Faded's Predictions Punishment

[Memento Mori]

@Swanty First, thanks for responding to many of the points made.

A ban/suspension wasn't really considered as part of a potential punishment as we saw nothing malicious about this, it was his first punishment and there was nothing that would negatively affect other users or teams.

This is mindboggling to me. Cheating is always malicious. Everyone loses when they play with or against a cheat. It cheapens the game for all those involved. Faded's teammates were among those advocating for a bigger punishment, as was someone who (I think?) gets on really well with him. As you know, in punishments where there are any shades of grey, people usually jump to the defence of their friends/teammates. Given how heavy-handed one famous recent punishment was, this looks incredibly tame and as others have pointed out, the precedent in cheating cases has been a larger punishment. Plus as you mention later, he did cheat another user out of their money.

Noble was suspended for 2 weeks for modifying claim threads and covering his tracks to gain 73 TPE, but it was his second offense. All other instances of cheating haven't had suspensions attached. If Faded had a previous punishment and clearly hadn't learned from the last time, then yes a suspension would have been on the cards.

However, it's since come to light that some of his casino winnings came from a user bet where he likely knew that he was guaranteed to win. I definitely consider cheating someone out of their own money a step above everything else so far, so I would support additional action.

I think what Faded did was at least as bad as what Noble did, personally I think it was much worse. Noble abused his powers to cheat his way to 73 TPE and Faded 'only' did the same for 44 TPE, but the 128m that Faded cheated his way to from the casino/user bets is enough to fund max earning for about six seasons. He'd still be spending this money on training and equipment on his next player. It's an insane amount of money. I wrote 40,000 words of media in my first few months on the site, and I have never had close to that amount of money in my league account.

When you do something like this, I don't think it matters whether or not it's your first offence.

Who knows, though the way it's played out wasn't something we ever expected. Faded was vehemently denying everything even after being informed of the impending punishment and had drummed up support among some users that HO were going after him, so if anything, I expected a stout defense from him and his supporters questioning how we could punish someone without any hard evidence. No doubt there would have been a subset of other users that sided with him if there was even a sliver of doubt. The admission of guilt immediately afterwards was unexpected and has changed the narrative completely.

This isn't true. This punishment was posted at 5:52pm in the superior timezone, and Faded admitted it in his retirement thread at 6:26pm. All the replies in the thread for the first 34 minutes were prior to Faded's admission. In those first 34 minutes (among the jokes and memes), we had people calling for a suspension, a ban, people calling the punishment "very light", another person calling for a ban, an "I can't believe there wasn't at least a short ban" and one person saying that it wasn't 100% definitive. Numbers' post pointing out that this was a light punishment compared with the most similar previous case (Noble's) came 2 minutes after the retirement post and 1 minute after Faded linked it, so was probably before seeing it.

The admission of guilt did not change the narrative. The overwhelming response was already that this punishment was very lenient.

Fine amounts are a weird one (both in the ISFL and in real life). For some they're extremely punishing and therefore effective, for others they're a drop in the ocean and aren't a deterrent in the slightest. I would be open to exploring modifying fines to be more along the lines of '$7M or 50% of the user's bank balance, whichever is larger' to make it a better deterrent for all. But will have to see how the rest of HO feel about that one (feel free to share if you have opinions on that or an alternative that works better!).

I don't see it like he's just been told to put the stuff back on the shelf with no repurcussions. I see it as someone saying 'Here Faded, have 2-3 free TPE', and he went out of his way to steal 4 instead. Now that he's been caught, he's not getting the original 2-3 TPE that everyone else got. He's now permanently missed out on 11 weeks worth of predictions that he'll never be able to get again in this player's career. If he'd done them normally, he'd be around 25-30 TPE better off than he was before retiring.

I've grouped these two together as they address a similar point.

Taking into account his casino "winnings", he cheated his way to 128m worth of casino winnings and 44 TPE, the result of which was the removal of 135m and 44 TPE. I asked spreadsheet man what the average predictions score was last night, and if Faded had performed averagely in the weeks where he made his predictions after the video was uploaded, he would've earned 30.352 TPE.

So he's 7m and 30 TPE worse off compared with not cheating.

Let's say tomorrow I phish the Youtube password from someone and start doing the same thing for the same amount of time. I'll assume I don't earn any other TPE for simplicity's sake.

Scenario A: I cheat, and don't get caught. I now have 178m and 1390 TPE.
Scenario B: I cheat, and get caught: I now have 43m and 1346 TPE.
Scenario C: I don't cheat. I have 50m and 1376 TPE.

Do you really think that's a deterrent?

88 was definitely on the table. I personally voted for 44 for a few reasons. One being that even though we knew it was virtually certain that he cheated overall, we could not be certain that he cheated in each one of the 11 instances.

This is a big part of why cheating is so awful. It stops you being able to trust the things in front of you. I don't envy you having to go through this evidence. But this is why you have to punish cheating harshly.

If you're considering cheating, you can probably live with losing your ill-gotten gains. They weren't yours in the first place. That's why cheaters in video games keep making new accounts and continue to cheat. Having something you didn't earn in the first place get taken away isn't a punishment. But the idea you might lose something that you actually earned, because it was impossible to distinguish between the times you cheated and the times you didn't? That's a deterrent.

I want to thank you and @DarknessRising for continuing to engage with the community in these situations, I (and many others) think it's really valuable. But the cycle we seem to find ourselves in recently is that HO makes an unpopular decision, we express our frustration to the two of you, are told that this will be a learning experience and then HO makes an unpopular decision and we do it again. The same 'we didn't expect this reaction' was the response after Kya was removed from her post, and HO has badly misread the community again here. You (as a group) need to get better at understanding the community you represent.

Honestly, I think Faded retiring his player kinda bailed you out here, as the only further punishment left is a site suspension to delay him coming back and recreating (if he even wants to) or issuing him a further fine/job restrictions to put him at more of a disadvantage if he does come back. Him apologising/criticising himself (rightly) garnered some sympathy and stopped the reaction becoming more vitriolic.