#499882
Before I begin, if I misrepresent an argument or fail to mention one that is integral to OP's case here, it is from innocent ignorance or misremembering and not me playing slight of hand. Hopefully I got everything here covered, but if not feel free to bring it up.
So... OP has for years now repeatedly said that Online is never getting anything higher than Masters. The most common reason given is that it is "easier to cheat" on Lackey, followed by the less common "it'd take way too long to do an event". I'd like to respectfully challenge these assertions and make my case here for why we deserve - and can fairly get - the same game experience everyone else does here.
To the 1st argument I submit the following: this isn't a significant enough risk vs physical play to justify the OP's position.
Putting aside that there has never been a reported case of someone intentionally cheating online that I know of, there are some major issues with this argument in practice. All of these theoretical cheating scenarios I've heard involve people saving the game midplay, loading the save in another application, and then using this info to cheat.
Ok, then let's talk about how this actually would work on Lackey for the sadsack who decides a digital trophy is worth destroying the game for everyone. First, what are the only two ways this could be used that I can think of? To skill/ability track, and to look at crew when making random selections so as to force a pull.
The first of these is a issue that could actually occur. Someone could skip the memory component and make a grid of cards on another save that they'd have to resave/reload every new play or so to keep it up to date so they'd know what people had where. This would definitely give them an edge if they took the time and effort to do this. Here's the catch - every time you save it sends both players a quite prominent message informing everyone there who saved and when. The constant manual saving, and then pause to do the work on the second window or whatever they have, would be quite noticeable if done every single attempt and would be very easy to stop with a "no manual saving rule without the other player's consent". I hear some of you say "but what if Lackey crashes and you have no save?!", to which I'd say I've only ever played (a ton) on Lackey and haven't seen a crash/lost game since 2016 or so and I can't even recall the last time someone made a manual save to get around said crashes; I'd also say that it is possible for a judge or other third party to do the occasional saves to avoid this if it was a major concern for you in a major game - again it tells everyone who saves and when. You could also agree to allow players to save at a given time as a backup if you're both absolutely terrified of this, in which case you'd both be aware of it and what info the other player could potentially theoretically get if they take a few minutes to rig it up each time.
What about the second and seemingly more damning issue? Well, when you do a random selection you shuffle your crew and the opponent then drags a card to the required place. This occurs over the course of about a second or two. In order to cheat a random selection in this manner the following would have to occur: You'd wait for the opponent to shuffle to save because if you saved before this you wouldn't actually get any order on who went where. Then you'd have to explain the "Timestamp: Player X saved the game" that occurred immediately after the shuffle - good luck with that one. Then you'd have to load up your save and go into their shuffled crew, flip them, check them all, and then mentally make a note which position the given card(s) are. Meanwhile your opponent, who rightfully is used to random selections taking about 0.2 seconds (at most) after a shuffle for a pull to happen, would have to have the minute or more of you sitting there not doing anything explained to them.
You're not actually supposed to be making any decisions here, just waiting on their Crew Tab for them to hit shuffle and then drag random cards to where they are supposed to go. You can't claim you're thinking because there is nothing to think about, and you can't say you're taking over a minute to navigate to the tab you should already be on because you know a random selection is coming up. This is not a realistic scenario in which one 'easily' gets away with cheating. In fact, it'd probably be less conspicuous and easier to physically lean over the table and look at your opponent's hand irl then do something like this - and I think we all know how well that would go if someone tried it.
So in my opinion the risk of online cheating, to say nothing of the underlying assumption that the only thing holding back us online playing from being cheats is that we don't care about Masters enough, is incredibly overblown, and variously not a real issue or one that is easy to rule around (no manual saving). Cheating just frankly isn't a great excuse, and is not significantly easier to do unnoticed online than it is offline.
Now on to the 2nd - that it'd take way too long to do a Continentals like event (perhaps even months, I've heard!). I submit that this argument is based on a number of assumptions that don't need to necessarily hold true, and are generally made up of surmountable issues.
When we did Masters OP chose to have a game a week, for five or so weeks. This seemed to work out perfectly fine. But for Continentals, let's presume you wanted even more rounds so let's look at how do they do things at high level physical events. Correct me if I'm mistaken, but from what I gather everyone flies/drives in and they set aside a day or so, split up the matches, and run all the games one after the other. We already used to do this - quite frequently - online in the past. They were live tournaments of 3-5 rounds that took several hours (3-5 under the older longer gametime rules) and we all played concurrently with the TD managing time. We generally stopped doing this of late, but for very high level events we could bring this back.
