Is that a joke? The only time I did not submit my POV was at the end of Season 3 when I was kicked out of my house, I'm sure people that have been around a while remember the gotfrag drama. It clearly states on the email I received that I was found to be "cheating during a match", not failure to provide POV demos.

They reviewed SEVERAL of my DEMOS from UGC LEAGUE PLAY (it says so right in the email). I turned in every fucking demo they asked for in Season 5 which was about three. I even have the emails still to prove it. What a joke of a league; lying butthurt admins that can't handle getting destroyed.

ugc admins are corrupt as fuck. he was bullshitting you when he told you that.

+fragged Sal to bring him back to 0. Don't shoot the messenger.

But it sounds like he really buys it off only the ugc admin's statement. The tone is based off the one testimony he has instead of all the people's inputs. You can't say that what Sal said isn't biased against marisa, and that's what the -frag is for. I mean I don't know what the whole story is, but Sal's wording isn't that great.

^ I'm talking to marissa about it right now.

Sal's wording is only as bad as how you read it. The damning evidence of Marissa's email was presented after Sal's post, Sal didn't know. Maybe if he was aware of it before hand, he would have pressed Hein on the issue. If I were him, with his knowledge, and in his situation, I would trust what someone told me IRL over facts that I didn't know.

I wouldn't worry about it. I shouldn't be discussing situations such as this without the whole story.

Edit: Hein wasn't specifically discussing the m4risa ban with me, it was more of an offhand comment that I misinterpreted. All he said on the subject at QuakeCon was that m4risa had had the demos requested 3 times, not that m4risa had failed to turn them in all 3 times. So that's my bad for making shit up.

It's okay Sal, I thought Marisa was hacking too until I heard things from UGC admins which convinced me otherwise. It is fairly obvious they banned Marisa for no real reason with no real proof, it looks really bad, reminds me of ETF2L AC team when BeaVerN got banned where league admins with little experience were banning people on whims.

But this has nothing to do with the invite rules being removed. Just want to point out my team seems to be the only one in the top 10 of Platinum (other than bfl) than don't have an invite player on our roster and we could recruit some or form a team with some.

Sure, just throw away all that history Hildreth! You asshole...

;)

ever heard of bonus?

Completely inaccurate. In season 3, Marisa was accused of cheating and we requested his POV demos. Conveniently, he was "kicked out of his house" once we started asking for them and was unable to provide any POV's. This caused some level of punishment and put on our "watch" list. I can't remember specifically what was done because I wasn barely active/involved with UGC at the time. Then, in season's 5 + 6 we had requested and received several POV demos throughout season and found obvious instances of hacking in the ExJedi vs hl.tf2 game and he was banned accordingly. Hopefully Marisa starts off season 8 without using hacks and plays straight up.

We don't ban people because we do not like them. It just doesn't work that way, I'm sorry to disappoint all you conspiracy theorists. We barely have enough time to get normal league duties finished let alone set up some grand corruption scandal. We really don't care about the trolls as much as you think we do.

I also find it somewhat comical how this is brought up in an completely unrelated thread. A lot of people complained about the invite limit and the second we fix it people start complaining about something else. Get's old.

It's amazing how garbage can spew even more garbage.

I was asked for POV demos during our first match with Lonely Hearts in Season 3 where I played very well, and they were submitted without issues. Then toward the end of Season 3, I am kicked out of my house and I did not have my computer for sixty days. The email you sent to me was after I had started to go offline for 60 days and was on the same Monday I was supposed to have another critical playoff match, why the fuck would I go offline before you sent the email while at the same time on match day? How the fuck was I supposed to foresee you sending me an email wanting POV demos when I had already been kicked out and offline? As for getting kicked out, transgender hate is real. Especially from excessively religious Mormons such as my mother who just couldn't stand the changes I was going through.

I remember you bitching to Hildreth because I gained captaincy for Team USA in the ETF2L Highlander Nations Cup. In return, he asked you for proof regarding the incident in Season 3 of UGC; you were unable to give any proof because there wasn't any fvcking proof.

I am wondering if you are going to be stupid enough to pull the same stunt again when my team crushes you (along with your overbloated ego) 5-0 within seconds this season.

