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

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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.
This was very well written and I agree with a lot of the substance. Playing with the best has made competitors better since the dawn of competition. Losing these top competitors for a year will definitely negatively impact this. What I will say though is in you example for instance let's say there was a robber that made minimal contributions to the village. How woul he be punished compared to the robber who made many contributions to the village? I think they should recieve the same punishment, because I do not agree with merit-based punishment reductions. Now, I am not saying that you think all the top competitors should get a break while the less notable users have to suffer. I just noticed that your point did not mention how a punishment given to Conflict would compare to RandomUser1234 for doing the same thing (if I missed where you mentioned this I apologize). Overall, I do agree with most of your points, and I am also disappointed that the tournament quality might drop because of this.
 

Pearl

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I just noticed that your point did not mention how a punishment given to Conflict would compare to RandomUser1234 for doing the same thing (if I missed where you mentioned this I apologize)
this ain't a bad post but i can't help but mention that i fucking lost my shit after seeing someone with the name groudon518 downgrading randoms with numbers in their names
 
this ain't a bad post but i can't help but mention that i fucking lost my shit after seeing someone with the name groudon518 downgrading randoms with numbers in their names
Lol, I have numbers in my name I know that, I was just using the stigma (that you're showing right now) that ppl with numbers in their name are generally treated as more random. I have experienced this other times as well and used this in my example. I did not intend to downgrade anybody.
 
We're like two months away from 2017. Maybe it's time ghosting gets accepted as part of the (competitive) game ?_? Fighting against it is nearly as useless as doing a war against drugs or the likes, so just allow it already.

Make sure to reduce timers during tournaments to 30 seconds at most, though, or most games will be longer (in real time) than that 1200-turn battle, as all turns will take as long as possible while all of your friends run every calc imaginable.
 

Lowgock

Doyen & Éminence Grise of the German Pokémon Community
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Posting this for jira since he is not allowed to post in the tournament section:

To make things clear: I'm not contesting my punishment, I'm trying to make a general point about things that have gone terribly wrong in competitive Pokemon.

Let's not pretend we are unaware of the fact ghosting of this kind is regularly taking place in 90%+ of all World Cup (and all SPL) teams, that actually care about the outcome and aren't playing merely for fun.

The same is true for any of the "high profile" individual tournaments, where everyone knows they're technically team tournaments with half a dozen people discussing every single move.

I'd go as far as to claim, you nowadays have to ghost, since your opponents are highly likely to do the same, you cannot prove it and you are putting yourself at a severe, competitive disadvantage by refraining from it.

If you are honest, the only difference between us and the majority of other teams secretly engaging in ghosting is the fact that one of our members fell victim to an actual crime (and not merely rule-breaking in a Pokemon tournament), enabling the TDs to gain access to actual evidence they couldn't have obtained by any other (legal) means at their disposal.

These shady decisions are perfectly in line with the questionable handling of the Bloo scandal, where the TDs first failed to investigate the suspicious actions of one of their own and later overcompensated by resorting to creepy real-life-stalking tactics.

Don't get me wrong: Smogon TDs are not a law enforcement agency and therefore not bound to any regulations regarding the exclusion of evidence!

The blooper I'm criticizing right now is not the circumstances under which we were banned, but the impunity of the myriads of other ghosters and "ghostees", which is both ridiculous and unjust.

This is even true considering the different degrees of punishment within our team: One of our players has been banned for a year, even though he didn't actually give or receive any advice, but merely discussed moves after their respective turns had already taken place. I never discussed my own matches or had them discussed in the conversion, but sporadically gave some advice to others, yet I got a higher sentence than two players, who both ghosted and were being ghosted on a regular base...

Of course, the impunity of fellow offenders is irrelevant to the culprit's case, but once again: Smogon TDs do not hold court proceedings.

One thing you guys need to realize: You do not have ANY means of obtaining evidence on ghosting, unless the ghostee
a) is tremendously stupid (e.g. by pissing off his ghosters or revealing the ghosting to a hostile third party)
or
b) fell victim to a crime.

