A frank NS2WC discussion
fanatic
This post has been edited. Join Date: 2003-07-23 Member: 18377Members, Constellation, Squad Five Blue
This post has been edited. Join Date: 2003-07-23 Member: 18377Members, Constellation, Squad Five Blue
Given the complete lack of transparency regarding the administration behind this event, and the decisions they've made, I'm making this thread to encourage a frank discussion and to ensure that the relevant information is available to the supporters who paid for the tournament, the participants, and those of us who have watched the preparation of this tournament with increasing disbelief. My information has been collected and verified by talking to various people who have been involved.
So far there have been four rather large and public controversies. I will give a brief summary of them, but link to threads containing the full discussion of each item. I apologize for the length of this post, but it is impossible to accurately describe the situation without going into detail.
1. Qualifier timings
The dismal timings for the quarter finals -- the matches deciding which teams would be sendt to the live event in Cologne -- was the first thing players noticed when the rules were released. Having the deciding matches of the qualifier in the middle of Christmas, when a significant amount of players and spectators will be on vacation, is just about the worst planning possible. My post on the matter quickly earned 20 agrees, and multiple other players and spectators voiced their concerns in the same thread. I think puzl (legendary ns1 developer) put it best by saying "I think it is crazy to run this tournament over Christmas. When you guys are sitting down wondering why attendance was less than expected don't forget that people warned you".
Thus far, the admins' only reply in the thread they themselves created for feedback on the rules, has been Hugh's solo post, saying that "timing most probably cannot be changed". WasabiOne later made a separate post on the ENSL website, saying that they are "looking at the possibility of pushing the quarterfinals back a week", which would significantly reduce the problem, but no more news has been forthcoming.
2. The Eissfeldt ban (edit: this issue has been resolved)
The community was shocked by the news that Eissfeldt, a highly respected Godar player and ex-duplex player, would not be allowed to participate in the tournament. I will not go over the details of why he was banned in this post, but I will refer you to my earlier posts explaining what happened: link to first post, and link to second post clarifying the circumstances. These posts earned a total of 39 agrees, 18 awesomes and 12 disagrees -- most of these disagrees occuring before I posted my second post further explaining the matter. Over five pages of that thread, the community, players and spectators, showed an overwhelming support for allowing Eissfeldt to play.
Despite all this, it took developers complaining on the internal UWE campfire chat to get the NS2WC admins to even reconsider the issue. As the discussions from admin meetings are not made public, we have no way of knowing what exactly went on during those meetings. All we know is that the majority voted to uphold the Eissfeldt ban, in spite of the massive public outcry. In this situation, Godar did the only thing they could, and in desperation they suggested that the admins could at least let Eissfeldt play if Godar qualified for Cologne without him. In the end, the admins used that as the basis for their public decision, and decided that Eissfeldt would still be banned from playing in the qualifier. Godar were told that they had to agree to this decision and that no more public comments on the subject would be allowed. WasabiOne then proceeded to pretend that this result was reached "in full cooperation with all parties involved", even though it is abundandly clear that was not the case. Shortly thereafter the discussion thread was closed, because apparently this meant that there was nothing more to discuss? I wonder if the same will happen to this thread.
The end result is that Godar has to play the entire qualifier without their sole Lerk player. Playing without a Lerk is pretty much impossible, so Godar have resorted to re-training Railo as a Lerk, but he is obviously at a heavy practice disadvantage against other teams, and he has some enormous shoes to fill given that Eissfeldt is one of the best Lerk players in the world. From watching their performance in practice matches, it is clear that Godar are suffering heavily from this loss, and as a result they will have a very difficult time qualifying for the tournament.
Throughout this entire ordeal, Godar have been threatened with further sanctions, including losing their seedings from the last season of ENSL. They have also been told that all of their other players are under suspicion. Zefram (NSL League admin and NS2WC admin) also banned Eissfeldt from playing in the NSL Season 3 bronze final, forcing Godar to play with a merc, and therefore unsurprisingly losing 1-3 to Saunamen. The NS2WC admins have also repeatedly told Godar to keep silent about the entire affair, apparently having no interest in any kind of transparency.