"fvcking"

GOTFRAG REVIVAL 2012

but yeah what the ugc highlander admins are clearly missing is that, even IF you buy the idea that transparancy is impossible for an AC team (because it would alert hackers to what cheats were no longer viable to use etc.), it's just ridiculous to not even be up front about who is on the AC TEAM, what experience they have looking at hacks, etc.

as Hildreth pointed out regarding the Beavern fiasco in ETF2L, many of the AC admins at the time were not actually particularly experienced players and should not have held such a position. in fact, later a new AC team was brought in, and the first thing they did was reverse Beavern's ban and write a damning letter to the previous admin team. it reads as follows:

" Let us start by apologising for how long this has taken. It is utterly indefensible that an innocent player and his team have been hung out to dry for two seasons having been convicted of an act that he did not perform. We are utterly disgusted by the conduct that we have seen from some members of the previous AC team, and we will not justify it for one second. This was a mistake, a big mistake, and there are no excuses for what happened, but the best that we can do is learn from it, and make things right again.

You might say that it is very easy for us to criticise our predecessors, as we weren’t part of the team at the time, but we intend to make good on our promises of improvement. We are very committed to making sure that the process is much fairer and consistent for everyone that chooses to make ETF2L the place that they play TF2, for example, we are currently rewriting anti-cheat protocol, and we intend to shortly set up a documented system for reviews of existing bans.

A human-patrolled anti-cheat system can never be flawless, but we can certainly strive to be better."

when you have a team of human beings working as the AC team, it's important that they are publicly known, qualified, and most of all UNBIASED. if I recall correctly, many of the AC admins dealing with marisa's team were either on the team she beat or good friends with them. that's just completely ridiculous. unless someone is just excessively blatant, there will always be an element of the unknown involved in these things, and if that void is filled with bias and cronyism, things go wrong. I would prefer if the type of hack (aimbot, wallhack, triggerbot) that the person was being accused of was made clear, as well as the demos and ticks made public, but if that's not possible there at least needs to be a professional, unbiased AC team, not a group of old friends with a stake in the results who sit in a mumble channel together and work each other up over nothing.

Are these demos still floating around? I asked Marissa but SHE formatted her computer/re-installed steam a while back and didnt keep them. If they are so obvious, I'd love to see them.

MustardOverlord's post is eXcellent, I particularly agree with offending demos/ticks being made public. Any ban thrown down should be "Obvious" enough that the majority of public replies will be in agreement with the ban.

Check out this clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LBla4KMhMw

On one hand its a little suspicious. On the other hand it could be a natural tick in how Powah aims/shoots. Its a ridiculous killing spree and looks absurd, but thats just how it goes sometimes when you're a great competitor and playing a lot of games.

at the risk of sounding a little trollish/inflammatory, if the admins don't make themselves, their qualifications for catching cheaters, and the actual evidence of hacking clear, they could be as incompetent as this, for all we know:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CyFXR9qE-kM

Any admin who is directly involved in a dispute of any kind recluses themself from the dispute decision process which is what happened in this instance. Most of our admins have great relationships with all of our teams so its quite ridiculous to say "oh, that admin is friends with X who was beat by this person's team so they are biased".

It is and has been our policy for 10 years not to release any evidence used in hacking disputes. All it does is give hackers more ways to go around our cheat detection methods as well as become fodder for trolls and long flaming posts. If you want to look over the demo yourself, feel free to ask the accused for their demo. Wait.. that one was lost too huh? Jeeze what a coincidence. If you want to debate this any further please speak with the league owner, Fornaught as this is and has been his policy since the early TFC days.

And quite frankly mustard, we don't owe you any explanation whatsoever. First, you are rude to our admins which makes me forget you exist. Second, who are you to challenge us, volunteer league admins, about our experience and qualifications? We all volunteer our personal time to do as much as we can for the league. If you don't like what we do then don't play there, simple as that.

^ I hear what you're saying, but at the same time this all happened behind closed doors, so how are we supposed to trust that those with conflicts of interest were actually removed?

Supreme court judges are supposed to recluse themselves from cases but don't necessarily do that, Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia have been accused of such behavior.

Since you said people reclused themselves from the situation, can you describe who it was who pulled themselves from being involved in the decision, and who it was who made the decision?

As for owing mustard eXplanations, how about owing your own community an eXplanation for how/why these issues are being handled? I appreciate the volunteer time you and other league admins are putting forward, but by being in a leadership position you should eXpect to have to answer questions/challenges regarding your leadership.

Most of the things we do are transparent but disputes of any kind are always handled behind closed doors. It's just the way we do things and have always done things. We run the league and have every right to keep certain things in confidence between the admin team.

