OU BW OU Tiering Discussion

[Finchinator]

I think a lot of the issues within the community fall on two groups:
- leadership, myself most notably
- the personnel involved with the cheating

It is on me to not be as distanced and set the right example. A lot of the time I am not in touch with newer players or groups. I think we can work together and things will naturally come together a lot better.

Obviously the people who cheated have some stake in this, too. They shouldn’t have acted this way.

I do not think a few first-time bad actors should ruin laddering reqs for everyone. I think ladder reqs can be good and offer an opportunity to a lot of people who maybe don’t play specific tournaments to get reqs.

Inclusivity is a good thing when done properly. We should be a welcoming community with ground for opportunity. Ladder reqs permit that.

 

[peng]

I broadly agree with Finch.

Ladder reqs were a positive step in the last suspect. It gave players including ABR, excal, and luck>skill the ability to vote, who clearly should be part of the voter pool, as well as several of our ladder community who are knowledgeable but dont always have the availability to play in tournaments. The second clause of our tiering policy also says we should be catering to both tournament players and ladder players, so it feels like ladder inclusion should be continued.

There are some flaws that have been exposed this time around but I hope we can try to improve the system rather than get rid of it altogether.

 

[Excal]

i've always had gripes with the way we do tiering suspects on this website. but no matter how you spin it, any methods are going to come with crippling flaws. ladder requirements are remarkably easy to obtain; it's mainly a time commitment situation. and most people aren't gonna bother putting in the time to ladder for a bw suspect unless they care enough about the test's outcome.

as someone who recently benefited from the ladder suspect format, i have to agree with gtg/others that ladder suspects in old gens are not the best way to go about being a catch all to include voters who may have missed x, y, z tournament but have enough knowledge/skill to vote. this is not a knock on anyone btw (nor am i claiming that those who've gotten requirements for this test do not deserve to vote). rather than having a ladder, council should have x number of slots of knowledgeable players that they can nominate to have voting rights (with approval from ogc leader/administration). there's always gonna be a couple of edge cases, and the council will have better judgment over who should vote than an open ladder.

on another note, having observed the bw community discord over a decent amt of time, i would say it's more toxic than that of dpp/adv/rby and other old gens, but consists of a lot of genuine & nice people. the group that participated in larger scale cheating has contributed to the toxicity by demonstrating childish behavior in the community discord, on the forums, and most definitely in their cheating server. their overall behavior, and especially what we saw in this suspect test, is nothing short of unacceptable and admonishable to a high degree. their names and punishment should be publicized in an administrative decision thread somewhere, and concerns about this suspect test's legitimacy should be heightened. this isn't just one person asking someone to throw them a bone and forfeit -- this is significantly larger scale cheating considering the suspect test's size.

tl;dr
- consider alternatives to ladder reqs, like council voting nomination process
- those who cheated should have their names and punishment publicized due to the operation's severity