http://www.gosugamers.net/warcraft/features/2408

Enjoy! by b-sheep

http://theoriesonhumanity.blogspot.com/
I didn't want to post any more of this sort of stuff here considering it wasn't part of gaming.  So I finally decided to make a seperate one.  Enjoy.

I used to love the Digital Life event, until this year. With a ladder on a faulty system, it was inevitable that there would be problems. I understood that right from the get go. What I did not anticipate was the blatant lack of rules that were follow, by the administration of the tournament as well as the teams participating. On top of that the ladder system itself was faulty.   This entire fiasco all started about 3 days after the ladder ‘began’. I put it like this because until my team had started to challenge others noone was even challenging anyone. They figured they would just get a free berth at the end. They were sadly mistaken. After we had scheduled a few matches and settled in to practice for the maps we were to play the following week I became aware that the ladder system was faulty. Now you may be asking yourselves, how can it be faulty? A ladder system works off of points, simple. Well...it is simple until you begin being challenged for times that you are already scheduled to play on. Then you have about 6 challenges pending, and 3 waiting to be played. This causes a rather large problem because seeing as how it is the last two days of the event you cant propose new times for your pending challenges. On top of that you cant do an instant challenge to any of the teams that are on your pending list because well....they are still pending.   That was one problem, it was dealt with in a lack-luster way, but I understood the administrators dilemma. There are others to follow, that are directly the administrators fault. However not all administrators were less then helpful. Some were going above the call of duty and did more then what was asked for. They took the time out to sit down and help, not just pass you off as another small problem that could be dealt with in time.   Then comes the problem of cheaters. With no anti-cheat to speak of it was obvious teams would. I wont give any team names on that part as I am no anti-cheat administrator and I have a biased opinion as well I could not tell for sure. But, there were cheaters outside of the game itself.   The first incident:   Was a team that had played 4 matches and then went inactive. Being inactive just ensures that noone can challenge you. Your points stay the same, and you do not lose any for going inactive. When you come back from being inactive, you still have those points so you retake your rightful position. The thing with doing this is, if you have a challenge that was accepted and the date was confirmed etc. and you go inactive these confirmed challenges go away. So you can challenge as many teams as you want, and some will decline and lose points and you can in theory stay on top of the ladder this way. Noone seemed to notice this, and when I brought it to the administrators attention they simple said "there is nothing we can do, we have no choice if teams go inactive or come back because they can simply provide a reason". Which comes to no surprise to me as they are telling the truth, who are they to say the team is lying without a doubt?   That problem didn’t bother me so much, mainly because the team in question never ended up doing anything on the ladder anyway. If that were different I may feel different.   No, my real problem came with one team trying to cheat us out because their schedule didn’t work well with what they had proposed and confirmed as a match date. The date confirmed was "Sep 9th 5:15pm Pacific" so we had contact with the team via the DL PM system as well as a full 1 and a half page IRC log. We showed up to the server aware that the other team was unlikely to show. The didn’t, and I preceded to claim our FF win. I was quite surprised when I went to report the FF win, we had a 0-16 loss versus Devastation/Turmoil. I check the reason why and it says; "Hard to reach, impossible to contact". I laughed to myself and read it again, no mistake that is what it said. I send 3 e-mails to the administrators in charge of the event, with the IRC logs, the SS of us in the server at the correct match time and the overturn the FF loss. Happy as I was, I was a little confused and knew that this wasn’t the end of it.   The following day, we played 3 matches (sadly lost all) but I wasn’t bothered. I hadn’t expected to win many, especially versus hyper!, mTw, and TLR. After this we went to sleep, and I woke up a few hours later and decided to see if Hyper! $ had contacted me. He had, and he had said that Devastation/Turmoil overturned the previously overturned match. I wondered how, but didn’t care because I had the correct proof and there was no way they could win the dispute. I speak to the admin and he says that it got over turned because; "you failed to show up". I found this hilarious, and preceded to explain what had happened, he went to the head administrator and explained exactly what I had just told him. He comes back to me with; "they provided screen shots of them in the server at the correct time". I said I had too, and that this shouldn’t even be a situation because they changed their dispute reason. So it was obvious they were lying, especially after my screen shots and IRC logs.   This did not change the situation. They said that Devastation/Turmoil is a respected team so they opted to side with them. This in itself is a fiasco, but then insulting a teams dignity and intelligence was the bitter icing on the sour cake. I began to argue with the administration of the event, saying that they lied to you and even changed their dispute reason, this was an obvious decision. They did not listen and only after 2 hours of proving my countless points did they decide to act.   Then came the next problem, they only decided to delete the match and give us back the points we lost. This was unacceptable of course. As we were in the right the entire way through the event, and now we get penalized because they are "respected". If that’s the case then I don’t want to be a pro gamer anymore, nor do I want to have anything to do with e-sports. If every league is corrupt and wont follow simple logic then why bother?   To top it off, the rules clearly state    …

Well, we came 4th (out of 6th) which was actually quite well considering we only had 4 hours of practice with our 5 players.  We went 1-2.   It was good for the team especially since one hadent lanned before, and we needed to play together in a tournament to get the feel for it.  It went well so I am happy, very tired though so Im going to bed.

Well my team has the XFX tournament tomorrow (well in 4 hours) and I cant sleep....not becuase im excited, its just another LAN (with a lot on the line albeit but still its just a LAN)  I cant sleep because my nights and days are reversed so..tomorrow may be a rough day ahaha   My team practiced tonight and got a lot of the small problems out of the way.  We did pretty well considering the circumstances involved.   We shall see how tomorrow goes, I will …