The match was ExJedi vs hl.tf2. The leader of ExJedi at the time was Hein, who is also an admin. He brought forth the dispute just as any other team leader does in these cases and after that had zero involvement with the rest of the cheating dispute. He did not vote on the final decision or try and sway any of us. We are very conscious of this.

I am not going to list the members of our anti cheat team because quite frankly, we all get trolled/flammed enough and I am not going to throw names out there for people to be harassed.

We run an online gaming league for fun. We are not doing this for fame, glory, or money its just something we enjoy doing because we love TF2 and the community. I am not sure what it takes for you to trust us. All I can tell you is we have an incredibly caring, professional, and trustworthy admin team that I am proud to be a part of. Despite what some on here think, we honestly do not attempt to screw anyone over individually or try and create scandals and corruption. Just think about this.. we've probably had 30 trolls/haters attack us in the past 2 years alone and that number is being conservative. IF we were so corrupt as some accuse, and ban people we simply don't like, wouldn't there be more bans? We have like 2. It just doesn't add up. We just do not operate that way.

As far as owing to our community.. I take questions/concerns all the time privately. If mustard, you or anyone else has questions he is welcome to add me and we can discuss them. But just become one or two people ask about a cheating dispute doesn't mean our entire 5,000 player community is in an uproar. It's sorta taking things out of context a little bit don't you think?

I agree with you. It is a small number of people here who are still upset about this decision and how it was handled. I disagree'd when you phrased it like this:

Mustard was positing questions whose answers impact the entire UGC community. It's an issue that UGC needs to clearly eXpress how they feel about it. Your post above does clarify some of the league's stances.

I appreciated how you brushed him off because he was rude to you, then you proceeded to be rude to him. Should have just left that entire last paragraph in #46 out.

Just because you guys volunteer your time and effort doesn't make you guys qualified to find cheaters. Just saying, I know people who were inherently swayed by people or just extremely biased against single players all the time. Pub servers that skillban are prime examples. Also, not being able to back up bans with proof because it might help hackers hide future actions is also really ridiculous. If it's a triggerbot, there's not much changing the fact that it shoots when you cross over an enemy (or head in some cases). If it's in aimbot, it's not going to change the fact it's going to target someone (it can be hidden and/or smoothed, but I'm betting hacks have been made that way for a while anyways). Wallhacks being found are completely dependent on how the player chooses to act with them and are never really conclusive. Although UGC is obviously the forefront grounds for cheaters to figure out how to avoid getting caught, I think we can handle getting evidence from the matches that did have a POV demo.

On one hand you say there are a handful of disgruntled players and then now whenever someone poses a question to us it "impact's the entire UGC community". Overblown to say the least.

Thanks for the advice eXtine.

Like ive said many times before, the accused is welcome to provide their POV demo to you or anyone else who ask and then you can make your own judgement.

Yes.

There are a handful of actively disgruntled players over how the admins and the AC team handled Marissa's ban. Regardless of whether the community at large is disgruntled or content, the question of how the UGC admins are handling AC issues impacts the entire UGC community.

Overblown?

Yes.

Any other questions or concerns you would like to discuss?

I just don't see an actual argument for why the anti-cheat team is run the way it is. what are the ACTUAL advantages of it?

let's break it down:

pros of not releasing the demos/ticks publicly and of keeping the AC team's identity a secret:
-prevents the admin team from being harassed (not really that big a deal, if it's true that there's just a handful of disgruntled people- you'd have to live with maybe 5 annoying forum posts, it's not like anyone is gonna give out your social security number or anything)
-"the way we've been doing it for 10 years" (not a true benefit to the system, doesn't really matter either way that it's been going on for that long)
-"if we release the hacks publicly then hackers in the future will know what to avoid" (brownymaster already handled this point well, but I'll also add that even if this were a good argument, it wouldn't go to the question of a private AC team)

cons of not releasing the demos/ticks publicly and of keeping the AC team's identity a secret:
-no way of knowing whether the team is qualified or not
-no way of knowing whether the team is biased or not- based on their opinions of the accused/accuser, which team they prefer, etc.
-no way of knowing whether the system of examining demos is flawed or not (as in, if the opinions of some admins are allowed to influence the opinions of other admins or not)
-no way of knowing whether the hacks were blatant, murky, or blatantly NOT there
-marginalizes the opinion of others in the community- if there are people who are really good at spotting cheating who AREN'T on the AC team, their opinion is entirely meaningless if the entire system is hidden, despite the fact that their input can be valuable