3. The six player rule change (edit: this issue has been resolved)
Around the same time the final Eissfeldt decision was issued, the admins changed the tournament rules to include:
The rule change is especially harsh on Godar. They were planning to bring all eight of their players to the event, which would give Eissfeldt a chance to play and clear his name on LAN. But now, even if they manage to qualify without Eissfeldt playing, they will be forced to deny one of the players who played in the quarter final a trip to Cologne to send Eissfeldt there instead. An almost impossible proposition, and I can only describe it as cruel. I have to wonder if the admins have planned this out from the beginning when they made their final decision on the Eissfeldt ban.
It is important to note that this rule was not included in the ruleset that was originally published. Those rules instead stated specifically that "14. (...) (i) Teams may bring in excess of six qualifying players to the Finals Series, however those teams will be responsible for the travel and accommodation of those excess players", and the participating teams made their plans according to this. To suddenly change the rules in such a major way is in itself irresponsible by the admins. It is even more damning that they changed the rules without consulting any of the players or teams, and without informing anyone that the rules had been altered. It was only discovered "by accident" by b1 when he was reading the rules a couple of days ago.
As with the two previous issues I have talked about, public opinion has been massively opposed to this change to the rules. Despite repeated pleas from players and spectators in the thread the admins specifically set up for feedback on the rules, they have not even acknowledged the problem. It seems that they are only interested in transparency when it suits their interests.
It is rather absurd that the only rule change the admins are willing to make, is one that the players themselves are universally opposed to.
4. The locked rosters rule (edit: issue resolved, but some permanent damage remains)
Section 4 (b) of the NS2WC rules state that "A team must be registered wholly and fully in the first instance". While this rule was not immediately noticed as problematic, it has since become an enormous headache. This rule is personally responsible for multiple players not being able to participate in the tournament at all, including myself. This is a rule that has absolutely no reason for existing, and causes no benefit for anyone involved in the tournament. I tried personally appealing to WasabiOne that this rule needed to be changed, but he made it abundandly clear that he was not interested in hearing arguments and that no rule would be changed regardless of the disastrous effect it is having on the players who want to participate in the tournament. The rule has also been criticized multiple times in the rules thread, but no comments from the admins have been forthcoming.
When this rule is combined with the extremely short time between announcement and signups, and the even shorter signup deadline, it is very difficult to understand how anyone could think this would work out well. It is made even worse by Section 4 (iii) in the rules that says teams have to sign up by thursday 28th (6 days after the tournament was announced and rules released) to keep their priority eligibility from NSL seedings. This has essentially forced teams to sign up quickly, for fear that they would lose their spots in the tournament, and they are now trapped without any chance to add new players to their rosters, and players are prevented from signing up for the teams they want to play for.
In practice, this proved disastrous for a new team called Team BVB. Bitey, who was dissatisfied with the conditions in Titus Gaming, wanted to create a new team to compete against Titus in the american scene, and with everyone else for a spot in Cologne. Together with rline, he left Titus and gathered some of his friends from Damage Networks, priori, and the old Nexzil, to play for Team BVB. When they signed their team up, however, they discovered that Locklear, their commander and thus critical player, had already been signed up to play for Titus, who had brought him in as a replacement for Bitey and rline. Even though Locklear is unlikely to actually play for Titus, and wanted to play for Team BVB instead, the admins refused to let him switch teams, and he eventually gave up. As a result, Team BVB was left without a comm, and since they had already registered their team, they were unable to add any players to their roster to replace him. The end result is that instead of another top team competing for a spot in Cologne, potentially making the competition far more interesting, we're left with a broken group of players who are unable to participate at all.
I think Gliss' comments from a conversation sum up how the players involved feel about what happened: "i was going to return and start playing again on bitey's team specifically for this event for happy fun times in ns2 (...) and now this is just restricting legitimate reasons for players to enjoy the game just so they can get their free, unearned trip imo".
