Competitive integrity in officials

[DrButler]

So a bunch of days ago valanar, who seems to be an aw alt gives the free NU cc win to orange - not saying he didnt deserve to win, but ye, interesting match.

 

Current ou official:

Frags vs belieber, both aw. Frags dodges the match, belieber gets the bye, continues playing.

Belieber vs zhiko, both aw. Belieber dodges the match, zhiko gets the bye, continues playing, makes finals, effectively dodging frags / belieber, who obviously are pretty tough match ups.

 

Blue gets the bye rd3 and rd4, makes finals. Nobody to blame here, but potentially dodging 2/7 rounds to win is an advantage over everybody else. Also by no means disrespecting blue here. I know hes on fire and that he can win officials without byes, but that shit shouldnt happen nonetheless.

 

 

I really dont wanna be the guy uguuing about that stuff, but seems like its necessary since people told me that shits going on for months now. In my opinion, byes after rd1 shouldnt happen in officials, so my suggestion would be that if someone doesnt continue to play you swap in the loser of the round before aka whoever lost to the player who dodged.

Probably not that easy to script, but whats going on rn its just an eyesore and aw people letting each other pass is just a frkn joke and a punch in the face for every competitive player.

 

cheers

 

 

Edited November 11, 2017 by DrButler

[xXBlu3BreathXx]

Ngl I have no idea why those two dodged me, I'll take the win but it does seem fishy.

[DrButler]

2 minutes ago, xXBlu3BreathXx said:

Ngl I have no idea why those two dodged me, I'll take the win but it does seem fishy.

People quitting happens and tho im repeating myself, you´re not to blame. Ofc you´d take it, who wouldnt take random dcs. Not blaming anybody who participated, but the system that allows that stuff to happen since it gave you an advantage you shouldnt have had. Congrats on the trapinch nonetheless.

 

That aw stuff is still pretty fkd up tho and either we faced huge coincidences tonight or this is collusion, which should be prevented.

[NikhilR]

Back in my days (saying this to sound like a veteran), we used to get dq'd for match manipulation. 

[Gilan]

3 hours ago, DrButler said:

my suggestion would be that if someone doesnt continue to play you swap in the loser of the round before aka whoever lost to the player who dodged.

While I agree this is an issue, I'm not really sure how to tackle it... Your solution doesn't fix the problem, as if the player is truly dodging, then they just play their match like normal, then if they win, they dc the next round, and whoever they were "dodging on" will still move on.

[DoubleJ]

3 hours ago, DrButler said:

 

cheers

 

 

Aw has been doing this for a long time. That's just how they run things as a team. Take for example the Autumn NU Championship series. I lost to Piata after a Rock Slide flinch, taking third place. He proceeds to the Championship and throws, gifting Frags a shiny Hitmontop as the prize after a two-month long event.  Not much we can do about this with these dumb automated tournaments. Players and teams used to be punished for this kind of behavior a long time ago under the premise of colluding with one another. Now, it's almost a given. 

[Jeiseun]

can't do anything about it, they can just enter the match and wait for 5 minutes to pass, it's the same thing

[OrangeManiac]

6 hours ago, DrButler said:

So a bunch of days ago valanar, who seems to be an aw alt gives the free NU cc win to orange - not saying he didnt deserve to win, but ye, interesting match.

Just so that would be no conspiracy theories: valanar PM'd me before the CC finals and asked me to queue to the finals immediately because he said he needs to go to university class. Knowing there was a "bug" in Tournament system coding that getting DQd doesn't give you any prize money I believed this man and queued immediately without changing anything in my team and he logged off immediately like he said he would.

 

I don't personally continue playing tournaments after I know I cannot finish them. But I'm not blaming this guy, he just wanted the prize money for winning as many people as he was able to. Also thanks to some stallers tournaments may last longer than you expected them to. So you cannot blame the guy for not reserving enough of time for this tournament because you can never know how long tournaments can last.

 

About the topic itself, I mean I hate it when people get byes in officials as well and even more when it's for sentimental reasons. We can't go on witchhunts, though. You can never know whether someone had some irl duties to be taken care of or sudden internet problems and just making assumptions it was because this person is a friend/teammate is wrong. Well, you can make the assumptions all you want but it's another thing to call out any said individuals without proof and would be even more wrong to punish anyone. It's unfortunate but don't think there's anything you can do.