you can assure people you're unbiased all you want, but if you just break down what actually happened, the following points are clear:
-the individual banned was not popular in the community
-the person banned was running a team stacked with invite players that was beating a lot of the traditional better teams in hl
-the team they beat is well known as an "admin team", and the team leader who complained about it is an admin themself
-many of the admins are extremely close-knit and have known each other for like 10 years, and were good friends with the leader of said team
-no ticks/demos were publicly released
-in no other league, including etf2l which also contains a human AC team that does demo reviews, was marisa ever banned for hacking, even when her demos were examined

after all that, you can't possibly believe that the people who are suspicious of the whole ordeal are out of line, overly cynical, or anything like that

I know you think I really dislike you so my opinion is biased, but this was actually the initial event that MADE me dislike the admin team, combined with seeing you overreact at any and every piece of constructive criticism ever given to you.

There was once an awful thread on the UGC forums where UGC admins publicly posted a YouTube video of a pub player on the forums and asked the community whether or not the person was cheating. The entire community said that the player was not cheating, even after a new video with wireframes enabled was posted by an admin. The admin that created the thread claimed that they knew the person in the video and that they were cheating. They tried to use this as a way to show that the "tf2 community" knows absolutely nothing about cheaters regardless of the video being voted "legit" almost completely unanimously aside from the small handful of admins that said otherwise. The thread was turned into a huge joke and was not just locked, but completely actually deleted. Here are the two videos that were posted.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0n_TIIEcyk (wireframes off)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNGbnyNFhMI (wireframes on)

joke

infinite when are you guys going to admit that you fucked up and banned a player with no evidence? it is seriously embarrassing to see your posts trying to defend your actions when everyone knows you made a mistake. etf2l realized they fucked up and unbanned one of their players, why can't you do the same?

can we please have another league pick up highlander? i love playing it but the admin corruption in ugc is such a joke...

Mustard: Not sure what to say to you man. You have an opinion and form your arguments around it and stick to your guns which I respect. One thing that shows me you have little understanding of detecting cheaters though is because you feel we should release our evidence which will in turn show our methods. There are methods out there to detect cheaters a lot of people do not know about and releasing this would be detrimental. I've asked you multiple times why Marisa is not sending you his POV demo to review. All the evidence gathered was from that so why don't you review it and make your own judgement? Oh wait you can't because its "lost" just like those season 3 POV demos were. All I can say is I disagree with your logic and could exchange paragraph after paragraph with you but there really isn't a point.

Marisa: The thread was not deleted, but moved to the leaders forum as a case study about the difficulty detecting cheaters in TF2. The person using the cheat was using an OBVIOUS wallhack. This was made even clearer for folks after using wireframes. While not incredibly scientific, it shows a lot of people do not know what to look for in cheat detection.

Harbleu: Not much to say to you either. You are always piping in after your buddy marisa makes a post or this cheating thing comes up. Maybe you guys are friends or something.. wait you are so how are you unbiased? And by "everyone" you mean 3-5 people or what?

My last post on this topic. The past aside, I am looking forward to you all playing in UGC (including a cheat free marisa) and hope you enjoy this season.

m4risa getting +fragged? We're definitely not in NATF2 anymore, Toto.

^^I read that ESEA was considering starting a HL league. It was probably just some random rumor, but it's something to think about.

So you got someone to wall hack to prove your crusade, then told him to act like he wasn't hacking therefore making it ridiculously impossible to figure it out or not, then try to claim on this biased-blind test that the community isn't as great and mighty as the admins who were told that they were hacking in the first place. Hm, that doesn't sound incredibly retarded and backhand and why everyone is making fun of you guys.

How about this: we start sending you in demos of wallhackers and legit players and see how many you can get right? I'm sure we can get ametrine or another hacker to prove that you couldn't tell a wallhacker from a legit person either. Double blind it for ALL groups.

edit: wrong quote

I have already explained everything, I only have POV demos of myself from the last four months. I have uninstalled Steam as well as Team Fortress 2 several times in the past whenever I get upset about something; it causes me to lose my POV demos. I know that UGC used to have a page on their website where there would be a large public banlist of players that had previously cheated in your TFC league with attached proof of cheating publicly provided.

I don't understand why I am the cause of a sudden change in policy.