I will try to calmly and peacefully advocate for a full refund for both the Tyrants and the Cryonicles. I do apologize if things got heated or if personal insults were thrown at hosts. At the end of the day you want to do your best job hosting and we want to do what's best for our teams. People (myself included) get very invested and can let emotions take hold when things don't go as planned or when people disagree with us. Anyway, onto policy.
To start, I'd like to start by talking about why we, the Tyrants and Cryonicles, reasonably deserve the full money amount of our lost players. The first part that I hope no one genuinely disputes is that we are not at fault or responsible for our players leaving or getting banned. We made retains and purchases with the assumption that they'd actually "go into effect" and we didn't get a single thing out of our players. They didn't play a game and week 1 didn't even start. We paid 16k (cryos 14.5k) for 0k value. We request full value back because it is the closest we can get to our initial value. It isn't close btw. A bunch of 3ks, while useful, were not even picked up in the initial auction so it definitely wouldn't be an outright buff. Do we want them? Hell yea. Do we think we're better off with them compared to right after draft? No, but we're trying to make the best of some shit situations. I get why other teams would want us weaker but I do genuinely believe it's in the best interest of SPL to make the tournament as competitive as possible, by offsetting the unfortunate circumstances to the best of our ability.
The thing is, most people seem to agree with the above. Like I don't think many people have been saying we don't "deserve" a full refund it usually just boils down to finer nuances of the rules. Regarding precedent and semantics, it is truly not that hard to justify or implement a full refund. For starters, precedent usually serves two main functions. The first function is to provide a guideline of expectation for how the rules work. The second function is to guarantee fair and equal treatment to those engaging in the same actions. Regarding the first point, neither John W nor Spies, for different reasons obviously, did not get banned or quit because of what they expected their teams to get after. If anything, if precedent pointed to less than a full refund, this would never be used as motivation for a player quitting. Precedent is irrelevant in this aspect. Regarding fair treatment, we all thankfully agree the Tyrants and Cryonicles should be treated equally here. Precedent would be unfairly broken if we got LESS than what people before us got, because then our expectations were unmatched in the negative direction. You can make things better than people expect, just not worse.
Side example: Say someone normally gets a 2 year ban for ghosting in SPL. If bea ghosted this SPL, it would be very hard to justify giving him MORE than 2 years. The usual punishment is 2 years so going worse than that is an unfair handling of an expectation and an unfair application of the rules. However, if current rules / policymakers agreed that 2 years was excessive and in fact 1 year was better, we could still give 1 year to bea. We can break expectations or precedent in the positive direction. We can be more generous than you promised, just not less. In this case, we can be more generous than precedent indicates if the precedent is too harsh / unfair in terms of SPL bans or cancers.
Furthermore, you still can link this to the Ojama SPL 11 situation if you really wanted. Like yes there was a trade but there was still a full refund. It was technically possible to either negate the trade and give Bigs a non-full refund, or to go through with the trade and give the Tyrants a non-full refund. It was specifically avoided because neither the Bigs nor the Tyrants were at fault then. This is very easily applicable to SPL 13's Tyrants and Cryonicles.
I believe that, according to the above arguments, as well as support from even parties that should be biased against us (such as CALLOUS), the Tyrants and Cryonicles deserve a full refund for their lost players. Thank you for your time and consideration.
Much Love,
The Dove