It sucks to say, but the weakness of the AC team now and going forward seems like a pretty intractable problem. There just aren't anywhere near enough people who meet the standards of 1) sufficient knowledge of cheats, 2) ability to remain objective, and 3) enthusiasm for the role (given 90% of the stuff they do probably revolves around random amateur players who aren't sexy to audit).

That camp3r guy's rant may have been unprofessional, as well as very unfairly dismissive of the efforts of the organizing advanced teams (who were, in fact, being proactive and trying to find solutions, like he recommended), but there is a small kernel of truth there, in the sense that the OMG CHEATER XPOSED threads will never fully replace actual AC admins. Like, dippidy could be the absolute best judge of scout cheating, and it wouldn't matter 99% of the time, because I doubt he wants to give up his free time combing through demos of total randos with no personal stake in the outcome.

I'll admit ignorance of whether AC admins are 100% volunteer or if they actually get paid, but if they don't that may need to change in the future. I'm just not sure we'll ever get past the obviously overstretched skeleton crew otherwise.

I do want to add that I sympathize with RGL in terms of timeline/how you triage various AC issues. In theory, if a case of some random lower div player comes up first in the queue, it would be 'fair' to finalize that outcome before doing the elijah case. However, life isn't fair, and the simple truth is that far more people care about a higher div player on an undefeated 1 seed right before playoffs. Allowing a cheater to play in, and very likely win advanced is just a much worse look than some guy on like the 9th place newcomer team or whatever. I think pretty much everyone would support a process by which super high profile cases get prioritized, since the league/community as a whole has more of a stake in the outcome. Then again, it's obviously extra important that the correct decision gets made.

Burying the lede there bud

If this were a real game and not tf2, playing in-person would not be some kind of last resort, it would literally be the first thing elijah did. When pro players in csgo thought ropz (before he went pro) was cheating in faceit, he literally went down to the faceit studio and played live, which pretty much dispelled everything. Have elijah go to dippidy's house and play on his setup! Or, less facetiously, have him play on someone else's setup on LAN. It's onerous, but he'd do it if he really cared about proving his innocence.

As an aside, I wanted to discuss the whole finite vs. permaban thing for cheaters. I actually tend to disagree with some of the hardliners here, and am ok with like a 2-year ban for first offense. Part of that may be believing in the capacity of people to change, especially if they're very young when they cheat; however, I am also sympathetic to the utilitarian idea that banning them benefits not just 1 person, but many.

The more convincing argument for limited bans, however, is that we're talking about subjective reviews done by humans, and not actual VAC/anti-cheat for the most part. Don't get me wrong, I think that the various anti-cheat teams do a great job in being certain before laying down the banhammer (and have definitely improved in the past decade or so; you almost never see scandals about unfair bans anymore). Still, as long as it's humans deciding these things, you will always be 99.9% sure, not 100%.

I think a mechanism by which a hypothetical unfairly banned player can prove how dedicated to competitive they are by coming back and playing legit, with a ton of scrutiny on them, is somewhat reasonable. Like, didn't that happen to a couple of guys in EU, like quad or Beavern? And I know there was rky in AU, but maybe the consensus is he really did cheat earlier- someone with more information on that would need to let me know. Either way, if the person was high-profile the first time around, there's always going to be tons of eyes on them, and if they're still cheating it gets found out pretty quickly (see: this thread).

Like, correct me if I'm wrong, but elijah is still arguing that his FIRST ban was unjust, and he never cheated, right? If i'm wrong about that, let me know, but given his gameplay looks pretty identical to how it did before, I figured that was his argument. Obviously, few of us believe him, but that's his story, and we gave him another chance to prove it. He failed to do so, and now, IF we can once again agree he is cheating for sure, a permaban seems in order.

It may be a bit of an appeal to authority, but it's definitely telling how many scout mains who specifically care about aim theory stuff have come to the same conclusions about this dude. I personally don't know shit about cheats, but as a demo main I was able to tell mxr was autodetting after watching him for maybe 10 minutes. It's pretty easy to tell in a lot of cases when something just feels off/unnatural, even if it's difficult to prove. To my eyes, elijah looks very fishy but not quite as blatant as mxr, but I fully suspect that he looks just as blatant to the aforementioned hitscan aim experts.

As much as I hate to say it, this comparison is way too harsh to b4nny

come over to my apartment ;^]

when the sun hits is such a good song

this might be the area where we get fucked over by the different timezones in NA in a way that the euros don't

in just about every other region they play matches at like 9:30, but that's obviously 6:30 pacific

still, we could def go a LITTLE bit earlier imo with bo3s, it's just hard to have such a sea change so quickly

That ^ being said, with the b4nny ruleset bo1s can feel a little anticlimactic so more bo3s is pretty fire

If you're going to do a format with this many different stages I think more time and energy should be put into explaining it to people, so it's crystal clear what the stakes are/are not

Also I think the issue with breaking up the groups this way is that this season happened to have a strong middle and weak top, so teams like lebron and maybe even the covenant would be better suited playing cat posse than froyotech. This format with like froyo witness and g6 would be dope, but you can't always expect that

The hornets are really about to take miller over scoot smh

The Job Is Done. We Can Go Home Now.

like putting aside the engineer possibility do people actually believe they could do 80 dmg in this scenario good god

there's some real dunning kruger going on in here