On unjustified tourbans, unprofessionalism from TDs, and revisiting the tourban appeal process

[Adaam]

I want to preface this by saying I am neutral in the recent ban waves and am not advocating to overturn any bans. I have not seen any of the alleged logs (besides the rather unconvincing and now deleted ones posted earlier), so it's not my place or anyone else's to make a judgment without seeing them.

I am skeptical of any investigation being called thorough and indisputable when the accused are never even contacted until the bans are given. I am heavily against the idea of "TDs only ban guilty people" being thrown around. Blind trust in authority, especially on a Pokemon forum of all things, is silly. We saw this in SPL when Callous was erroneously denied a team, and only after the specific charges were brought up was he able to clear his name. Baddummy posted another example (albeit a 5 years old one) of a decision overturned once evidence came out. I am aware that was mainly an SS decision, but the fact remains that a poor decision was made due to the accused being unable to contextualize the evidence against him. Is this case the same? Who knows. But banning users and then giving logs after appealing seems backwards. I don't think a ban should be levied until the TDs are able to fully respond to an appeal.

Also, "expediting" a decision because a user is in a tournament is also concerning. This makes me question the neutrality of the decision if the assumption is "ban now, ask questions later." Admittedly, there is no clean way to handle a case like this, as the alternative would be to pause the tournament.

 

[teal6]

(I have largely summarized this following post in Smogtours discord, so if you have read that, there's not a ton of reason to read this. Also, the writing is a bit poor, because I intended to end the post a few times and ended up writing a bit more. Apologies in that respect:

Edit: I also must recognize that there was another example in this thread brought up where public evidence was helpful. I don't recall the incident but it's disingenuous to pretend that it didn't happen, though admittedly, it's not enough to change my opinion.)

Congratulations everyone, the following is a rare completely sincere teal6 post, the likes of which I had to beg a few friends to be allowed to post (banned due to being a problem child).

The allegation underlying the creation of this thread is one that has been leveled, from what I can tell, since Tournament Direction became a function of some of the site staff. The idea that the tournament directors either purposefully or unintentionally do not perform an adequate level of due diligence prior to announcing a tournament ban is frankly absurd, and in this case, I can, and would like to, speak directly from experience.

During my tenure on the site (2015 onwards, mostly) there has been one single tournament ban that comes to mind that was 'unjustified' and it was one that I handed out myself, banning Lavos during the year that much of US West received tournament bans. Why was that one unjustified? I had consistently misread the information given to me, attributing a line to Lavos that wasn't actually his. However, Lavos did not even appeal this! The TD team (really, it was mostly just me and Isa working on this) noticed our mistake and rescinded the ban. The context here is vital - there was blatant, general chat ghosting occurring and Lavos had a line in the midst of conversation. To suggest in any real sense that he was unaware of this going on is brutally absurd, farcical from top to bottom, but Isa and I recognized our mistake and concluded he had not actually said a ghosting line at any time, thus the ban was rescinded. The point I'd like to make here is hopefully clear: there is **a lot of leniency** assumed whenever the TD team is presented with evidence of cheating in any way. At almost every turn, from my experience, the assumption is in favor of the player in question rather than against them.

I cannot say for certain that my next few statements apply to this thread, I've largely segregated myself from the general tournament community barring the handful of people that I talk to commonly. I do not know a single player that was recently tourbanned, nor do I know the individual that posted this thread using these bans as an inciting incident. However, that aside, I can say with complete sincerity this: the vast majority of the time one is looking to appeal a tournament ban it is done in entirely bad faith. By and large the evidence against such a player is usually so overwhelming and indisputable (logs, screenshots, shared screens, accidental admissions, etc.) that an appeal is usually baseless sans those that argue the length of the ban. It is the practice of most individuals that appeal, again from my experience, to solely obfuscate the core issue in order to find some sort of semantical trick that will absolve them entirely. It's frankly insulting to some extent, the TDs are not idiots, they know what the attempt is.

I say the above with no real moral judgment, either, but rather as what I consider fact. Allow me to provide an example: there was another tournament player whos ban I presided over prior to the strictness with showing evidence was truly in place. This individual had the evidence we had, and what's more, they had a ton more evidence. I spent hours upon hours responding to PMs from this individual wherein they showed me logs of ghosting that we had never seen yet, attempting to argue with me, saying things like "so is THIS ghosting then?", implying that our rules were too strict. For the record, almost all instances were indeed pretty outright ghosting (admittedly this was closer to the time where the lines were a bit more blurred between what is and isn't ghosting, old vs new Smogon, if you will).

