tell if you've been hacked. If you find yourself randomly ghosting, you may have been hacked, or maybe you have no regard for the rules. Who knows? You might not feel comfortable approaching the Smogon admins; we all know how bad they are at communicating to people, after all. If this is the case, then know that the TD team is always available to lend a sympathetic ear. Feel free to submit any and all chat logs to them. You can expect complete confidence and no (non-punitive) judgment.
 
Why is ghosting not allowed in a team tour? Tournament players clearly want to ghost/help eachother in team tours and I think that the best approach is embrace ghosting rather than trying to punish ghosting. If all teams ghost, then there's no real advantage for any particular team.
 
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watashi

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Why is ghosting not allowed in a team tour? Tournament players clearly want to ghost/help eachother in team tours and I think that the best approach is embrace ghosting rather than trying to punish ghosting. If all teams ghost, then there's no real advantage for any particular team.
but you don`t want it so that there`s no real advantage for any particular team. the better team with better players should win, but that won`t be the case if every player is playing at the same level due to their teammates holding a convention and making sure they don`t misplay. it literally turns every game into a matter of team match up and 50/50's

it would be wrong for a team of 3 bkcs and 9 papai noels to beat a team of 12 solid but not amazing players since the latter is obviously the better built team
 
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So we get higher level games. Isn't that a good thing?
Team tournaments are made of competition between every player taking part in it. When you just pick a player doing the job for his whole squad then team competition has no longer sense so what's the point in doing team tournaments if just 2/10 players are actually playing?

Let's say we would have higher level battles but then they would be rigged, misrepresented. It has absolutely no sense in playing a tournament in that way, or even just accepting it. Regardless if SPL/WCoP are actually just ghosting (and they're not), we can't just accept or "legalize" this.
 
but you don`t want it so that there`s no real advantage for any particular team. the better team with better players should win, but that won`t be the case if every player is playing at the same level due to their teammates holding a convention and making sure they don`t misplay. it literally turns every game into a matter of team match up and 50/50's

it would be wrong for a team of 3 bkcs and 9 papai noels to beat a team of 12 solid but not amazing players since the latter is obviously the better built team
quit insultin my nigga elodin
spl 6 mvp rite there
 

Mazar

Banned deucer.
Team tournaments are made of competition between every player taking part in it. When you just pick a player doing the job for his whole squad then team competition has no longer sense so what's the point in doing team tournaments if just 2/10 players are actually playing?

Let's say we would have higher level battles but then they would be rigged, misrepresented. It has absolutely no sense in playing a tournament in that way, or even just accepting it. Regardless if SPL/WCoP are actually just ghosting (and they're not), we can't just accept or "legalize" this.
discussing your moves during battle doesnt automatically mean 2/10 players actually play. outside of that I agree with you.
 
Yo this is a little retarded, every team in WCOP ghosts at least 10 games. You got proof from an illegitimate source and punish them for doing something every team blatantly does. My two cents, not that I care much for this game rn.
 
I don't really expect this view to get a lot of support, but this is how I've come to feel and I think it's justifiable.

As I mentioned lightly in my previous post, it's arguable that banning all these quality players will harm rather than help the quality of future tournaments. As a tournament player, what matters to me above all else is quality of play. That's not to say that I'd rather people ghost one another if it means everyone plays better, but, at times like these, it can be difficult to see the merit of such a harsh war against ghosting in team tournaments.

Structural elements of team tours make ghosting extremely likely; as I said on the last page,
- bad players that know they’re bad but still want to win will accept ghosting
- better players that know the bad players are bad but still want to win will ghost

This will occur as long as individuals are heavily rewarded for the success of their teammates. Furthermore, it's fairly easy to see that WCoP is easily the most ghosting-prone tournament we have, for pretty obvious reasons: you often know who your teammates are going to be far in advance, many stay constant from year to year, etc. WC teams are generally knit tighter than SPL (or whatever else) teams, and this is especially true for a team like Germany; they share a language and even their own forums/community. WC is also, needless to say, on Smogon's highest tier in terms of anticipation and glorification. Because this is the most ghosting-prone tournament, it's pretty fair (though not infallible, obviously) to assume that if you catch 10 (random number) users ghosting in WC, not all of these players engage in ghosting outside WC.

It's impossible to deny that the war on ghosting is and always will be largely futile. The only way to catch someone ghosting is if they or someone in their circle fucks up badly. Most people will never fuck up badly; for every offender you catch and ban, there are a great deal more still roaming free. This will never change. You also can't stop people from cheating by banning them, though you can stop them from playing legitimately (funny how that works...). So, in addition to the fact that you'll never catch the vast majority of cheaters, you aren't really giving them any reason to stop cheating; you're just showing them they need to be more careful about hiding it.