 

Edited November 11, 2017 by OrangeManiac

[DrButler]

10 hours ago, Gilan said:

While I agree this is an issue, I'm not really sure how to tackle it... Your solution doesn't fix the problem, as if the player is truly dodging, then they just play their match like normal, then if they win, they dc the next round, and whoever they were "dodging on" will still move on.

Yeah, didnt think that through too well tbh, but theres gotta be something that can be done. Maybe posting this in general discussion so people could share ideas would have been a better idea. Could you move it and i edit the op so it fits?

 

8 hours ago, OrangeManiac said:

Just so that would be no conspiracy theories

If my intention was to start spreading conspiracy theories i would have said so. It was just a cc, but imo tournaments should have a proper finals match.

 

7 hours ago, OrangeManiac said:

You can never know whether someone had some irl duties to be taken care of or sudden internet problems and just making assumptions it was because this person is a friend/teammate is wrong.

Idk how things are going in other parts of the world, but it would surprise me if people went to school / university, had to clean their rooms, see the doctor or run errands at 3am. It´d also surprise me if frags and belieber suddenly had internet issues when they faced their fellow teammates. No proof here, but cmon, how naive do you have to be to ignore the obvious?

 

As i already said im not a friend of regular byes either, but what made me start this thread is the fact that certain people openly and shamelessly abuse the automated tournaments to create advantages for their team mates, while blue just got lucky. There has to be something that can be done to prevent this in the future, altough i have to admit that i dont have a good idea myself right now. But thats what people share ideas and opinions for and im fairly optimistic that theres someone who has a good idea on the matter.

 

Long story short: first time i saw this kind of stuff happening and imo its just disgusting and its a shame this shit happened again and again, yet the people, who could handle that stuff gave 0 fucks. If you dont promote fairplay in officials you might as well just scrap the whole tournament thing.

[OrangeManiac]

@DrButler I didn't accuse you of making a conspiracy theory but as you used my case as an example so I just wanted to give the insights of what actually happened. That phrase was merely just a light joke and directed at all the readers because so many people would probably be quite surprised that someone people don't know about makes to finals and is expected to be an alt insta logging off at first turn. Someone could have thought it is my alt or friend, who knows.

[DrButler]

1 minute ago, OrangeManiac said:

@DrButler I didn't accuse you of making a conspiracy theory but as you used my case as an example so I just wanted to give the insights of what actually happened. That phrase was merely just a light joke and directed at all the readers because so many people would probably be quite surprised that someone people don't know about makes to finals and is expected to be an alt insta logging off at first turn. Someone could have thought it is my alt or friend, who knows.

Didnt even consider this being a possibility tbh, so i naturally missed the joke. Having a hard time not uguuing since the topic gets me mad pretty badly, but thanks for making it clear.

[XelaKebert]

As DoubleJ stated, yes we have DQ'd in the past for this offense.

 

To give context, back during the Masters series there was high suspicion that members of a certain team were actively boosting teammates in qualifiers. Using the same tactics outlined above. To that end the member who was being boosted was subsequently DQ'd for match manipulation. There was a lot of discussion with respect to what was going on. We had to analyze the entire bracket from the start all the way to the point at which the DQ was issued as well. This was not an easy decision to make, nor was it taken lightly.

 

At the moment I can't think of much we can do about this in the realm of automated tournaments, but I do agree that this is something we should discuss and reach a conclusion on what we can do. Automated queuing can make enforcing this rule tricky, but not entirely impossible.

[OrangeManiac]

51 minutes ago, XelaKebert said:

As DoubleJ stated, yes we have DQ'd in the past for this offense.

 

To give context, back during the Masters series there was high suspicion that members of a certain team were actively boosting teammates in qualifiers. Using the same tactics outlined above. To that end the member who was being boosted was subsequently DQ'd for match manipulation. There was a lot of discussion with respect to what was going on. We had to analyze the entire bracket from the start all the way to the point at which the DQ was issued as well. This was not an easy decision to make, nor was it taken lightly.

 

At the moment I can't think of much we can do about this in the realm of automated tournaments, but I do agree that this is something we should discuss and reach a conclusion on what we can do. Automated queuing can make enforcing this rule tricky, but not entirely impossible.