Tournament banned users have an advantage in any of these discussions over the tournament directors. They do not have to argue or present themselves in good faith. Indeed, they have a battle of attrition to win, constantly shifting goalposts or nitpicking nonsense within the evidence solely to shift the grounds of the discussion and try to find some light at the end of the tunnel. Were this a court of law, I'd have no issue with that. However, it isn't, and having a pretty good idea of the pre-ban investigative process that goes into each of these tournament bans, I can say pretty comfortably that I genuinely don't feel there needs to be a 'user vs TD' trial the vast majority of the time either. If you, as a user, feel susceptible to forged logs or something of the sort and a TD refuses to hear you out, that is time to talk to SS, which is the correct route of escalating a complaint. However, this seems to be rarely done, and I'll remind everyone that the TD team (usually) shares or makes available all information relating to a ban to SS - they DEFINITELY do in the case that a user appeals directly to SS, of course.

I suppose I'll sum it up by putting it this way - from my personal experience the lengths the TD team go through in order to verify a claim of cheating is sufficient to warrant a lack of distribution policy with respect to the evidence. The potential downsides both for the user that supplied the evidence as well as the can of worms this opens in terms of brutally bad faith arguing against the TDs themselves outweigh any potential benefit I can see by changing the policy. I do not believe in any real sense that there is a risk of massive forgery to ban an otherwise clean user - you'd have to reckon someone would have doctored up some logs against ABR by now if this were a real problem. And indeed it's this bad faith disposition that I despise the most, and on Smogon, there is no environment within which you face it more than when you are a TD. People lie blatantly and consistently to you that they are innocent, even when it is incredibly clear otherwise.

I'll end this post with an anecdote about another notable investigation that I took part in to show the lengths the TD team goes to give the user the benefit of the doubt. A number of years ago Ciele and I (as well as the other TDs at the time, but he and I were the most active IIRC on this case) were investigating a World Cup team and the cheating allegations toward them. Our evidence included WhatsApp logs where the timestamp happened slightly before the match, with one of the users involved saying something to the effect of 'get in call' (no, not Mazar). Similarly, the otherwise active team chat had a ton of 'missing' lines during the course of the match, with it being particularly active before and afterwards. There was a massive amount of smoke, but we never could find the fire - we could not find a call starting at that time, and the evidence in our hands was decided to be not enough to institute a tournament ban. Did the individuals in question cheat? Well, I'm not a TD so I can say, come the fuck on, obviously they did. However, did they ever admit to us even once that they played a match in call, even after hours of conversation? Again, very obviously, they did and would not. In these conversations the deck is actually stacked against the TD team who are pretty consistent targets of mockery, harassment and from time to time, hatred. It is that last line that caused me to step down twice - I was being treated absurdly poorly from a user that was tournament banned and finally I decided it wasn't worth it to be in that position, even if I could do some good otherwise. While a review of the appeal policy is, in and of itself, completely fine, the undercurrent of this thread and the implication of it's creation is absurd to me from every single angle.

The biggest problem the TD team has right now isn't unjust bannings, or laziness, or lack of responsiveness, or out of touched-ness(??) like it may have been in certain years in the past. Hell, they've done a great job with SCL, and I'm really looking forward to that. The only thing I see here that they need to look within about is the seemingly insane decision to allow Perry to be the spokesperson at a point here, an individual who seemingly does not have a single PR bone in his body. While I don't fault their actions in an administrative sense, being a TD carries a degree of weight with it, and the continued lapse of judgment shown, particularly with....inciting? the users in this thread is baffling to me and worthy of reconsideration.

Thanks and peace

 

[Isa]

adding some more ex-td stuff:

what teal describes is entirely accurate. there have been cases where we in the td team made initially improper judgements, and we immediately rectified those when made aware of the errors we had committed. most of the time though, those that have been targetted by the td hammer have been guilty and known it. some handle it with grace. others handle it by questioning, or attacking, the tds behind the decision. others yet attempt to forge evidence to prove their supposed innocence (don't do this). others YET attempt to forge evidence that attempts to ban another user for crimes not committed. during OST XII R3, i was contacted over skype by an anonymous user, submitting screenshots that portrayed ghosting happening between a player and some friends in a PS room of some kind. the logs, taken at face value, would indeed be grounds for a tournament ban due to ghosting. however, upon investigation, we discovered a separate PS server where the logs were made. these fabricated discussions were held under gibberish names and then edited in photoshop to look like they were genuine. if the td team was genuinely trigger happy, we would have banned at sight.

it is my hope and belief that the td team of today acts no less carefully around evidence as the td teams of yesteryear. one could criticize the speed of certain actions, be the speed too fast or too slow, but when the td team actually decides to act upon something, it is well researched and justified. indeed, like teal alluded to in his excellent post, one of the biggest issues regarding the td work is instead the amount of abuse you take from users that only wish to spite you. td burnout is a real thing and it is how you lose great contributors.

