I dont understand this ban.

This appears to be the match in question: http://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/545459

The teams are as follows:

Thrankos + Mystx

vs.

LordofTrolls + TheBogdanoffs

The spectators are:

PanchoVilla + Wonkey (Both of the same clan as team LordofTrolls)

The game is on Intersection.

The game starts with Team Thrankos (NorthWest) discussing their opening strategy.

Team LordofTrolls (SouthEast) is silent at this time on in-game chat.

Just before the game starts, Thrankos expresses his belief that SouthEast will be getting help from spectators.

Just after the game starts, team southeast executes the buildup to an ogre drop. Team northwest splits up, with one player staying in base and another expanding.

When two ogres have been completed, lordoftrolls flies them both exactly at Mystx's factory on the southwestern hill. Cursor tracking reveals that his attention remains there, clearly expecting something to come up there, rather than preparing to send the transports onward towards team northwest's spawn point.

I'm not an admin or the person who handed out this ban, but to me it seems deserved.

Blackdutchie

1: Having overly suspicious players doubting that we might get "help" from spectators is not a proof, just pure speculation perhaps based on their own experience using such cheating techniques

2: We are silent and so what? We have been experimenting all sort of drops and trolling techniques all weekend and I invite you AND the Admin to have a look before making such conclusions.

3: I was micro-ing the units to avoid enemy's sight. I could have went north/west or west/north, it was a 50/50 chance. And got literally surprised to see a dude putting his factory that close to our base, and just instantly dropped the Ogres! (Believe it or not, you just need to press "D" on your keyboard).

It's that simple!

And most importantly, we have played numerous MM yesterday with NO ONE complaining except this guy!

His strategy failed, and he raged. I understand that it can be humiliating to lose crushed by an Ogre drop but he should have been more fair play and accept his defeat.

Finally, I was expecting the admins to follow the rules! Admins are supposed to be FAIR and base their judgment only on ACTUAL facts, not speculations. If anyone raging can just report the winning team and accuse them without proof of cheating don't expect the ZK community to grow.

So again, I'm asking whoever banned us: WHERE ARE THE PROOFS?

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand.... what is that about?

PENALTY: Abusing other players
Cannot spectator chat
Muted
Issued on: 5/27/2018 2:39:37 AM (35 hours ago)
Expires on: 5/29/2018 2:39:37 AM (0d 12h remaining)

katastrophe Please, don't try to deviate the conversation on something totally unrelated. It's inappropriate.

As for the spectating issues, we have been asking for a delay in MM for a long time.

We have played many MM vs veteran players and NEVER complained nor reported anyone when a Pyro seemed to have a "sixth sense" and find the exact right spots that hurt. Nor when a Widow seemed to be blessed with the capacity to "smell" a cloaked commander and find him in seconds to stun him, etc. We simply assumed the good faith of the players. Never speculated, raged nor made false accusations.

Again, I'm still waiting for an Admin to give tangible proofs for our ban.

hokomoko enjoys this name :-)

I don't understand what all the fuss is about to be honest... we were gonna drop them with ogres and unfortunately for Mystx his com was where we flew over and this fuss about the reaction time? Give me a break, if you are paying attention and not in a coma you will drop on time, especially after doing this several times. We've been clan training all weekend in matchmaking and teams games, and having clan members watch us in 2v2/3v3 is great training. Sadly I think that Mystx had let his emotions get the better of him after losing, understandable but look at the mess we are all in now as a result.

Spec cheating is still a problem I agree, from an outsiders' perspective it's entirely possible we did that, and the people that do spec cheat probably do it with unassociated alt accounts watching so we wouldn't know about it. Maybe there can be some changes to the system instead?

- How about a time delay for spectators? They can only see 5 behind live gameplay?

- Remove spectators from ranked matchmaking? Yes it's nice to have live training, but if we want to eliminate speccheating I suppose this is the most sure way? The next best thing we could do is to analyse replays after a match to train... it's not as great though.

Watched the replay. It looks intensely suspicious. I think you can expect to be treated with suspicion when your username is LordofTrolls, your commander name is Troll, you have clan mates spectating the game and your blind all-in is directly perfectly to where it needs to go. I'd feel fairly confident in calling you out on this.

On the other hand, I legitimately don't think a ban is the correct response here. This is a problem with the game, not the players - rules in competitive games should always be designed with the assumption they will be abused.

I think a good approach might be to limit the spectator view of players who are in a party to only the LoS of the team containing the other members of their party (where all members of that party are on the same team), and introducing a time delay to spectator view. Wouldn't need to be long, maybe 5 seconds. That would make ambiguous situations and accusations of spec cheating like this less common, without reducing the usefulness of watching your clan mates play for training purposes. The replay will always be avaliable afterwards if you need the perspective of both sides.

What’s like or dislike got to do with it?

Harvey if you have an issue with me, you should bring this up in the correct channels rather than derailing the thread. That would be civil, thank you.

Ivory King in matchmaking, that proposal would need to be modified as spectators were outside the party... it would be better to make it clan-based, so that any clan members can only view LoS of their fellow clan members, however that would get difficult if you ended up having multiple clan members on opposing teams. Time delay is a must-have though.

What kind of proof do you imagine can be brought?