This rule has also affected me personally. I was initially very excited by this tournament, and I was considering making a comeback for it, after six months in retirement. I was unable to find a team to join in such a short space of time, however, and I am now barred from joining any of the teams I was interested in playing with because they have already signed up. I want to play, but I am not allowed to.
The worst part isn't even how cruelly this rule is being enforced, the worst part is that it makes no sense. The only reason to have such a rule, is to prevent players from playing for multiple teams during the tournament. This purpose can easilly be accomplished by having a simple rule that says that players cannot play for a different team once they have played a match for a team, or even a rule that says that the teams are locked after a certain date. I think that, given the nature of this small community, such an event should do everything in its power to include as many participants as possible. Instead, we have rules that almost seem designed to prevent players from participating, and admins who refuse to listen to reason.
My current tally of casualties as a direct consequence of this rule is [ 5 ], but there are likely many more that I do not know about. Boom has retired from competitive NS2, rline has uninstalled NS2, and Bitey, Gliss and myself are unable to join a team because all the teams are already signed up at this point. These are all veterans of the game that have played their hearts out at the top level during previous events, but are now prevented from participating because of the admins' inability to accept criticism.
5. Final remarks
I have created this thread to expose what is happening to this so-called community event, in the vain hopes that public outcry may force the admins to see reason. The reputation of this tournament can still be salvaged if the admins listen to the community and rectify the issues I have commented on above. I must admit that I have very little hope that this will actually happen, though.
The NS2WC was supposed to be the greatest thing that ever happened to competitive NS2. Instead, it has caused more harm to the competitive community than any single event that I can remember in the history of NS1 and 2. I cannot even begin to describe how disappointed I am. This by far marks the lowest point of my ten years in this community.
Edit: The admins have made a solid effort rectifying their previous mistakes, and as a direct result of this, the tournament is now in much better shape. Moving forward I think we should applaud the effort made by the admins to provide an entertaining tournament and remember that to err is human.
So far there have been four rather large and public controversies. I will give a brief summary of them, but link to threads containing the full discussion of each item. I apologize for the length of this post, but it is impossible to accurately describe the situation without going into detail.
1. Qualifier timings
The dismal timings for the quarter finals -- the matches deciding which teams would be sendt to the live event in Cologne -- was the first thing players noticed when the rules were released. Having the deciding matches of the qualifier in the middle of Christmas, when a significant amount of players and spectators will be on vacation, is just about the worst planning possible. My post on the matter quickly earned 20 agrees, and multiple other players and spectators voiced their concerns in the same thread. I think puzl (legendary ns1 developer) put it best by saying "I think it is crazy to run this tournament over Christmas. When you guys are sitting down wondering why attendance was less than expected don't forget that people warned you".
Thus far, the admins' only reply in the thread they themselves created for feedback on the rules, has been Hugh's solo post, saying that "timing most probably cannot be changed". WasabiOne later made a separate post on the ENSL website, saying that they are "looking at the possibility of pushing the quarterfinals back a week", which would significantly reduce the problem, but no more news has been forthcoming.
2. The Eissfeldt ban (edit: this issue has been resolved)
The community was shocked by the news that Eissfeldt, a highly respected Godar player and ex-duplex player, would not be allowed to participate in the tournament. I will not go over the details of why he was banned in this post, but I will refer you to my earlier posts explaining what happened: link to first post, and link to second post clarifying the circumstances. These posts earned a total of 39 agrees, 18 awesomes and 12 disagrees -- most of these disagrees occuring before I posted my second post further explaining the matter. Over five pages of that thread, the community, players and spectators, showed an overwhelming support for allowing Eissfeldt to play.
Despite all this, it took developers complaining on the internal UWE campfire chat to get the NS2WC admins to even reconsider the issue. As the discussions from admin meetings are not made public, we have no way of knowing what exactly went on during those meetings. All we know is that the majority voted to uphold the Eissfeldt ban, in spite of the massive public outcry. In this situation, Godar did the only thing they could, and in desperation they suggested that the admins could at least let Eissfeldt play if Godar qualified for Cologne without him. In the end, the admins used that as the basis for their public decision, and decided that Eissfeldt would still be banned from playing in the qualifier. Godar were told that they had to agree to this decision and that no more public comments on the subject would be allowed. WasabiOne then proceeded to pretend that this result was reached "in full cooperation with all parties involved", even though it is abundandly clear that was not the case. Shortly thereafter the discussion thread was closed, because apparently this meant that there was nothing more to discuss? I wonder if the same will happen to this thread.