I'm going to go out on a limb here (not really, but let's pretend) and say that most teams are guilty of ghosting by your definition. It's pretty hard for people in a team channel during a game to refrain from blurting out what they think the best move is, and it's similarly difficult for players to refrain from looking at the channels. I can recall making a habit of closing the team channel during games because I didn't want teammates' mid-game assertions to cloud my judgment. Likewise, there are also almost always players on my teams that come to rely on the channel for guidance during games. If you actually were to catch and ban everyone who ever cheated in a team tournament, you’d not only decrease game quality by banning most of the best players in favor of worse ones, but the number of banned players and the discontent among them would be so great that they would likely just forsake your community and make their own (you'd also lose a TD or two (or more), but hey, no need to go there). The banned cheaters would also just be replaced by more cheaters, because, again, the format of team tournaments has a tendency to give rise to cheating.

The group of players you've just picked off for an entire year includes some of the best players and community members in tournaments. Conflict, for example, is one of the most influential and respected tournament players; he has a strong chat presence, is known for speaking his mind, and is (probably) the most skilled at what he plays. He’s also the biggest staple on one of the most consistently successful SPL teams. xray and cosine180 are fixtures in ST playoffs, and bluri is probably the greatest BW player of all time. It's clear to see that (taking their supposed dishonesty out of the equation for now) banning this group of users will decrease the quality of tournaments significantly.

Analogy: there are 100 robbers in a village, and you want to put an end to robbery in the village. You get your hands on concrete evidence against 5 of the robbers, so you remove them from the village. However, these robbers can still steal shit from outside the village if they feel like it, so you aren't doing much to decrease the amount of robbery that goes on. When the aforementioned 5 robbers are in the village, they make significant positive contributions to the society through their day jobs that can't be made from outside the village. Does it still make sense to remove them?

It’s also worth noting, in the context of the analogy, that if you were to establish evidence against all guilty robbers and remove them (which you can’t, but you want to), the village would likely be impaired to the point where it could no longer function (or function a lot worse than before). In such a case, the old robbers would probably just be replaced by new robbers, because certain circumstances (team tournament formats) make the village robbery-prone. These new villagers would be significantly worse at their day jobs, while all the removed villagers would probably form a new (better) village...I could go on.

Fucking flawless analogy, I know. But anyway, the conclusion I'm trying to draw from all this: there is reason to believe that banning these users will significantly decrease the quality of play and competitive discussion in the tournament community without having any significant effect on the amount of cheating that goes on. Ultimately, if you want to stop ghosting in team tours, you’ll probably have to a) stop rewarding individuals so heavily for their team’s success and either abolish or significantly alter team tours or b) just accept ghosting as an inevitable aspect of team tours (which it is, due to their format and your inability to catch and punish the vast majority of offenders) and revert back to aldaron's ghosting standards.

Either way, you should stop implementing solutions that harm the community significantly while barely contributing to the fulfillment of your goals (goals which, if actually achieved, would likely fuck over the community beyond repair).

tl;dr (though this isn't all-encompassing) banning good players for ghosting in team tours is dumb, because ghosting will happen anyway due to the nature of team tours and you're just decreasing the quality of play; additionally, if you were to somehow ban everyone that has cheated (by your definition) in a team tour, you'd end up banning so many people that the community would probably just migrate.


Oglemi I'm not sure what your counterargument here is, but I'll rephrase slightly if you insist: why you do think aldaron chose to espouse that definition of ghosting as opposed to your current one, bud? Maybe he didn't want to ban the entire team tournament community.

I've never written anything nearly as long as this on Smogon, but I do think we're moving in a pretty grave direction here.
 
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Sacri'

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Structural elements of team tours make ghosting extremely likely; as I said on the last page,
- bad players that know they’re bad but still want to win will accept ghosting
- better players that know the bad players are bad but still want to win will ghost
Another analogy to answer this: Kids at school are always taught that copying someone elses answers doesn't make any sense because this person won't be there next time, you get the reward once to fail later on simply because you never learned how to do it by yourself. The same logic applies here: people who get ghosted don't get any better at the game, they may get the reward once but at the end of the day they are just as bad at the game as before and on top of that there is a chance they get caught. On the ghosters side: if they know one player on their team isn't great at the game and they want to play they can just try to help them improving, because you know when you play pokemon you improve, it's not "i'm a bad player and I will stay bad forever and ever" that's not quite how it works here. You can get better and if you're helped by someone great at the game prior the games you'll get better. This attitude will satisfy both parts, doesnt involve any risk and contributes to the integrity of tournaments.
 
As a lot of people said, a lot of teams ghost in team tournaments (still, not all. In Spain for example we didn't ghost). I think like some more people who already posted that the sanction is a little too much. Hell, Germany didn't even win the tournament.

Also, Germany is our favourite WCOP victim :c
 
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