tl;dr -
thanks tournament directors with no monetary gain on the line

 

[Oglemi]

Hard to follow teal's post but to address to Niko's post take it from an old fart ex-TD from the IRC era that forging evidence against users is always in the back of the minds of the TD team; doing so on IRC was incredibly easy since it was all just text, so every bit of "evidence" that came our way had to be heavily scrutinized, and by this I mean from the source, to the accused, to did the timestamps make sense, to does the log actually sound like something the user in question would say, etc. A TD falling for forged evidence, let alone the team, is highly unlikely. Faked logs nowadays are probably incredibly hard to make convincing; it's not just about "i'm going to log in as two/three/four accounts and just talk to myself or a small group of friends to implicate this person;" there is a LOT you would have to get right to fool the TD team. What's more, even if the TD was convinced by a forgery, you have to remember they always have the option of following up with a live request; as in "that log implicates this person, do you have another one you can provide right now to prove it's genuine." Hard to make a convincing forgery on the fly

What's more, everything that comes across the TD's path is seen by more than one TD; no TD wants to make a decision by themselves for fear of making the wrong call. Everything is seen by more than one person, and usually everything is ok'd by the staff as a whole. It's pretty hard to levy that a team of people is mishandling cases so poorly so as to warrant a thread like this.

Take it from the person that made one of the worst snap decisions on this site as a TD; it's incredibly unlikely that a TD or the TD team would make a rash decision and allow for blowback to happen. I can't speak to how "expedited" this decision really was (eg. from evidence being submitted to bans being enacted), but the evidence would have to be pretty convincing to justify pulling the trigger "expeditiously."

Will also agree with the sentiment that the types of people that get banned are also the types of people that will do anything and everything they can to continually harass and bargain for any type of lesser sentence or complete acquittal, because in their eyes they have nothing to lose. I can only think of one user that actually took their ban with stride while I was a TD; literally every other user just immediately made an alt or took the harassment route (or made a public appeal, like this thread). Doing the TD job is incredibly taxing, especially for users that are not as argumentative as I was. I have faith that the TD team would not ban a user in the finals of tournament without some strong evidence to justify doing so, and I hope the last three character witness posts are enough to convince people of this.

 

[Shurtugal]

I think the issue with the appeal system is how easily it can be abused by the people who are cheating (i.e. they have nothing to lose by appealing). Wasting time or fabricating evidence to try to get out of trouble, we've pretty much seen it all. I think appealing is healthy when discussing the ban in question, but with how accurate TDs have been at identifying guilty parties, I think its safe to say that appealing to be totally off the hook is likely a waste of time.

What I think can be done is this: introduce a penalty to players who are proven to be abusing the system. If you're guilty but appealing that you're innocent, that is blatant abuse of the appeal system, and I think it should be punished. An extended tournament ban or even a forum ban, I think these are all good options.

The reason this is so important, is because if we can penalize people for abusing the system, perhaps they will be less likely to waste time by using it, and their appeal might carry more weight if that makes sense? If they're willing to risk an extended ban, why do that unless they're innocent? I think if we adjust the appeal system to be more abusable without introducing a penalty system like this, it would be a disaster later on.

Edit for Katy : I think TD can go case by case when applying a penalty, I really think it should only be in place for blatant and obvious abuse of the system. If there is an innocent case, it is likely any evidence against them isn't going to be abundant or obvious, and I would trust the TDs to know when to apply a penalty personally.

 

[Katy]

What I think can be done is this: introduce a penalty to players who are proven to be abusing the system. If you're guilty but appealing that you're innocent, that is blatant abuse of the appeal system, and I think it should be punished. An extended tournament ban or even a forum ban, I think these are all good options.

I dont think that is a great solution on the table. Sure there are more often than not cases, where one party or even multiple parties cheated, be it via ghosting, boosting, or any other cheating, which is technically possible to get the butt up in tournament plays. But WHAT if there is that one single case, which is proven unguilty, the case which didnt do anything wrong first place? I dont think that this system is great to begin with, as it can lead to that one single case, which receives a further punishments on their way to gather evidences together of the intention to be proven not guilty. Sure this can be used against users, which may appeal even tho they are proven guilty with one or multiple evidence(s), but when you take that away from the very admittingly - rare - cases to give them a chance to prove they're not guilty, that can lead to being anxious on going that way.

But in cases, in which the evidences are very strong, overwhelming, with a great amount shown to the table, I think this can be viewed as abusing the system. However, I feel everyone deserves a chance, at elast in my book that is, to argue and discuss in a civil way about their appeal. It also gives the appealer a chance to get a stronger view on what they have done and perhaps this will give them the chance to change themselves, their attitude, their behaviour for future references.