The end result is that Godar has to play the entire qualifier without their sole Lerk player. Playing without a Lerk is pretty much impossible, so Godar have resorted to re-training Railo as a Lerk, but he is obviously at a heavy practice disadvantage against other teams, and he has some enormous shoes to fill given that Eissfeldt is one of the best Lerk players in the world. From watching their performance in practice matches, it is clear that Godar are suffering heavily from this loss, and as a result they will have a very difficult time qualifying for the tournament.
Throughout this entire ordeal, Godar have been threatened with further sanctions, including losing their seedings from the last season of ENSL. They have also been told that all of their other players are under suspicion. Zefram (NSL League admin and NS2WC admin) also banned Eissfeldt from playing in the NSL Season 3 bronze final, forcing Godar to play with a merc, and therefore unsurprisingly losing 1-3 to Saunamen. The NS2WC admins have also repeatedly told Godar to keep silent about the entire affair, apparently having no interest in any kind of transparency.
3. The six player rule change (edit: this issue has been resolved)
Around the same time the final Eissfeldt decision was issued, the admins changed the tournament rules to include:
If NS2 was a big game with professional teams and players, this rule would make sense. This is not the case, however. NS2 is a tiny game with amateur teams and players who play for the fun of competition. Many of us have jobs and families, and we don't have time to play 24/7. Because of that, most teams need more than 6 players to be able to practice regularly. All the way since NS1, the "normal" roster size has been between 8-10 players. Archaea faced this problem during our two previous visits to Cologne, and we decided to pay with our own money to bring all our players to Cologne, so that everyone could share the experience. That worked out perfectly on both occasions, and caused no problems for the players or organizers. Several teams were planning to copy that arrangement this time around, but are now denied from doing so. This has caused internal conflicts in teams and some players have lost motivation for playing the game. As Tane put it; "It's really rough to start competition inside your clan when you have seven or eight active players who all wants to play. These kind of rules makes people literally cry"."14. (...) The four winning teams from the Winners Bracket Quarterfinals will each select 6 players from their roster. Those selected will receive airfare and accommodations to the live event. Only those selected players will be permitted to play at the live event. All other players on the roster may attend but may not be allowed to be used as a substitute."
The rule change is especially harsh on Godar. They were planning to bring all eight of their players to the event, which would give Eissfeldt a chance to play and clear his name on LAN. But now, even if they manage to qualify without Eissfeldt playing, they will be forced to deny one of the players who played in the quarter final a trip to Cologne to send Eissfeldt there instead. An almost impossible proposition, and I can only describe it as cruel. I have to wonder if the admins have planned this out from the beginning when they made their final decision on the Eissfeldt ban.
It is important to note that this rule was not included in the ruleset that was originally published. Those rules instead stated specifically that "14. (...) (i) Teams may bring in excess of six qualifying players to the Finals Series, however those teams will be responsible for the travel and accommodation of those excess players", and the participating teams made their plans according to this. To suddenly change the rules in such a major way is in itself irresponsible by the admins. It is even more damning that they changed the rules without consulting any of the players or teams, and without informing anyone that the rules had been altered. It was only discovered "by accident" by b1 when he was reading the rules a couple of days ago.
As with the two previous issues I have talked about, public opinion has been massively opposed to this change to the rules. Despite repeated pleas from players and spectators in the thread the admins specifically set up for feedback on the rules, they have not even acknowledged the problem. It seems that they are only interested in transparency when it suits their interests.
It is rather absurd that the only rule change the admins are willing to make, is one that the players themselves are universally opposed to.