But since we all know, almost any team (or high-level individual player) is routinely engaged in ghosting - whether we want to admit it or not - all an opposing team now has to do is to hack their most stupid member and leak a few screenshots... And by such awful decision-making, the TDs are further encouraging such a behavior.

To be quite fair: There is no halfway decent decision to be made in this case, since the underlying rule (No "ghosting") itself is deeply flawed. You have the choice between either leaving us unpunished even though we evidently broke this very rule or giving your future tourney particants plenty of incentive to commit crimes over a couple of Pokemon tournaments...

There is no point in establishing a rule you cannot possibly enforce by any (lawful) means. My opinion: You should just allow ghosting for the future, but require the "ghostee" to give credit to all of his ghosters and punish the failure to do so.
 
Just because you can't keep your team in-line and your players can't handle the responsibility of taking a loss for their team through their own decisions, it doesn't mean that all others cannot Jira. What your post is attempting to do is to throw mud at everyone in order to equate all of us to your team's abjection.
 
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Posting this for jira since he is not allowed to post in the tournament section
My opinion: You should just allow ghosting for the future, but require the "ghostee" to give credit to all of his ghosters and punish the failure to do so.
..............................................................................

why does it sound like u want people to give credit to their sources like theyre writin an essay
wtf kind of awful opinion is this my lord
never post again jira. ever.
 
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Deleted User 229847

Banned deucer.
Posting this for jira since he is not allowed to post in the tournament section:

To make things clear: I'm not contesting my punishment, I'm trying to make a general point about things that have gone terribly wrong in competitive Pokemon.

Let's not pretend we are unaware of the fact ghosting of this kind is regularly taking place in 90%+ of all World Cup (and all SPL) teams, that actually care about the outcome and aren't playing merely for fun.

The same is true for any of the "high profile" individual tournaments, where everyone knows they're technically team tournaments with half a dozen people discussing every single move.

I'd go as far as to claim, you nowadays have to ghost, since your opponents are highly likely to do the same, you cannot prove it and you are putting yourself at a severe, competitive disadvantage by refraining from it.

If you are honest, the only difference between us and the majority of other teams secretly engaging in ghosting is the fact that one of our members fell victim to an actual crime (and not merely rule-breaking in a Pokemon tournament), enabling the TDs to gain access to actual evidence they couldn't have obtained by any other (legal) means at their disposal.

These shady decisions are perfectly in line with the questionable handling of the Bloo scandal, where the TDs first failed to investigate the suspicious actions of one of their own and later overcompensated by resorting to creepy real-life-stalking tactics.

Don't get me wrong: Smogon TDs are not a law enforcement agency and therefore not bound to any regulations regarding the exclusion of evidence!

The blooper I'm criticizing right now is not the circumstances under which we were banned, but the impunity of the myriads of other ghosters and "ghostees", which is both ridiculous and unjust.

This is even true considering the different degrees of punishment within our team: One of our players has been banned for a year, even though he didn't actually give or receive any advice, but merely discussed moves after their respective turns had already taken place. I never discussed my own matches or had them discussed in the conversion, but sporadically gave some advice to others, yet I got a higher sentence than two players, who both ghosted and were being ghosted on a regular base...

Of course, the impunity of fellow offenders is irrelevant to the culprit's case, but once again: Smogon TDs do not hold court proceedings.

One thing you guys need to realize: You do not have ANY means of obtaining evidence on ghosting, unless the ghostee
a) is tremendously stupid (e.g. by pissing off his ghosters or revealing the ghosting to a hostile third party)
or
b) fell victim to a crime.

But since we all know, almost any team (or high-level individual player) is routinely engaged in ghosting - whether we want to admit it or not - all an opposing team now has to do is to hack their most stupid member and leak a few screenshots... And by such awful decision-making, the TDs are further encouraging such a behavior.

To be quite fair: There is no halfway decent decision to be made in this case, since the underlying rule (No "ghosting") itself is deeply flawed. You have the choice between either leaving us unpunished even though we evidently broke this very rule or giving your future tourney particants plenty of incentive to commit crimes over a couple of Pokemon tournaments...