What I strongly believe is, that - as ABR said above, very simple, short, and perfectly, If you behave and act well and don't cheat, then there is nothing a user has to appeal.

 

[Hogg]

Have a lot to say on this topic as former TD but on mobile and limited connection ATM, so I'll keep it brief:

• 90% of tourban appeals are from people who absolutely know what they did and are either fishing to find out how much we actually know or hoping to figure out who leaked;
• It's not just protecting the source, it's also about preserving methods of investigation (knowing how we identify faked logs or investigate alts makes it easier to get past us the next time) and our own sanity (the back and forth is absolutely exhausting and one of the main reasons I was happy to retire from TD);
• A not insignificant percentage of the time we have an active mole you haven't found yet or way more logs than you thought we did and we can literally see you discussing how you're going to get one over on us but we can't reveal it;
• Stripping full logs of identifying information is incredibly tedious and time consuming (at a bare minimum it means removing time stamps from every line, and we've got some Smogon Detectives who love doing things like counting pixels to figure out who or what was redacted from screenshots);
• All that being said, I DO think that it doesn't hurt to release at least portions of logs in a decent number of cases;
• When you appeal, TDs provide input and evidence to an admin to review and make sure they weren't acting capriciously (we don't generally relitigate a TD's case but we do review evidence to make sure TDs didn't act without reason);
• Making appealing punishable is a terrible idea;
• Actively impeding an investigation by lying to a TD should be considered unsportsmanlike conduct and infracted in serious cases (I'm talking intentionally misleading to try and help someone get away with cheating, not just refusing to provide info or whatever); and
• TDs (and staff in general) do need to consider the PR side of things more when announcing and responding to bans and requests for info - I know that what makes a good TD and what makes a good ombudsman aren't necessarily skills that overlap, but it is a very public position and most of these decisions are things people REALLY care about a lot.

Damn that was longer than I meant it to be, phone on 8%. Tl;Dr: shit is complex, there are a lot of people acting in bad faith, but also there are places where staff can do better.

 

[hs]

please @ mods @ tds @ ss and related, do not delete this post as it is more pertinent to the subject and this thread than most comments i've seen being posted, this has been dragged down for longer than it should've been and i figured i'd have to make this post to clarify the situation from my perspective and share what did happen in fact.

for those like leo who love to talk their asses off without properly informing themselves, it may be shocking: logs do exist, and it's disgusting to know how far people can go to cheat in a tournament like uu ladder tournament where people consistently play hundreds, thousands of games fairly to get a shot in poffs, but they so often happen to lose their spot to someone who thinks this is a survival game and playing 1v5 is totally fine, like cmon man, at least have some decency to admit you're a fucking loser lmao:

and no niko, they were not forged because i can not only prove it via screens of the users in question admitting to it but also logs from when the server was still up, so refrain from posting in the near future for your own good buddy.

maybe don't ghost in the fucking general next time, just a tip: using the hidden channel would've been very useful, as although i do have perms to see that there is a channel i don't have access to, i can't check what's inside because this is basic coding, and not hacking.

at least to me, being more worried about ''who leaked'' instead of ''what was leaked'' shows that there was something being hidden you're worried about becoming public and you're perfectly aware of your guilt. i seriously don't know what some of you (specifically basaninho) had in mind when raiding the uu discord, as if that was going to make you look more innocent or undo all the shit you've done, especially when you guys were being deceitful about it:

now, i am seriously asking you, does this not constitute ghosting or is actively talking to someone who's playing a circuit tour game and suggesting plays when they're clearly in the chat (let me reiterate, this happened in the general chat lol) just being naive and unknowing of the rules? please do not pretend any of you don't know that, it is literally common sense.

this only leaves user amukamara, whose case is honestly the only one that's worthy the time of appealing, and i won't be talking much about it in here because it's not the focus + tds should be taking care of it, but it is a weird situation to me as someone who knows the user they were supposedly encouraging to alt, and that same user has an alt from 2019 (and he even joined ost this year https://www.smogon.com/forums/threa...top-prize-of-400.3675677/page-42#post-8710164), much before the server was created. and that's why wasting td's time making appeals when you know you're guilty is so fucking lame, as this case could've been looked at much before.

this is all i wanted to say. much love and peace

 

[Quite Quiet]

I had hopes this thread could be salvaged into something remotely productive but that is not going to happen now.

If someone wants to open up a new thread unrelated to any particular cheating instance to discuss the process in itself then feel free to do so, but this isn't that thread anymore. That is a productive discussion we can have, but not whatever this is.