4. The locked rosters rule (edit: issue resolved, but some permanent damage remains)
Section 4 (b) of the NS2WC rules state that "A team must be registered wholly and fully in the first instance". While this rule was not immediately noticed as problematic, it has since become an enormous headache. This rule is personally responsible for multiple players not being able to participate in the tournament at all, including myself. This is a rule that has absolutely no reason for existing, and causes no benefit for anyone involved in the tournament. I tried personally appealing to WasabiOne that this rule needed to be changed, but he made it abundandly clear that he was not interested in hearing arguments and that no rule would be changed regardless of the disastrous effect it is having on the players who want to participate in the tournament. The rule has also been criticized multiple times in the rules thread, but no comments from the admins have been forthcoming.
When this rule is combined with the extremely short time between announcement and signups, and the even shorter signup deadline, it is very difficult to understand how anyone could think this would work out well. It is made even worse by Section 4 (iii) in the rules that says teams have to sign up by thursday 28th (6 days after the tournament was announced and rules released) to keep their priority eligibility from NSL seedings. This has essentially forced teams to sign up quickly, for fear that they would lose their spots in the tournament, and they are now trapped without any chance to add new players to their rosters, and players are prevented from signing up for the teams they want to play for.
In practice, this proved disastrous for a new team called Team BVB. Bitey, who was dissatisfied with the conditions in Titus Gaming, wanted to create a new team to compete against Titus in the american scene, and with everyone else for a spot in Cologne. Together with rline, he left Titus and gathered some of his friends from Damage Networks, priori, and the old Nexzil, to play for Team BVB. When they signed their team up, however, they discovered that Locklear, their commander and thus critical player, had already been signed up to play for Titus, who had brought him in as a replacement for Bitey and rline. Even though Locklear is unlikely to actually play for Titus, and wanted to play for Team BVB instead, the admins refused to let him switch teams, and he eventually gave up. As a result, Team BVB was left without a comm, and since they had already registered their team, they were unable to add any players to their roster to replace him. The end result is that instead of another top team competing for a spot in Cologne, potentially making the competition far more interesting, we're left with a broken group of players who are unable to participate at all.
I think Gliss' comments from a conversation sum up how the players involved feel about what happened: "i was going to return and start playing again on bitey's team specifically for this event for happy fun times in ns2 (...) and now this is just restricting legitimate reasons for players to enjoy the game just so they can get their free, unearned trip imo".
This rule has also affected me personally. I was initially very excited by this tournament, and I was considering making a comeback for it, after six months in retirement. I was unable to find a team to join in such a short space of time, however, and I am now barred from joining any of the teams I was interested in playing with because they have already signed up. I want to play, but I am not allowed to.
The worst part isn't even how cruelly this rule is being enforced, the worst part is that it makes no sense. The only reason to have such a rule, is to prevent players from playing for multiple teams during the tournament. This purpose can easilly be accomplished by having a simple rule that says that players cannot play for a different team once they have played a match for a team, or even a rule that says that the teams are locked after a certain date. I think that, given the nature of this small community, such an event should do everything in its power to include as many participants as possible. Instead, we have rules that almost seem designed to prevent players from participating, and admins who refuse to listen to reason.
My current tally of casualties as a direct consequence of this rule is [ 5 ], but there are likely many more that I do not know about. Boom has retired from competitive NS2, rline has uninstalled NS2, and Bitey, Gliss and myself are unable to join a team because all the teams are already signed up at this point. These are all veterans of the game that have played their hearts out at the top level during previous events, but are now prevented from participating because of the admins' inability to accept criticism.
5. Final remarks
I have created this thread to expose what is happening to this so-called community event, in the vain hopes that public outcry may force the admins to see reason. The reputation of this tournament can still be salvaged if the admins listen to the community and rectify the issues I have commented on above. I must admit that I have very little hope that this will actually happen, though.
The NS2WC was supposed to be the greatest thing that ever happened to competitive NS2. Instead, it has caused more harm to the competitive community than any single event that I can remember in the history of NS1 and 2. I cannot even begin to describe how disappointed I am. This by far marks the lowest point of my ten years in this community.
