Conquer Club

Accused:

josko.ri

The accused are suspected of:

Other: Game throwing

Game number(s):

Game 19803892

Comments:
I was involved in a very close game in the Monster royale tournament. I was in a good position to win by a very small margin against DBandit by round limit. Josko suicided into me to prevent me from winning the game and gaining an edge in this tournament. I'm currently tied with him in the tournament with 3 wins each. That game is one of the two last before the score reset. He admitted in the chat that he suicided into me to prevent me from winning a 4th game and getting an edge towards the tie-breaker if we end up being tied in rounds 4 & 5. However josko was in no position to win the game.
At round 19, I had 32 troops and a drop of 6. DBandit nuked a single from me and stacked, getting to 36 troops. With my drop of 6, I would have ended up with 37 troops, narrowly beating him. Snaps below.

Previous ruling: viewtopic.php?f=239&t=225191&start=25#p4985104

TeeGee wrote:From this point on, all games, no matter what it is, unless specified, shall be subject to all CC rules. This includes tournament and tribe games.

Other relevant ruling: viewtopic.php?f=239&t=232202&start=50#p5134896

king achilles wrote:[...] Yes, I agree that no one is obligated to let anyone win a game and that you are there to kill one another. However, this must be guided under the principle that you must play to win. If there was a small difference, it would be completely fine to attack any other players if you thought you even had any type of chance of winning.. even if this required extremely lucky dice.

Though, if there was a considerable difference and you really had no chance and the situation is like there are players A > B > C and C attacks A on the last turn of the game, reducing them below B, so that B wins, C had no chance of winning as they were already last, it's a classic case of game throwing.

From the chat

2020-05-29 11:32:32 - josko.ri: Zabeast, I have nothing against you but my strategy is oriented towards my winning of this tournament.
2020-05-29 11:33:39 - josko.ri: Therefore, if you jump to 4 wins before score reset and I still have 3 wins, that is not beneficial for me. better for me is if we are both on 3 wins and then we have equal chance for better tiebreaker in case of equal score in round 4,5
2020-05-29 11:34:11 - josko.ri: as i said, nothing aganist you but I act how to increase my own chances of winning this tournament.

Snaps
Round 19 (player i, whatever the color is supposed to be)-32 troops, 9 terts (drop: 6 -- pennsylvania+ lakes); DBandit 31 troops


Round 20

I did move which increases my chances of the tournament winning.

If I choose between winning a game or winning a tournament, more important is winning a tournament.

Therefore, my strategy in the particular game was oriented towards winning the tournament.

Currently, Zabeast and me are tied on the Leaderboard of the tournament, therefore it is in my interest that he does not win the particular game and go ahead of me on the Leaderboard.

Many times in past I was victim of other player suicided into me in particular games because it gave them favorable position on the Leaderboard.

For example, DBandit70 won Game 19284913 and came to the top of the Leadeboard and then suicided into me in final turn or close to final turn of four other games Game 19284916, Game 19284915, Game 19284914 and Game 19284912 to prevent me to take back the top Leaderboard place from him. Although my feeling of losing because of his suicides was not good, I did not see his actions as against rules and never reported him for his actions. Simply, he played strategy which he considered the most beneficial for his winning of the tournament.

If this is against rules, then I have many past reports to fill (such as this one above vs DBandit70) when I was victim of this kind of strategy.

We play to win tournaments (primary goal) and games (secondary goal) therefore our strategy should primarily be oriented towards winning of tournaments rather than winning of single games.

Check out the first link that ZaBeast posted josko.

You were accused then, and TeeGee clearly said throwing game to win a tournament was not accepted anymore.

So your past cases aren't valid, but this one is.

Tough to believe you didn't know the ruling on another case you were accused, but even if you didn't, not knowing the rule isn't an excuse for breaking it.

You should get a warning for that. That won't do anything, but you'll know not to do it again.

king achilles wrote:Yes, I agree that no one is obligated to let anyone win a game and that you are there to kill one another. However, this must be guided under the principle that you must play to win.

This was my principle, in order to win the tournament (by myself), it is beneficial that Zabeast does not win that game in question.
I played move which clearly increased my chances to win the tournament and I do not think doing that is against rules.

