RE: Ewin and John W, v.2
We want to expand on the administrative decision above: the TD team was approached by numerous players in the aftermath of the game between John W and Ewin with accusations that John W's team had been leaked to Ewin prior to the game. That is a serious accusation and we started the investigation moments after the first report, trying to get access to screenshots, logs and private games between Ewin and numerous other users.
Ewin rejected TD access to that groupchat they had been using to prep due to "pernsonal info being available" for us to read, and provided lone screenshots to prove their point. They were cropped to only show disjointed bits and pieces of conversations and of course that is not a very reliable defensive proof to us considering the fact messages could have also been deleted throughout our investigation. During the conversation with Ewin, multiple times details would change, making his story less believable the more we asked them. Due to the nuances of the situation we will be doing something we usually don’t do (for a number of reasons) and share details of the investigation.
From what we gathered Friday through our sources, Ewin dropped two teams in their teamchat Thursday (shortly afterwards, and in the same day John W said he’d be using sun) - one a sketch version of the team Ewin would eventually use in their match versus John W in the following day but with different sets. The other was also a sketch version, albeit with only one Pokémon missing EVs. Ewin confirmed he'd use the team with the best sun matchup the day thereafter - Ewin reposted the Centiskorch team, but now complete with different sets for almost all Pokémon after reportedly testing with someone else. It's important to note again that Ewin did not prep with the Lindworms, but in a different groupchat with different users. In this groupchat there was a user that was previously helping John W's team, was in the Leviathans chat and had knowledge of John W's team for the week. Furthermore, we have received information that Ewin asked Lindworms if that same user could be added to their chat as well the week prior, despite that user was already in the Levanthians discord, albeit inactive. Following all of this, we had 2 potential users to talk to: Ewin and the tester that played using a Sun game versus Ewin. The tester promptly gave the TD team the teams they had tested with, with indeed one of them being an almost exact replica of John W's team. Considering we have a screenshot of Ewin admitting that he knew John W would use a sun team, this made us even more suspicious.
Following all of this, the TD team involved in the decision was sure that some sort of collusion had been done by Ewin, with indirect or direct help by that user. As we had not been given entrance to the groupchat where the team was certainly built, the TD team decided we could not outright tourban Ewin without further proof, and that led us to the original decision, as a sort of middle-ground. We have, however, heard the arguments presented against it and, following precedent from a similar case in
Slam VII, and decided to alter it.
Result: Ewin will be Tournament banned for one year, disqualified from this edition of Snake Draft, and we are nulling the result of the match between Ewin and John W that happened last Friday. We will continue investigating this issue in the coming weeks.