Edit: The admins have made a solid effort rectifying their previous mistakes, and as a direct result of this, the tournament is now in much better shape. Moving forward I think we should applaud the effort made by the admins to provide an entertaining tournament and remember that to err is human.
Comments
I truly don't think it's too late to undo the damage, and have the tournament still be the greatest event for NS2. Rules can be adjusted, rosters can be unlocked, the qualifier dates can be adjusted.
It just requires the NS2WC admins to open an active, direct and public dialogue. Ya know, involve the community in this community funded tournament. And it needs to happen now.
I completely 100% agree with all Fana said above. I would like to add that the 18+ rule in my eyes is also rather cruel, excluding even more players from the event. (Whats the problem of letting lets say a 17y person come with lets say parental permission if need be?)
I was very exited about the tournament and was supportive of the idea early on.
The insane lack of information, feedback & explanations about the entire tournament after the money goal was reached is staggering.
This is supposed to be a community event but the community is not informed, rules and dates are not even remotely discussed and questions are not answered. What is even more troubling is that if a question like the 6man rule is answered on steam via via, that same answer is not posted by any organiser in the rules topic at hand.
I shall refrain from saying how the rules affected the ability of TAW Love to apply for the tournament. I did not fully ask yet, and thus can not say with any certainty. I can say on a personal note that the whole holidays period proved a big problem for me to show in any case. Do not misunderstand me that I take this to harsh.. I merely state it as 'a competitive player' who indeed could not join due to the dated, as Fana stated.
Personally I have no more faith in this tournament. I originally was planning to show, regardless if I played or not. I am glad now I did not get any tickets. I will however keep a eye on the entire thing till the end, as it will show me if its worth donating for a next time.
But I do agree that from the looks of it even UWEs events are starting to look better then the 'community tournament'.
My best wishes to all who still try to make the best of this tournament, regardless if they are organising or playing.
This is just from an outsider looking in (I play NS2 casually, but enjoy eSports): Could it have to do with child labor laws? I know that LoL has the same rule about age because of something having to do with child labor laws making it illegal to pay the teams who have underage members. I probably fuddled something in explaining it, I'm not a lawyer, but this might be a little out of their control.
I've been okay with most of the rules for this event, but as a team leader this one is really frustrating. I've been trying to weigh the pros and cons between signing up and securing my team a spot vs being able to try out // pick up a 7th player to use as backup. Just kidding. Wasabi just posted that this rule was amended. I'm a happy camper.
At the same time - This was put together and organized by a small group of people. Had they not gotten Nvidia / Intel to donate $16,000, it never would have happened. They are donating an extensive amount of their time & resources for this. While I've been frustrated by a few things here and there, nobody was forced to donate for the NS2WC, there are no entry fees for teams, nothing. I think that's something everyone needs to keep in mind before criticizing. It isn't an easy job and you won't be able to both please everyone and make it as fair as possible.
At the end of the day we at NS2WC have gone above and beyond to work with both players and teams to make this an open and fair event. Sometimes decisions have to be made without considering the player involved and look at the rule and what they agreed too, this is to be fair to all parties and not just one player of stature. Its hard to make decisions about and that is why its not one person in charge of this event. I respect that people take issues with certain things but I have not stopped anyone from having a conversation with me about their concerns or made my mind up about anything without talking to all involved parties. You just cant make everyone happy.
You realize this rule is preventing a team from NA forming that has an extremely solid chance of going to the WC?
You can make a lot of people happy by opening rosters instead of trying to prevent a team from forming because you want to keep players locked onto your team.
1. Timings do indeed suck a bit. Unfortunately, the NS2WC is between a rock and a hard place: Go earlier, and there is not enough time for registration and qualification. Go later, and it is too expensive to fly the teams to Cologne. As for the date of the final itself, the date secured was earlier than I would have liked. But it was the only date available: The ESLTV studios are in high demand for LoL, CSGo, and CoD events. We are small fry and cannot always get the weekend we really want.