Rather than punishing match manipulation, I think the system should discourage match manipulation. The problem is that match manipulation can and always will be possible. Instead of giving free wins you can "accidentally" misclick or play your worse match ever against your teammate and/or friend. The problem is that the reasons for match manipulation is 1) giving a teammate a prize they desire 2) giving a teammate a ticket to a final tournament etc. if the teammate already has one. The problem here is that even ethical players could feel as the right thing to do is help their friend, even though from the competitive standpoint it is a serious offense. Rather than trying to suspect and punish people, discourage people.

 

How?

 

Well, this is a much more complicated question. The thing is that the Gift prizes whether they are shinies or comps or both encourage match manipulation because you couldn't help wanting your best friend get his dream shiny. For the second point you've already kind of found an answer which is not to allow seasonal ticket holders to participate in further qualifiers, which definitely is a reasonable answer. For the Gift prizes point, as long as this system is about Gift prizes there can always be situations where you feel as you have to give a match to a friend. It's wrong but rather than punish, discourage. For this reason I'd hope we would shift towards non shiny perfect TRADEABLE comp prizes so that the prize isn't the reason for match manipulation.

 

I don't know what happened in this particular case and in that regard I'm all fine for punishing evident match manipulation. But all I'm saying if I had to play my best friend for his/her favorite shiny prize in the finals, I would feel really bad for beating him/her. I'm not saying I would match manipulate but I would say I would feel very fucking bad.

 

Edited November 11, 2017 by OrangeManiac

[XelaKebert]

1 minute ago, OrangeManiac said:

Rather than punishing match manipulation, I think the system should discourage match manipulation. The problem is that match manipulation can and always will be possible. Instead of giving free wins you can "accidentally" misclick or play your worse match ever against your teammate and/or friend. The problem is that the reasons for match manipulation is 1) giving a teammate a prize they desire 2) giving a teammate a ticket to a final tournament etc. if the teammate already has one. The problem here is that even ethical players could feel as the right thing to do is help their friend, even though from the competitive standpoint it is a seriois offense. Rather than trying to suspect people, discourage people.

 

How?

 

Well, this is a much more complicated question. The thing is that the Gift prizes whether they are shinies or comps or both encourage match manipulation because you couldn't help wanting your best friend get his dream shiny. For the second point you've already kind of found an answer which is not to allow seasonal ticket holders to participate in further qualifiers, which definitely is a reasonable answer. For the Gift prizes point, as long as this system is about Gift prizes there can always be situations where you feel as you have to give a match to a friend. It's wrong but rather than punish, discourage. For this reason I'd hope we would shift towards non shiny perfect TRADEABLE comp prizes so that the prize isn't the reason for match manipulation.

Bear in mind that the incident I spoke of took place when prizes were tradeable so having tradeable prizes for tournaments would not 100% solve the issue and it certainly would not discourage it. In order to discourage this behavior then there must be a negative consequence. For example, let's say someone engages in this behavior using alts. We could turn around and ban all alts used in the incident and even issue temp bans to players who engaged in the activity as well. Is that extreme? Maybe, it also depends on how often the player in question engages in match fixing. If they are habitually attempting to fix matches in order to boost other players further in the tournament then maybe a ban is justifiable. You don't discourage match fixing by changing something that still allows for a positive outcome.

[Takens]

19 hours ago, NikhilR said:

Back in my days (saying this to sound like a veteran), we used to get dq'd for match manipulation. 

Old days, when you had 5 minutes to get ready and your rival had like half an hour.

[pachima]

Saffron tournaments back.

The easiest fix is the best fix.

[XelaKebert]

14 hours ago, pachima said:

Saffron tournaments back.

The easiest fix is the best fix.

No that's not the best fix. Having manually hosted tournaments was a logistical nightmare and was rife with inconsistent calls being made. One GM would DQ for a DC during a match and another would allow for a rematch or allow for the other player to decide if they want to rematch. We made several changes to introduce consistency but in the end those changes ended up doing little to no good. We were still placing players and staff members into situations where they would have to make a potentially unpopular call. That is also on top of trying to maintain order with each referee having to monitor 3-4 matches. Automated tournaments are here to stay because they allow for consistent enforcement of the rules and can be expanded upon to ensure we have fair gameplay at all levels. That is something we cannot guarantee with manually hosted tournaments.