Nerd essay because I feel weird about this ban length >:-(
Mostly because I feel like if I were antlers, I would literally just quit after this lol. Never interacted with him before but I really don't want an amateur caster to quit or not be able to play with his friends :-(
setsulYou do realise that everyone's been complaining about RGL always bending the rules, and now you're asking them to bend the rules?
I feel like this isn't true though lol? People have definitely been asking RGL admins to use discretion in their decisions...
People just want admins to not make totally arbitrary decisions (banning safrix for rhyming with the n-word in a private server before a scrim), but still apply intelligent discretion (maybe don't ban the guy who accidentally spec'd like 10 seconds before a match ended.) These are not opposed at all imo.
(clockwork's were the first posts I could think of and people always changes their opinions after the cool invite player posts.)
clkwrkthis is fucking tf2. there are not many people who play this game and cultivating a "for the community" approach should be the number 1 priority for the league. handing out severe punishments for even the most minor of offenses will do nothing but thin the playerbase. and there's nothing in this game but pride, so if they get banned and lose out on a season of playing the game, they might just not play the next season. i've seen similar things happen many times before, with players much more well known who have a lot more to lose. pure literally quit our team in esea after they didn't let us reschedule or fix a payment issue that left us forfeiting our first match. he felt that it wasn't worth the headache to play for a league that clearly wasn't player-focused at all. and that had a significant effect on the outcome of that season. we were one of the best teams pre-season and easily would've been fighting for first place had that not happened. that's the kind of shit you risk when a league makes it too difficult to play a game you only play for fun.
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setsulThere should never be a "cast x games, allowed to cheat once" type of deal. The whole "but does he really need to record demos if he's not cheating" argument is garbage.
This is kind of a disingenuous reading of the situation... It's more like "The lowest scoring roamer in his division who no one suspects of cheating and contributes to the community by casting amateur matches in his free time in such a way that his config sometimes gets screwed up should not be banned for a whole season for a violating a rule that only exists to enforce other rules against cheating."
Antlers ~should~ record his demos, but fundamentally it doesn't really matter... Did anyone actually think that he was cheating? He got caught up in a rule that only exists to make it easier to enforce other rules. (If this rule didn't exist, real cheaters would have a much easier time saying "oopsies I don't have my demos" when directly requested. Otherwise, this rule would literally not need to exist. I highly doubt that the "random checks" are thorough...)
and that leads to my biggest gripe with this... Even IF he was cheating, had recorded the demo, and it provided evidence that he was cheating, I have a feeling that the rgl admins wouldn't really look at the demo and he would still get to play next season -_- It's not a "does he need to record demos if he's not cheating?", it's a "would he be banned right now if he had submitted a demo of him cheating?"
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IMO, the "general" solution to this:
1. If you miss three demo requests, you get banned.
2. If all of the demo requests are "random," the ban is for a week or two. (Enough to scare people into recording demos, but not enough that people will just quit and hopefully not kill teams.)
3. If any of the requests are because you are legitimately suspected of cheating, you get banned for the three months. (Enough to stop cheaters from playing)
4. If rgl admin read this, please be applied intelligently so people don't quit this dying game.