2. My understanding is that Eissfeldt received an NS2 VAC ban. I have not read your other, more detailed posts Fana, so I don't know if that's true. If it is true, then it is not appropriate for him to play. VAC is an extremely misunderstood system. Suffice to say it does not give false positives. If Eissfeldt did indeed receive a VAC ban, then he is guilty of serious cheating in NS2, and that is unacceptable. Eissfeldt's value to Godar and previous good standing in the NS2 community is not relevant to the application of the principle that cheating is unacceptable. Would, and more importantly should, the NS2WC have been as accommodating to an unknown player from a division three team?
3. Your argument is sound. There are valid reasons for this rule, with regards to fairness on non-European teams. However, it is not in keeping with the spirit of the event. I have raised the issue with NS2WC admins and they are considering changing the rule today.
4. The intention of the rule is to prevent administrative nightmares that make the tournament impossible to manage, as players trade themselves between teams. The unintended consequence is that players like you are barred from entry. I have raised the issue with NS2WC admins and they are considering modifying the rule to preserve its original purpose, but eliminate the unfortunate side effects.
Please remember that UWE is not running this event, we have significant influence due to our monetary, sponsorship, and other contributions. My words in this thread represent that influence, not some sort of 'developer is god' authority. The team organising the NS2WC, including WasabiOne, Zefram, and Reddog, are doing an extremely difficult job very well. They are attempting to balance the sometimes competing interests of many parties. Please maintain civility towards them as they work to achieve the balance that is best for all NS2 players.
Its not my team, I provide servers and mumble to them, when it comes to team decisions I was and am not involved.
Eh? What a mediocre amendment.
Players should be able to swap rosters freely prior to the signup deadline or better yet, before the first match that the team that said player is signed up to play for. Obviously you guys must be doing this by hand for this to be an issue. Any other reason and this makes no sense at all. However the competitive scene is small enough, and roster swaps infrequent enough to not have this unreasonable limitation in place.
The rest of this post has already been discussed, addressed, and solved in most respects, but this is a new point of drama.
I'd love to see more transparency here as what Fana has described is not how the situation was described to me by a member of BVB. And isn't Bitey on IM now? Is Bitey confirmed to be on IM's NS2WC roster or is he just playing with them for fun?
However, the main point is that he was using the wallhack as an adminstrative tool to spectate and catch actual cheaters ingame. It is almost the only somewhat surefire way to catch a wallhacker who is capable of masking his actions even a bit. This has been done throughout the history of FPS games and - as far as I can tell - is considered to be acceptable by practically anyone who knows a thing about anti-cheat methods.
Due to the unfortunate state of NS2 demo system and playback, he had to run the wallhack in live ingame and spectate rather than running it on a separate replay file that can be watched afterwards without risk of VAC bans. As far as I've understood, live spectating with wallhack is roughly the only way to get some good proof of the wallhacker at the moment. Either you have the wallhack yourself or you go swinging your banhammer based on an educated guess.
So yeah, Eissfeldt did get caught by VAC. He did get caught by VAC while trying to make the server a better place to play. It's a little silly mistake to use a wallhack VAC can catch, but the intentions were about contributing to the community, not to gain personal advantage or anything. Banning him for an unfortunate and a bit of silly mistake he made while trying to make the NS2 community a better place to play seems to go against most of the things the tournament is supposed to stand for.
Most of the details of this case I've got from Fana, so I might not be representing the full picture. However, as long as the admins are as quiet about it as they have been, this is roughly the only source of information I've got.
On top of that, it had already been addressed with what is (imo) a very favorable compromise for Eissfeldt/Godar in that he would be allowed to play at the LAN.
Because having to drop a player that made your team make it to the finals is totally a fair compromise. That ban might as well still be in effect.
This zero tolerance policy rule doesn't prove that he is "guilty of serious cheating", a VAC ban isn't proof of cheating during a match. There isn't any proof besides the ban notification, it doesn't show when/where he has cheated, if he had cheated during a NSL match, it just shows that he loaded cheats at some point. Any competitive player could have been banned like this without actually cheating a single match.
