Follow-up on r/cow post about Jayne's GitGud tournament staff



Earlier today, a post went up on r/cow alleging that a pair of tournament admins from Jayne’s Elo Hell/GitGud community had unfairly penalized a team in a December 2018 tournament and told the team’s manager that, after investigating, it was determined the team had introduced a non-rostered player on a smurf account to the roster. The post has been upvoted heavily, despite making unproven allegations toward said tournament organizers and violating the sub’s witchhunting policy by naming the organizers directly.



I spoke at length with both the tournament staff/organizers and the manager from the team in question today, and was given access to a chat logs dating back two months to the tournament in question.



The Manager’s team, Socks and Sandals, was frequently in violation of the tournaments’ SR requirements and had attempted to add subs to the roster that were in violation of the tournament’s “smurfing” policy.



The chat logs show tournament organizers and staff had spent a great deal of time in working directly with this team and its manager to vet players and confirm background. Without the ability to verify battlenet accounts like Blizzard might at the OWL and Contenders level, the GG staff used any and all available resources to cross-check gamertags and Discord IDs with players participating in other tournament skill levels, and with players who had participated in the tournament in the past. The GG staff was required to communicate with the S&S manager at a frequency beyond what would be commonly expected of normal tournament organizers. On multiple occasions, several staff members were required to dedicate upwards of an hour of their time to handle the personal requests of this team to verify the identities of new subs it had hoped to bring on.



Despite the fact that the tournament operates on a community level with volunteer staff, the team made what appears to be tremendous efforts tending to the manager’s and players’ requests. The staff were not always able to make immediate responses, but made what I would consider to be an extraordinary effort in trying to work with the team through its roster-building efforts. The staff were also careful to protect the identities of those who provided them with additional details/evidence of players’ alternate accounts in violation of the rules.



On different occasions, the team manager made disparaging remarks toward the tournament staff after being asked to provide the evidence needed to vet the players’ backgrounds. After multiple confrontations with staff—and after having found to be in violation of the tournament’s written behavior policies—staff told the manager they would be removing him from the manager position. While the rules allowed for the staff to ban the manager from the tournament (and future tournaments), the staff instead told him that he was only being removed from his current managerial position with the team and could still participate in this and future seasons.

One or two other instances of similar experiences also appeared in the comment threads, but by and large, most other tournament participants shared only positive experiences.



For how much priority window space this story got today, what’s disappointing is the amount of negative attention it generated against a community tournament and staff that serves a vital function in the OW community—helping to introduce new players to a team environment and provide them with a valuable experience that would otherwise be difficult to come by. Personally, it was eye-opening to see the level of commitment and number of hours sacrificed by dozens of volunteer staff. While I don’t discount that there can be some inconsistencies with the tournaments rules from time to time (something that staff have already addressed in clarifying the rule book even further for the current season), I just wanted to go on record and say that it’s really disappointing a post would highlight two very non-public figures and provide what I gather to be a very one-sided account of what transpired.



To suggest that the tournament staff should never bear responsibility in any such situation is equally silly, and that’s not what I mean to suggest here; other teams are devoting just as much (if not more) time to scrimming and competing, and so I also don’t want to speak against the post’s concerns as if all teams should simply “shut up and appreciate the experience being provided.” Just by participating, I’d expect that the teams will be accommodated in a professional and appropriate manner by the tournament staff. In this particular instance, however, I strongly believe that the poster went very far overboard and provided a severely one-sided account of the story.



This is by no means a "report." Rather, in seeing how long the post was able to stay afloat on the sub without being forced to remove the names of those accused, I thought it would be appropriate to make sure that the claims being levied against the two very non-public individuals were legitimate.

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