If we work under the assumption that we stopped so that it was easier for people in different timezones to manage to attend, then I don't see why we can't work around the issue. For the absolute highest level events people irl sometimes set aside vacation time and/or even set aside days and hundreds of dollars to take planes to make it to the site (sometimes in a different timezone anyways), staying in hotels or other players' houses. Is it really more inconvenient to set aside a day or two to play an online event at a strange/unusual time for you during your time off? This would be a call for the online community as a whole to make, but even in the worst case scenario I can think of two workarounds - pods/brackets based on timezones (not a fan of this idea but it springs to mind) where the last few matches would be at an agreed upon time by both parties on the second day, or simply mandating that all players must do all their matches at a time of their choosing with 1 day at most between each one. Again, this is all assuming that timezones are the big sticking point here and not that we didn't just move to this model because we felt like it and wanted a more casual atmosphere where people could arrange things in-between real life duties and didn't have to dedicate much time to it.
The other component to this I've heard is that it'd be crazy to have TDs watching all the games for these, and that this plays into the time argument. Well if we held the event live we'd have the TDs easily reachable for questions or rulings while everyone played, and using the spectator system Lackey has and the ability to hop into Discord voice channels at will, the TDs could watch one or more of the games at once and even listen in to them. I admit that hopping between discord chats is not quite as ideal or easy as just walking between tables, but if the online community really wanted this, and a TD or two was willing to do so, I don't think this is an insurmountable obstacle either. Do TDs at physical Continentals observe every single game as they go on at once, or am I correct that they just walk around and keep their eyes and ears open for issues or concerns that might be noticed/get called out? I realize that the ultimate unanswered issue here is "what TD would be willing to do this?" and that if the answer is nobody then this whole issue is kind of moot. But I have hope that someone, or even the CC itself, would be willing to step up for this if they thought it was as possible to carry out as I claim.
Anyways this is super long and I want to hear what you guys think either way, so I'll end my defense here. It is possible that everyone thinks my arguments are terrible or that changing this isn't worth the effort, in which case I'd love to hear you rebut me. However, as an Online exclusive player not being able to take part in anything like Continentals outside of Masters does feel a little ostracizing (tons of articles and threads on what happens at these events practically take over the site when they occur) - especially since one of the major arguments is the assumption that we can't be given the same level of trust physical players get in terms of our willingness to cheat. As time goes on I'm still fairly confident the majority of players in the future will be online players, and for both our and their sake I think it is worthwhile to have at this debate one last time.
So, who's up first?
Edit: Caught and corrected a few spelling/grammar issues.
So... OP has for years now repeatedly said that Online is never getting anything higher than Masters. The most common reason given is that it is "easier to cheat" on Lackey, followed by the less common "it'd take way too long to do an event". I'd like to respectfully challenge these assertions and make my case here for why we deserve - and can fairly get - the same game experience everyone else does here.
To the 1st argument I submit the following: this isn't a significant enough risk vs physical play to justify the OP's position.
Putting aside that there has never been a reported case of someone intentionally cheating online that I know of, there are some major issues with this argument in practice. All of these theoretical cheating scenarios I've heard involve people saving the game midplay, loading the save in another application, and then using this info to cheat.
Ok, then let's talk about how this actually would work on Lackey for the sadsack who decides a digital trophy is worth destroying the game for everyone. First, what are the only two ways this could be used that I can think of? To skill/ability track, and to look at crew when making random selections so as to force a pull.
The first of these is a issue that could actually occur. Someone could skip the memory component and make a grid of cards on another save that they'd have to resave/reload every new play or so to keep it up to date so they'd know what people had where. This would definitely give them an edge if they took the time and effort to do this. Here's the catch - every time you save it sends both players a quite prominent message informing everyone there who saved and when. The constant manual saving, and then pause to do the work on the second window or whatever they have, would be quite noticeable if done every single attempt and would be very easy to stop with a "no manual saving rule without the other player's consent". I hear some of you say "but what if Lackey crashes and you have no save?!", to which I'd say I've only ever played (a ton) on Lackey and haven't seen a crash/lost game since 2016 or so and I can't even recall the last time someone made a manual save to get around said crashes; I'd also say that it is possible for a judge or other third party to do the occasional saves to avoid this if it was a major concern for you in a major game - again it tells everyone who saves and when. You could also agree to allow players to save at a given time as a backup if you're both absolutely terrified of this, in which case you'd both be aware of it and what info the other player could potentially theoretically get if they take a few minutes to rig it up each time.
