ESOCommunity

Hey everyone,

Earlier this evening, we witnessed an incredible series between Tit and snowww in the final round of the New World Championships qualifiers. This was a high-stakes match, perhaps even one of the most important matches in the history of Age of Empires 3, since the winner of this series won a ticket to the $4000 LAN event this July. The score was 3-3 when the players went into the 7th and final game on Florida when allegations of smurfing came to our attention.

We can confirm, by investigating the history of IP-addresses of relevant ESO accounts and forum accounts, that the final game on Tit's account was played by kynesie.

Several details in the pregame and the gameplay raised our suspicions. Our team has been hosting tournaments for years now and this is not the first time we've seen signs of cheating. It saddens me personally to see yet another instance of cheating and I would like to reiterate that ESOC and EscapeAOE do not tolerate cheating of any kind and that we will continue to take a hard stance against any kinds of cheating in our tournaments.

In 2015, we witnessed the birth of ESOC and the subsequential growth of Age of Empires 3 tournaments, and 2019 has already started stronger than any other year with the upcoming LAN event. But as ESOC grows, it’s important to consider the substantial impact an individual player has on the health and stability of the game and the integrity of tournaments. All this does is hurt the tournament, the viewers, and, ultimately, the game itself.

All together, the information we have collected makes us uncomfortable in continuing any involvement with these individuals. Therefore, we are sad but forced to announce that Tit and kynesie are both disqualified from the NWC tournament. This means that snowww and tabben have qualified for the Top 8 LAN event. Tit and kynesie are both indefinitely banned from tournament play.

Thank you for understanding this hard decision. We will try to answer any questions that may be left, and we would like to ask everyone to keep the discussion in this thread. All other threads related to this incident will be locked/removed.

The Tournament Admins.

Sad

Welp

GG NO RE

F

F

Send hpc for tit to lan!

This is a sad day for the AoE3 community.

Can walls be buffed now?

@tit @Kynesie I feel let down :( You know I'm a big fan of you guys for a long time.

Good job by the ESOC and Escape team doing what is required in exceptional circumstances.

Bring on the LAN.

What's really sad is that I feel Tit could've won it on his own, but now we'll never know.

I believe that cheaters should face the same punishment that @evilcheadar wants to inflict on people who don't like seafood: they must be flayed with crab legs.

It's very sad to see that some of the top players in this community have no respect for the integrity of the tournaments hosted here. A huge amount of work goes into maintaining the site, organizing tournaments, and casting matches, not to mention the community's generosity in contributing to prize pools. There are a limited number of expert players of this game, and losing the variety of play that Tit and kynesie brought to the table is undoubtedly a tragic loss. However, if they are not willing to respect the tournament's integrity, it is clear they have no place in tournaments with so much at stake.

Did they really think they'd get away with it? It was so obvious. Kynesie has such a unique style of game-play, and tit executed it perfectly. Really wonder what was going through their head.

BUT WHY DO THAT!!!!!??:(

lol what shocks me most about this is that they must actually have believed noone would find out. that was the most obvious cheat ever, they may have the same playstyle but completely different mechanics, IP check was not even necessary tbh

Fuck, I was saying in the chat that we shouldn't spread accusations against players :(

charlemango wrote:Fuck, I was saying in the chat that we shouldn't spread accusations against players :(

we still shouldn't tbh

Is evidence of these accusations going to shared?

Kynesie trying to pull-trick Tit at the lan.
tabben and snowww got alt-d

how they arent abusable mechanics ???

very dissapointed that they did try something like this...

gustavusadolphus wrote:Is evidence of these accusations going to shared?

You can't share IPs due to privacy concerns.

oh tit you put it to the last game of the series. why did you have to cheat ? Pretty sure after winning 3 games you could have won the last game aswell. But its the right decision to ban both of them. They are both equally guilty in my eyes. Maybe it should be clarified for non native speakers that they are actually not perma banned.

imagine being in vietnam rn and not knowing the world has gone nutz