There is quite a lot here, but to me there are two very important points:

“A person breaks a rule defined by the tournament documents, lies to a Tournament Official, or

notices an offense committed in their (or a teammate’s) match and does not call attention to it.”

“Additionally, the offense must meet the following criteria for it to be considered Cheating:

The player must be attempting to gain advantage from their action.

The player must be aware that they are doing something illegal”

This line of thinking isn’t, and shouldn’t be, unique to Magic’s penalty enforcement. In order to disqualify someone for cheating, the player has to be aware they are doing it. Now, I’ve seen a lot of conjecture saying things like “how can you play 5 games before this and not know when you’re searching so much?” and that’s a valid question, but that doesn’t prove he knew. That’s simply your take and opinion. In order to disqualify the player, the head judge has to believe it based on sufficient information, and no judge worth their salt should be handing out disqualifications based on anything else. If a judge does hand out a disqualification based on their feelings or uninformed thoughts, then it not only brings their own integrity into question, it also bring the tournaments integrity into question. A judge should only ever hand out a disqualification when they have the adequate facts to validate the penalty. Ultimately, a disqualification is a huge penalty to give, and to go back to Magic once again, it’s something they take very seriously, as you can see in their very detailed disqualification process.

Investigation Please

Now, while I’ve said a game loss was the correct penalty at the time for the infraction, and a disqualification was not, that isn’t where this incident should end. In fact it’s far from it. The most immediate thing that should have happened is that an investigation is started by the head judge, they should have gotten statements from the relevant people, question the player, perhaps check any stream footage if they were on at any point and so on. At the end of it, the head judge looks at the information they have and makes a decision. Nothing may come of it, but maybe something will. I can’t say if anyone at the tournament has started or performed an investigation into this infraction. However, I do believe it’s fair to say there are some questionable facts involved, such as:

How did the player realise they had five copies of a card but not realise they had four?

In a deck like Scions with a good amount of search, how did a player never notice this in the first five rounds?

None of these questions, or any others, make the player guilty of cheating or not when we don’t have the answers. I’ve heard stories of players have a situation where they ran an illegal number of copies of a card at a high level event and only realised it after they were out of the tournament. It’s not impossible to do, and here’s a little quote I’d like to share which I think is relevant:

“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”

– Hanlon’s Razor

Regardless, the proper thing to do here is investigate, and I really hope that’s what happened.

All Eyes On Them

Besides the investigation, the next thing that needs to happen is that the player involved should be under heavy scrutiny for the rest of the tournament. Now, that’s not to say they have someone stand next to them for every game. Frankly doing that would probably give the player adequate right to complain to Square Enix about judge bias towards them. However, any player that judges are suspicious of, should have eyes on them more than others, and I believe this is one of those situations where the player in question should be watched more closely.

So, what happens if the player ends up receiving another penalty? If he does something that would get him a caution, does he get DQd? What about a warning? Well, it’s entirely depending on what the player does, but generally a caution isn’t going to be enough to do anything to the player. However, given they already have a warning and a game loss, a further warning is likely enough, at the judges (or head judges) discretion, to issue another game loss. You might now be wondering what should happen if they get a further game loss (not counting a warning escalated to a game loss that is). Well, it’s likely at this point you just escalate to a match loss. Although, as previously mentioned, FFTCG doesn’t seem to include that in their penalty guideline. However, the head judge has the authority to issue the penalty they think fit the infraction, so regardless of its omission, it can still be given. If you’re now wondering if the game loss could instead escalate to a disqualification, the answer is that it depends. It depends what caused the player to get the second game loss, and if combined with the previous incident, the head judge now feels he has sufficient evidence to issue a disqualification.

GO BEYOND!! PLUS ULTRA!!

Okay, so the penalty was issued, the player should be investigated and should be monitored more closely throughout the rest of the tournament. Let’s pretend all of this stuff is actually done, that should be the end of it right? Let the player move on to the next tournament and forget about it? Well, yes and no. A player should be allowed to start a tournament “fresh,” that’s how it is with any card game. However, a list of infractions given and to which players should be submitted to a database. This database isn’t just for any judge to access, and unfortunately the judge system FFTCG has in place currently doesn’t really have any judges in a high enough position to warrant access to it anyway, but the idea of the database is to be able to track consistent behaviour across tournaments by a judge panel, or the staff of the game. If a player actually gets a disqualification, it can be helpful to look at past behaviour to see if the punishment was warranted. This doesn’t mean a lack of penalties automatically gets a player’s disqualification overturned, it just means for those players that have a previous and consistent history of penalties at events, it can be easier to make a decision. Other factors should always be considered when reviewing the disqualification.

Beyond a penalty tracking database, I’d like to see the game’s “floor rules” updated and properly structured, I don’t really think the penalties listed need changing, although a match loss penalty does absolutely need to be added. The document also needs a big dollop of polish, as the formatting is about as consistent as Guardians, and it needs far more detail and structure.

Community (lolNA)

I understand a lot of people in the community are sick and tired of incidents like the one discussed here which keep happening. People are angry, and they want something done about it, and while I don’t believe giving this person a disqualification because of others’ infractions at other tournaments is the correct course of action, I do think more can be done. FFTCG and its community has grown in an age where communication about incidents is shared almost instantly. This stuff isn’t unique to FFTCG, it’s just shared far more than most other card games, as far as I can see, and the fact the game is smaller than games like Magic or others compounds the issue because the community tends to be more close-knit. I believe that, given the way this community is, Square Enix need to do more to be transparent. They should not be putting up walls and going “you weren’t there” or “if you have a problem, please contact official channels.” They should address the community, explain what happened and explain the action taken. It might help for them to also talk about their plans to address it in the future. Besides the solutions I’ve listed, there are plenty of other things they can do, like deck check on entry. Although I know first-hand that isn’t always entirely feasible which is why I didn’t talk about it above in any detail. Things like the size of the judge team and the restrictions on when you can begin registration at the venue can make it basically impossible. Deck check on entry also doesn’t stop players committing gameplay infractions that result in game losses. Sometimes, no matter how much you do, you can can’t do enough. Unless you just disqualify and ban everyone for everything. That’ll solve it in no time, because then everyone will be banned and so no one can commit infractions.

Finally, while some of what I’ve said here is the facts as they are, some of it is simply my opinion, and you are more than welcome to agree or disagree with anything I’ve said regardless. Unfortunately, while I think everyone should be allowed to discuss their opinions on this, far too often these discussions are deleted and swept under the rug, which just fuels the fire of the community hatred of this stuff more as far as I’m concerned. Moderate specific people, not the entire discussion, and let the community talk!

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“I would prefer even to fail with honor than to win by cheating.”

– Sophocles

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-Yoh Ceeza