What about the second and seemingly more damning issue? Well, when you do a random selection you shuffle your crew and the opponent then drags a card to the required place. This occurs over the course of about a second or two. In order to cheat a random selection in this manner the following would have to occur: You'd wait for the opponent to shuffle to save because if you saved before this you wouldn't actually get any order on who went where. Then you'd have to explain the "Timestamp: Player X saved the game" that occurred immediately after the shuffle - good luck with that one. Then you'd have to load up your save and go into their shuffled crew, flip them, check them all, and then mentally make a note which position the given card(s) are. Meanwhile your opponent, who rightfully is used to random selections taking about 0.2 seconds (at most) after a shuffle for a pull to happen, would have to have the minute or more of you sitting there not doing anything explained to them.
You're not actually supposed to be making any decisions here, just waiting on their Crew Tab for them to hit shuffle and then drag random cards to where they are supposed to go. You can't claim you're thinking because there is nothing to think about, and you can't say you're taking over a minute to navigate to the tab you should already be on because you know a random selection is coming up. This is not a realistic scenario in which one 'easily' gets away with cheating. In fact, it'd probably be less conspicuous and easier to physically lean over the table and look at your opponent's hand irl then do something like this - and I think we all know how well that would go if someone tried it.
So in my opinion the risk of online cheating, to say nothing of the underlying assumption that the only thing holding back us online playing from being cheats is that we don't care about Masters enough, is incredibly overblown, and variously not a real issue or one that is easy to rule around (no manual saving). Cheating just frankly isn't a great excuse, and is not significantly easier to do unnoticed online than it is offline.
Now on to the 2nd - that it'd take way too long to do a Continentals like event (perhaps even months, I've heard!). I submit that this argument is based on a number of assumptions that don't need to necessarily hold true, and are generally made up of surmountable issues.
When we did Masters OP chose to have a game a week, for five or so weeks. This seemed to work out perfectly fine. But for Continentals, let's presume you wanted even more rounds so let's look at how do they do things at high level physical events. Correct me if I'm mistaken, but from what I gather everyone flies/drives in and they set aside a day or so, split up the matches, and run all the games one after the other. We already used to do this - quite frequently - online in the past. They were live tournaments of 3-5 rounds that took several hours (3-5 under the older longer gametime rules) and we all played concurrently with the TD managing time. We generally stopped doing this of late, but for very high level events we could bring this back.
If we work under the assumption that we stopped so that it was easier for people in different timezones to manage to attend, then I don't see why we can't work around the issue. For the absolute highest level events people irl sometimes set aside vacation time and/or even set aside days and hundreds of dollars to take planes to make it to the site (sometimes in a different timezone anyways), staying in hotels or other players' houses. Is it really more inconvenient to set aside a day or two to play an online event at a strange/unusual time for you during your time off? This would be a call for the online community as a whole to make, but even in the worst case scenario I can think of two workarounds - pods/brackets based on timezones (not a fan of this idea but it springs to mind) where the last few matches would be at an agreed upon time by both parties on the second day, or simply mandating that all players must do all their matches at a time of their choosing with 1 day at most between each one. Again, this is all assuming that timezones are the big sticking point here and not that we didn't just move to this model because we felt like it and wanted a more casual atmosphere where people could arrange things in-between real life duties and didn't have to dedicate much time to it.
The other component to this I've heard is that it'd be crazy to have TDs watching all the games for these, and that this plays into the time argument. Well if we held the event live we'd have the TDs easily reachable for questions or rulings while everyone played, and using the spectator system Lackey has and the ability to hop into Discord voice channels at will, the TDs could watch one or more of the games at once and even listen in to them. I admit that hopping between discord chats is not quite as ideal or easy as just walking between tables, but if the online community really wanted this, and a TD or two was willing to do so, I don't think this is an insurmountable obstacle either. Do TDs at physical Continentals observe every single game as they go on at once, or am I correct that they just walk around and keep their eyes and ears open for issues or concerns that might be noticed/get called out? I realize that the ultimate unanswered issue here is "what TD would be willing to do this?" and that if the answer is nobody then this whole issue is kind of moot. But I have hope that someone, or even the CC itself, would be willing to step up for this if they thought it was as possible to carry out as I claim.
Anyways this is super long and I want to hear what you guys think either way, so I'll end my defense here. It is possible that everyone thinks my arguments are terrible or that changing this isn't worth the effort, in which case I'd love to hear you rebut me. However, as an Online exclusive player not being able to take part in anything like Continentals outside of Masters does feel a little ostracizing (tons of articles and threads on what happens at these events practically take over the site when they occur) - especially since one of the major arguments is the assumption that we can't be given the same level of trust physical players get in terms of our willingness to cheat. As time goes on I'm still fairly confident the majority of players in the future will be online players, and for both our and their sake I think it is worthwhile to have at this debate one last time.
So, who's up first?
Edit: Caught and corrected a few spelling/grammar issues.
Last edited by Gorgo Primus on Mon Feb 24, 2020 10:20 pm, edited 1 time in total.