I'd like to first clarify the suspension. I am not a cheater. And if you look at the charge I got fried for, it isn't cheating. I don't advocate cheating, and never will. As most people experienced with the DCI know, the charge of "Fraudulent Tournament Reports" is done to fluff up one's tournament rating, and thus get advatages like the free byes. Since my DCI number is public knowledge now (96933302), it is easy to go to
www.thedci.com and check out my rating. My final Constructed rating was 1610. My final Vintage rating was 1689. My final Limited rating was 1690. These are pretty average scores, and certainly not reflective of somebody who was using fake tourneys to pump his DCI rating.
So...what in the world was I doing? Yes, I am guilty of the charge of turning in fraudulent tournament reports. I only have my testimony to back me up, since I doubt Chris Zantides will release any info, but I mean it when I say "it was with good intentions." I was running tournaments in a small town where we rarely had the minimum of 8 players to run a sanctioned tournament. However, everyone wanted to play in a sanctioned tournament where their performance was recorded. That, and I myself wanted to attract attention to the area's tournaments. If there were no tournaments in the DCI records, then people wouldn't even know the area had tournaments. And yes, there was a bit of attention from new players all because they saw tourney records having gone on, as they were outside of the local player's "clique" and had to find out about local tourneys through the DCI website. It was my decision, and by the rules of the DCI, an illegal decision. Because of continued low turnout, I stopped running tournaments in September. Then, in October, a tournament in a nearby city was missing its coordinator, and I had to help out. However, it was a 7 player tourney, so a placeholder was needed. I decided to use Al Sanson (he's suspended along with me) as the placeholder. He actually did run fraudulent tourneys for a point advantage, and nobody really liked him anyway. When he found out he got angry with me, I got angry with him, and we both double-KO'd each other by alerting the DCI to the other's activities.
To the DCI's discredit, they had no idea of anything going wrong, even with hideously obvious patterns in both of our fraudulent reports. I went a bit fruther and pointed out my patterns to the DCI, hoping to help them in determining who fraudulent event runners are. I have no idea if they've incorporated that info into their tracking system they say they have. You can see that Sanson not only had a higher rating than I did, but had gone to events where his fraudulently high rating gave him free byes. A little bit of investigation will reveal that. He did things for corrupt reasons, since he was a cheater. I, however, made really bad choices in what I thought was helping players.
I could still be considered a cheater by hardcore rules followers/lawyers, but I feel I am not. The overall result is that I was willing to sacrifice my own record just to make the local players happy, and ended up doing so. Sanson and I were the only two local tourney organizers, and because of our loss, there haven't been sanctioned tournaments anymore in this "south county" area, though there have been a few more tourneys in the northern areas.
Well, that took up a lot, but I wanted to make it known that I am not a cheater by the "breaking rules for an advantage" definition, however, I still am a person who broke the rules in a major way, so I can still be considered a cheater by some. Fine by me, as long as its known that its more of a gray issue than a black and white one.
Should I write up an article like this? Would the CPA site benefit from a "Game Ethics" article? Like I said, I don't advocate cheating. I also don't advocate doing what I did.
After learning about the ineptitude of the DCI and the shortfallings of sanctioned tournaments (they really aren't too great compared to other options), I do advocate just ignoring the DCI and doing things privately. Non-sanctioned tournaments have always been much more interesting to me. Battle cirlces, Vanguard cards, Portal cards, Peasant Magic, the list goes on and on with the things that are much more fun than running a static DCI tournament. I am getting ready to help a local store owner run some private tournaments. I can definitely write articles about that, and am thinking about doing so when the tournaments begin. Imagine a Tribes Tournament report, which would be better suited to the CPA site than a normal tournament site, and all at the same time keeping the flavor of a casual game with it.
Yeah, Scrye is pretty easy to write for, though I have been saddened to see their content drop off considerably in the past few years. It must be hard to have readable content for all the games out there, but they do shoot themselves in the foot when every editor and assistant editor lines up and does their "best of X set" (where X is the latest Magic set). Come on...two dozen Top Ten lists about the latest set is too much wasted space. At that point, an article about Wyvern strategy would have served the death of a tree much better. (Wyvern's a very old game...dead...if anybody can't remember back that far).
TPFB just basically puttered out because none of us members paid much attention to upkeep of the site. None of us even remember the site's password, so we can't edit it or do anything. Not that any of us would want to.
Everyone in that former team still plays Magic, and we still play casual games quite regularly, with the addition of some other players. We even play other games every once in a while...Jyhad, Rage, Wyvern, D&D, Pokemon. The thing is, we aren't a hardcore "Offend the Masses" type of group like we used to be.
That previous sentence certainly means I've calmed down a lot. I am able to write something without cussing every other sentence. Amazing, eh?
