[TSL] TL Punishes Cheaters - Page 6

Another lurker here, and I have to wonder about the decision made here. The punishments outlined here are incredibly more severe than punishments for comparable (or worse) offenses in other sports. Take the steroid scandals in American professional baseball, for example--the punishment is generally suspension for about half a season, which is like two or three months if you take the Starcraft equivalent? Something like that.

And the way I see it, using performance enhancing drugs is a much worse offense than ladder abuse, primarily because of the different effects. If a person conspires with another to get a couple free wins, it doesn't give him an inherent advantage over other players. Obviously it's an awful thing to do, since cheating in this way to qualify prevents another person from qualifying legitimately. But imagine, if this person cheats to get into the top48, and then wins the TSL, he has still proven himself to be the most skilled player in the tournament (as long as you trust the tournament structure to find the best player out of all entrants). Ladder abuse does not provide an inherent advantage over opponents in-game, and so a person who wins the TSL even while abusing would still "deserve" it in the sense that they were the best player in the tournament. Meanwhile, consider steroids, which artificially improve a player's ability and provide an inherent advantage against other players. If a person taking steroids wins a sport tournament or breaks a record, then it was not his skill that did it--it was the artificial improvement from his drugs.

That's not to say I think cheating should go unpunished, however. Disqualification from the TSL and a ban from official events for six months seems reasonable to me. But an effective ban from the biggest foreign event for two or three years seems unnecessarily harsh, especially for those players who have proven themselves valuable members of the community (I don't know if any have, but the fact that I recognize several of those names when I don't follow Starcraft all that seriously suggests to me that at least a couple are valuable community members). When you compare the reaction to abuse here to the reaction to greater abuse in a bigger sport (e.g., baseball), the community here seems to revile cheating at a level much higher than the other sport's fans. Honestly it's puzzling to me, I was genuinely shocked at how immediately the community unanimously decided that everyone who abused the TSL ladder (even for just three wins) was absolute trash and the scum of the earth.

I don't mean to be confrontational here, I'm just having a difficult time believing that these decisions are reasonable. Maybe it's because I'm really not that involved in Starcraft, I just follow both the professional and foreign scenes casually. I won't complain about the punishments; I was just surprised at their severity. Granted I was also surprised that about a quarter of the tournament candidates cheated in some way, but that begs the question of "Why was cheating so tempting that 25% of the top players on the ladder would resort to it?" When you've got that many people deciding that cheating is the best option for them, I can't help but wonder if an outside force pressured some of the players into doing things they wouldn't do otherwise. As to what that outside force is, beats me. I'm just throwing out considerations.

But anyway, this post has gone on too long. I just wanted to chime in from the point of view of a neutral person who does disagree with the punishment decisions. I don't think it's unreasonable to believe that a significant number of people feel the same way I do, but just don't say anything because there's nothing to be gained from it. Those who are especially angered by abuse would be more likely to post about it, I think, than those of us who just find it a disappointment. Regardless, I'm glad to see that something was done, even if I disagree with the severity of the action taken. If the TSL, and Starcraft in general, are to be made "legitimate" in the eyes of society as a whole, then cheating does need to be strictly monitored and dealt with. Thanks for putting on the tournament, and I'm really looking forward to it.