1. Smurfing: We have a lot of evidence that points to christian2502 being a smurf. (Side note: temutu is not a smurf, he is an Orinoco player. He uses many accounts, but temutu has always been his main. He practiced for the tourney by playing andes games on various accounts. However, christian2502 is definitely a smurf.)
-No recent games on the christian2502 account. How could he have such good performance in the tourney, holding charlemagen and beating ramex19, when, aside from tourney games and a few 2v2s, he has not played in 5 months?
-Past game performance does not match up with tourney performance. In the past, christian2502 was a PR22-PR23 player, never ranking up above pr23. If you ask anyone who played with him, they will agree that that is his real rank. In the tourney, however, he is playing at a high captain level at least.
2. Lag: We have definite proof that temutu and/or christian2502 lag quite hard. I've played games with charlemagen/_H2O and with AJIV/ramex19, and none of them lagged considerably. However, temutu/christian2502's games against both charlemagen/_H2O and AJIV/ramex19 lagged very hard. This can be seen on _H2O's stream (https://www.twitch.tv/ryanmankle/v/93924934). Lag is unfair because it slows down the game providing slower players an advantage, and units do not react the same in lag as in no lag, for example sometimes melee units simply don't work. The Treaty Team Brawl was intended to be played with little/no lag.
Temutu and christian2502 were not disqualified in the previous round due to the lack of motivation that charlemagen and _H2O had to continue the tournament. I will conclude this by taking this opportunity to reiterate that smurfing in tournaments is unacceptable. It is different from smurfing in normal games because there is cash involved. If you attempt to smurf in a tournament, you will get caught and DQ'd, no one will benefit, you will lose respect, and you will create extra work for admins as they take time to sort the situation out. This applies to both supremacy and treaty.
Edit: I didn't put much thought into this original post because I expected it to be an open and shut case, they smurfed and got DQ'd, but as temutuAoe3 pointed out it is not. See this post for a better explanation:
dicktator_ wrote:Alright, my head is a lot clearer now so I'm going to explain exactly what happened, what went wrong, and why there's so much drama and controversy over this particular disqualification.
What happened: We had sufficient reason to believe christian2502 (and possibly temutu as well) were smurfs. These reasons included no games on the christian2502 account in the past 5 months, a sudden drastic improvement in performance compared to previous games on the account, and use of proxy IPs/VPNs by both temutu and christian2502. As smurfing goes directly against one of our rules, the tourney admins unanimously decided to disqualify christian2502 and temutu.
Where we as tourney admins went wrong: While I still believe the punishment to be fitting of the crime, the execution of the punishment could have been much better:
-We did not give the users on temutu or christian2502 a chance to give their side of the story. We DQ'd temutu and christian2502 without warning and without attempting to reach out to them. AJIV and ramex19 had a say in the final decision, so, for fairness purposes, we should have given temutu and christian2502 that same opportunity. It's likely that the result punishment would have been the same, but by giving them a chance to have a say the decision would not be so biased and one sided. Also worth mentioning is that those within ESOC are for the most part aware that smurfing generally results in immediate disqualifications (this can be seen in the supremacy tournaments), but it might not be obvious to those outside of ESOC.
-We cited lag as a reason for the disqualification. There is absolutely nothing in the rules that says lag should lead to a disqualification. Furthermore, we did not have the "definite proof" that I claimed we had that temutu and christian2502 were the sole cause of lag, as can be seen by the screenshot with ramex19's yellow ping.
-We didn't any rules regarding player lag. Player lag can ruin games and give some teams a disadvantage, but we should have had some kind of pre-set rule or procedure on how to determine who is lagging and how to handle it.
-We did not change the rules to reflect the change in streaming policy. I still think it was unfair to compare a discrepancy in rules regarding streaming policy to blatant smurfing, but the point that temutuAoe3 made still stands. The moment we decided to allow Gichtenlord and _H2O to stream their tourney games, we should have updated the rules to reflect the change in streaming policy.
-We waited too long to take action. It was obvious after the game against charlemagen and _H2O that their opponents were most likely smurfs. We should've looked into it and taken action immediately after that game and prior to the game against AJIV and ramex19, regardless of whether or not _H2O was interested in a rematch.
Hopefully we can learn from our mistakes here when running treaty tournaments in the future.
My offering: (This does not in any way represent the opinions of other admins). Here is what I am willing to do to make up for errors in judgement on behalf of myself and other admins. If the real users of temutu and christian2502 say who they are, and that they are willing to rematch, I will attempt to convince AJIV, veni, and the other admins to grant them a rematch. I can't guarantee that they will agree to it, but I'll do my best to convince them.
That said... smurfing in tournaments is still wrong. It has detrimental effects on the tourney as a whole, including but not limited to that it fucks up seeding (players are seeded based on ELO) and that it gives the smurfs an unfair advantage in that their opponents have no idea what they're up against. We made errors in judgement when handling this smurfing case but the biggest error of judgement was the decision to smurf in the first place. If the real users behind temutu and christian2502 had just played on their mains none of this would have happened.