There is no point in establishing a rule you cannot possibly enforce by any (lawful) means. My opinion: You should just allow ghosting for the future, but require the "ghostee" to give credit to all of his ghosters and punish the failure to do so.
you are basically saying "we think everyone is cheating, so we are doing the same because screw the scientific method or even good ethics/morals, the most important thing is to win a fucking online tournament"

Accept and learn from your errors, and when you'll come back, try to follow the rules. As lame as it sounds, that's all there's to it.
 

Teclis

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Seriously why is this thread still open ? That's more or less total garbage, and that gives a poor image of the community to newcomers.
If you really want to talk about ghosting, please go into the Inside Scoop, just let TDs decide or something like that :(
 
Correct me if I'm wrong, but there is an option on Skype to remove a player prior to his (her) match, and then get him (her) back on the discussion.
If you do it, you can discuss there everything you want without any ghosting since the player is no longer inside. That removes the argument of "We want to discuss while he plays".
And I know this is possible since with friends we actually did it during Wcop. We removed Welli0u when he was playing, then put him back afterwards. It's not like it's difficult.
 

Killintime

Time not so well spent
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Posting this for jira since he is not allowed to post in the tournament section:

To make things clear: I'm not contesting my punishment, I'm trying to make a general point about things that have gone terribly wrong in competitive Pokemon.

Let's not pretend we are unaware of the fact ghosting of this kind is regularly taking place in 90%+ of all World Cup (and all SPL) teams, that actually care about the outcome and aren't playing merely for fun.

The same is true for any of the "high profile" individual tournaments, where everyone knows they're technically team tournaments with half a dozen people discussing every single move.

I'd go as far as to claim, you nowadays have to ghost, since your opponents are highly likely to do the same, you cannot prove it and you are putting yourself at a severe, competitive disadvantage by refraining from it.

If you are honest, the only difference between us and the majority of other teams secretly engaging in ghosting is the fact that one of our members fell victim to an actual crime (and not merely rule-breaking in a Pokemon tournament), enabling the TDs to gain access to actual evidence they couldn't have obtained by any other (legal) means at their disposal.

These shady decisions are perfectly in line with the questionable handling of the Bloo scandal, where the TDs first failed to investigate the suspicious actions of one of their own and later overcompensated by resorting to creepy real-life-stalking tactics.

Don't get me wrong: Smogon TDs are not a law enforcement agency and therefore not bound to any regulations regarding the exclusion of evidence!

The blooper I'm criticizing right now is not the circumstances under which we were banned, but the impunity of the myriads of other ghosters and "ghostees", which is both ridiculous and unjust.

This is even true considering the different degrees of punishment within our team: One of our players has been banned for a year, even though he didn't actually give or receive any advice, but merely discussed moves after their respective turns had already taken place. I never discussed my own matches or had them discussed in the conversion, but sporadically gave some advice to others, yet I got a higher sentence than two players, who both ghosted and were being ghosted on a regular base...

Of course, the impunity of fellow offenders is irrelevant to the culprit's case, but once again: Smogon TDs do not hold court proceedings.

One thing you guys need to realize: You do not have ANY means of obtaining evidence on ghosting, unless the ghostee
a) is tremendously stupid (e.g. by pissing off his ghosters or revealing the ghosting to a hostile third party)
or
b) fell victim to a crime.

But since we all know, almost any team (or high-level individual player) is routinely engaged in ghosting - whether we want to admit it or not - all an opposing team now has to do is to hack their most stupid member and leak a few screenshots... And by such awful decision-making, the TDs are further encouraging such a behavior.

To be quite fair: There is no halfway decent decision to be made in this case, since the underlying rule (No "ghosting") itself is deeply flawed. You have the choice between either leaving us unpunished even though we evidently broke this very rule or giving your future tourney particants plenty of incentive to commit crimes over a couple of Pokemon tournaments...