Well, you are mistaken then. It is against the rule.

From the link ZaBeast posted :

TeeGee wrote:
If a different ruling was given back then perhaps everyone would have acted differently and this could have been avoided. At the time it was thought reasonable to play using such tactic, as long as it would help you advance to the next round. Looking at it from this point it would seem that we must now re-evaluate questionable tactics that involves sabotaging games for the purpose of advancement. Mad777 has made a very good point that we must always play fairly at all times and never forget to have good sportsmanship above everything regardless if it is a tournament game or not.

For this report, we are clearing them as we believe that their actions were only swayed by my past ruling from similar cases involving tournament games. However, the pre-existing precedent that this is acceptable in tournament games is now removed.

As I said, this strategy was used against me many times in past in multiple games and multiple tournaments when I was receiving end.
I did not consider it as rule breaking and therefore never reported it.

I suicided nolefan5311 in a tournament game once because it gave me a better chance of progressing to the next round and - if memory serves - it was closed without issue. I can't find the report because the search function is a pile of wank. The only way this could really be seen as game throwing is if josko had nothing to gain from it. In my opinion josko 1.0 did nothing wrong, although it is funny to see him argue with josko 2.0 here.

Giving more importance to a single game rather than the entire tournament sounds dumb.

iAmCaffeine wrote: In my opinion josko 1.0 did nothing wrong, although it is funny to see him argue with josko 2.0 here.

dying

seems like a sound strategy, imo.

Your situation is different caff (but under the actual rules should still be forbidden). Josko is through to the round reset, the tournament is not decided at all as there are still 14 games to go. Actually, for that move to benefit him, the following conditions need to be met
1- josko and I finish with the same score in the next 14 games
2- josko and I have won the same number of games in the tournament (so we have won the same number of round 4 and round 5 games each, given that round 5 games are worth 2 points) or josko has won one less round 5 game than me, but the combined rounds needed to win his game is higher than mine (so he would have been tied with the number of wins had I won the great lakes game, but would have lost the other tie-breaker).
3- josko and I are not tied for positions 3-4, 5-8 or 9-14
That's an awfull lot of ifs. Allowing players to suicide on others to get a better chance of winning a tournament would also set a dangerous precedent (which had already been overturned by the link I posted). For instance you could also make the argument that once you're confident you get through, you should suicide on the higher ranked players to try to prevent them from advancing to the next rounds so that you'd have better chances to win after the score resets.

my case of suiciding nolefan5311123123 wasn't guaranteed to help me, in fact it was quite an outside chance that it would, but i still got off with it

viewtopic.php?f=239&t=215275&start=25#p4738783
It got noted though, which means it was against the rules.
And that was BEFORE the precedent was set that trying to win a tournament didn't supersede from respecting site rules such as suiciding and game throwing.

Just because something is Noted does not mean rules have been broken.

This is part of tournament play and something that happens quite a bit. I remember when I was on top of the leaderboard for the Great War, certain guys didn't even wait until the later rounds, they started attacking me in round 1 so I wouldn't win more tournaments.

I also remember rulings in the past that the C&A team does not get involved in tournament related issues.

shoop76 wrote:I also remember rulings in the past that the C&A team does not get involved in tournament related issues.

That was quite a while ago. I think they have more recently said that site rules are site rules, anywhere on the site.

shoop76 wrote:This is part of tournament play and something that happens quite a bit. I remember when I was on top of the leaderboard for the Great War, certain guys didn't even wait until the later rounds, they started attacking me in round 1 so I wouldn't win more tournaments.

I also remember rulings in the past that the C&A team does not get involved in tournament related issues.

Not quite the same when you compare at a Meta Tournament level rather than a single tournament. Not saying is right neither but this exemple is not really apple to apple, Olympics works the same way and we had instance with player doing weird thing to prevent opposant to win a tournament so their team would not score but nothing was really done for it
Here we are talking about one single tournament that plays Battle Royale game type, that has still 14 games, 9 games of 14 players with 34 maps choices in round 4, and 5 games of 14 players on Colloseum in Round 5, all rounds uses random spoils and settings. No one can really pretend the outcome, whatever level of player you are, and predict for the upcoming win i’m suiciding on another player just in case...
If t would have been during the last round, even with all 5 games running, then i can see that happening with a kind of fairness to it but come on...that early, give me a break.