Get a working replay system in the game and there wouldn't have to be a situation like this.
In most court systems, you do not ask the jury if the defendant is innocent, you ask if he is guilty. We're not saying Eissfeldt is innocent, we're saying he's not guilty. And we do not need to presuppose anything, we have plenty of evidence pointing towards the fact that Eissfeldt has not been cheating.
First of all, the most significant piece of evidence is, NON of his opponents have accused him of EVER cheating. These are players that have played against him for several hundreds of hours. If he had been cheating, I'd maintain that some of these people would've noticed.
Next, these same people seem to maintain that Eissfeldt is not guilty, AFTER the accusations were made against him. These accusations were all made by people who are not playing against Eissfeldt regularly. Eissfeldt's good long standing reputation IS a positive piece of evidence towards him not being guilty.
And the third piece of evidence, is that Eissfeldt has been streaming his games for months to the public.
He has even offered to stream the qualifying rounds. Tell me, if you had to bet on who's cheating and who's not. Would you bet on the guy that has a VAC ban and is live streaming his match, or the guy who does not have a VAC ban and is not streaming his match?
If you would like to maintain that Eissfeldt has been cheating in matches, then you should be able to pinpoint ONE match that we can investigate. For right now, these are just slanderous accusations that Eissfeldt has no possible way of disproving. You are in effect asking Eissfeldt to prove himself innocent, presupposing that he is guilty. There's a reason why our court systems don't work like this, it's an impossible position you put him in.
Or is it the Nvidia sponsorship money and the supposed peering eyes of this corporation that compels you to go overboard with community dividing rules? in the hopes that the more "professional" you make it look to them the higher the chance this will act as a springboard for some future career you hope for ?
Anyway this draws me to my final point and suggestion which is that the NSL, given the leadership consists of low tier players and individuals that have far too much affiliation with UWE, should be ditched by the players in favour of a new organisation. Clearly the cancer is too far gone to save it and instead it should be viewed as a series of lessons learnt for the new organisation that should be headed by high level comp players or at least those with a good attitude and affiliation with the actual community.
ps. Why is it so god damn necessary that this event be held in cologne. Europe is a big place.
You can't prove that he didn't cheat during an actual match, either. That's the issue.
Why not just amend the rule to prevent roster change once the first game has been played in the WC? This way players can't jump rosters mid tournament but rosters can change before the tournament starts.
1) On the registration page of the NS2WC, it states "Please make sure you have read all the rules before signing up your team."
2) On the rules page, rule 4b states: "A team must be registered wholly and fully in the first instance"
3) So a prem div team signs up a team, based on this.
4) Drama happens within the team and players slap each other in a girl fight
5) Players now want to hop to another team because they don't 'play nice' with the others anymore
6) Admins don't allow it because, well, the rules are above (which were supposed to be read and understood by the team anyways)
7) Players, not getting their way, run to Fana and are sheltered under his coat of love and caring for prem div players
8) Forum drama inevitably ensues
At the end of the day, this was sparked because of internal team drama which was completely out of the hands of the NS2WC. With all the time and effort the admins are putting in for free to make this actually happen, I'm just shocked at the thankless attitude of the community. Managing people and events is definitely hard, especially those diaper-wearing prem div players. No one else has noticed that anytime there has been a 'problem', it has involved a prem-div player or team? Doesn't that raise an eyebrow with anyone? It should.
And Fana, just because you didn't get your way with Wasabi - you drag this all out on the forums? It has been said that Wasabi isn't the only decision-maker - don't you think it would have been far more prudent to request a meeting with all of them and discuss the issue? The obvious answer it no, you did not - because you will do whatever you can, it seems, to publicly slam these poor guys any chance you get. Do you have some vendetta against this tournament or the organizers?
Wrong. That's not an issue. You do not ask a person to prove his own innocense, it's the prosecution that has to prove that he is guilty. The burden of proof is on the accuser. And remember, no one actually accused Eissfeldt of cheating in ANY match. So there's no match for us to investigate at all.
But apparently, in ns2, you are guilty untill proven otherwise.