There is no point in establishing a rule you cannot possibly enforce by any (lawful) means. My opinion: You should just allow ghosting for the future, but require the "ghostee" to give credit to all of his ghosters and punish the failure to do so.
According to this logic, Killintime win post:

Thank's guys I really did my best in (insert high profile tour name here) and now to credit my ghosters because this win I would not have been able to get without!
  • hogg
  • sacri
  • pearl
  • king UU
  • omfuga
  • stallion
  • vince2612
  • teal6
  • And anyone else we had in that 12 man skype call who I just toke the advice of and took teams from!
At this point what is even the point of playing? This game is literally meant to be played 1v1 with you trying to understand the opponents mindset and play-style through the course of the game. You gain nothing from this game besides bragging rights so why ruin it in the first place by taking in ghosts? Go play some team based games with actual shit on the line instead of just ruining it for people christ. I know I have been in many situations where me and a bud are in a skype call before a big match and I literally wish him luck then kick his ass out of the call where he has to rely on his own wits and skill to outplay the opposition.
 

3d

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Posting this for jira since he is not allowed to post in the tournament section:
If you are honest, the only difference between us and the majority of other teams secretly engaging in ghosting is the fact that one of our members fell victim to an actual crime (and not merely rule-breaking in a Pokemon tournament), enabling the TDs to gain access to actual evidence they couldn't have obtained by any other (legal) means at their disposal.
The TDs could have gained access to those logs if someone leaked oo
 

destinyunknown

Banned deucer.
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.
Fact of the matter is: this is not the first time some of these German players have been caught ghosting. Bluri was disqualified 2 years ago from OST because he was getting ghosted (guess by who!), and he's not the only German player involved in the latest ghosting incidents. Hell, the majority of the support for Germany players in this thread has been Mazar, who got caught getting ghosted himself (guess by who! lol) a few months ago.

Maybe the reason they got caught is that they have been doing this quite frequently and for a long time (and therefore there were people in their circle trying to expose them), and because they are careless about internet security (I could elaborate on how Bluri got caught in that OST)
 
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Mazar

Banned deucer.
Fun Fact: The German version of SPL (currently underway) is hosted by Mazar and explicitly allows ghosting!
lol


-----

btw bluri wasnt ghosted two years ago, it just was that an austrian friend of him wrote during his battle stuff into the battle chat and they were both dumb and couldnt speak a single word english, so they got banned.
 

Texas Cloverleaf

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There's really only one way to ensure that this sticks: require any and all irc chats or skype convos to have a TD presence and permanently ban any offenders who contravene that dictate in addition to regular ghosting.

Go on all you want about the quality of the playerbase when such harsh punishments are used, but that's what it necessary if you want to maintain the integrity of 1v1 matches in a tournament setting.

And, at the end of the day, there will always be a next man up, the next tesung, the next big thing who comes up to take the place of anyone who disappears. It's the responsibility of you and your team not to ghost and suffer the associated punishment. Whether that takes out an entire WCOP team or not.
 
There's really only one way to ensure that this sticks: require any and all irc chats or skype convos to have a TD presence and permanently ban any offenders who contravene that dictate in addition to regular ghosting.

Go on all you want about the quality of the playerbase when such harsh punishments are used, but that's what it necessary if you want to maintain the integrity of 1v1 matches in a tournament setting.

And, at the end of the day, there will always be a next man up, the next tesung, the next big thing who comes up to take the place of anyone who disappears. It's the responsibility of you and your team not to ghost and suffer the associated punishment. Whether that takes out an entire WCOP team or not.
Having a TD in team channels doesn't really solve anything. I mean if people really want to ghost they can just PM each other...

Also we definitely should not just legalize ghosting. That entirely takes away from the integrity of this game. All we can really do is keep punishing those we catch, and hope this dissuades future players.
 
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Texas Cloverleaf

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Having a TD in team channels doesn't really solve anything. I mean if people really want to ghost they can just PM each other...

Also we definitely should not just legalize ghosting. That entirely takes away from the integrity of this game. All we can really do is keep punishing those we catch, and hope this dissuades future players.
Hence: if they go to private channels and it's found out they get perma banned
 
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