Jdsizzleslice wrote:Just because something is Noted does not mean rules have been broken.

In this case the noted reference ZaBeast is talking about had a comment from admin stating this shouldn’t happen and it has been noted...if you tell someone you can’t do that and your case to be noted, means if you do it again i warned you will get in trouble, but I fully agree not all noted case are against the rule.

If we are stating doing it is ok then what would tournament look like (disregarding their length, aspect, etc), then everyone will suicide at any stage doesn’t matter.
This would make tournament much less enjoyable overall.
If you can’t win a game then so bid, you have to accept opponent was better or had more luck, bottom line. You can’t win all the time.

I saw this as valid strategy because it was used vs me multiple times and nobody cared. So I thought I can also use it as valid strategy when it could benefit me.

If this strategy is valid it would actually serve against me because usually I am leader of multiple tournaments so other players would often use it against me.

Therefore, ironically, I also have interest in declaring this strategy invalid. It would cause one disciplinary action against me for making this case but in future it would protect me from others suiciding into me which is a great benefit for me.

josko.ri wrote:I saw this as valid strategy because it was used vs me multiple times and nobody cared. So I thought I can also use it as valid strategy when it could benefit me.

If this strategy is valid it would actually serve against me because usually I am leader of multiple tournaments so other players would often use it against me.

Therefore, ironically, I also have interest in declaring this strategy invalid. It would cause one disciplinary action against me for making this case but in future it would protect me from others suiciding into me which is a great benefit for me.

Telling this, I am actually in favor of this being judged as against rules.

In short term I will come out with warning or noted for my actions in this game (when I was not aware that doing it is against rules).

However, in long term I can use this rule in my advantage to avoid players suiciding into me to prevent me winning, which often happens against me in my games and which motivated me that I also use the same strategy when it can be beneficial for me.

do u want to make a 3rd post saying the same thing again?

iAmCaffeine wrote:I suicided nolefan5311 in a tournament game once because it gave me a better chance of progressing to the next round and - if memory serves - it was closed without issue. I can't find the report because the search function is a pile of wank. The only way this could really be seen as game throwing is if josko had nothing to gain from it. In my opinion josko 1.0 did nothing wrong, although it is funny to see him argue with josko 2.0 here.

Giving more importance to a single game rather than the entire tournament sounds dumb.

It can sound as dumb as you want it to, but TeeGee has already addressed this in the previous post linked.

TeeGee wrote:From this point on, all games, no matter what it is, unless specified, shall be subject to all CC rules. This includes tournament and tribe games.

Meaning committing suicide in games to win a tournament may have been allowed before, but it is not any longer, and subject to punishment.

Kotaro wrote:

iAmCaffeine wrote:I suicided nolefan5311 in a tournament game once because it gave me a better chance of progressing to the next round and - if memory serves - it was closed without issue. I can't find the report because the search function is a pile of wank. The only way this could really be seen as game throwing is if josko had nothing to gain from it. In my opinion josko 1.0 did nothing wrong, although it is funny to see him argue with josko 2.0 here.

Giving more importance to a single game rather than the entire tournament sounds dumb.

It can sound as dumb as you want it to, but TeeGee has already addressed this in the previous post linked.

TeeGee wrote:From this point on, all games, no matter what it is, unless specified, shall be subject to all CC rules. This includes tournament and tribe games.

Meaning committing suicide in games to win a tournament may have been allowed before, but it is not any longer, and subject to punishment.

I think that is correct.

I would be very interested what the opinion of the lead tournament director on this issue is. But I have noticed that in general, the TD department prefers to leave questions unanswered, either because they don't want to get into a debate or because they may not be able to answer questions.

If this is ruled as cheating, which I feel like we are too, it will change the whole landscape of certain tournaments and open the flood doors to cheating reports. And then I am curious will it only be cheating if it happens at the round limit.

I'm not saying this because I won the game but that is a very good strategy. I know I did it last year in at least 2 games both times against josko.ri and I would of won the tournament except for some tiebreaker lost me 1st to josko.ri. I honestly see nothing wrong with this, it strategy and it a good one.