Hey there, HeyTrainer. I want to thank John for asking me to write an article about cheating for his ongoing series; I really appreciate him giving me an outlet to express my thoughts. In this article, I’m not really going to talk about in-game cheating at all, as I feel that topic has already been discussed plenty. Instead, I want to focus on how we, the community, can police ourselves in regards to cheating and cheaters, malicious intent, and game state errors.
Setting the Scene
Ever since the infamous Florida Regionals of January 2016, where we saw N-baiting and flagrant stalling, cheating has been a pretty hot topic in the community. It seems like every few weeks, new video evidence of someone cheating gets exposed. Even as I write this today, Azul Griego, the best player in the world currently, was caught drawing an extra card on stream. Did he cheat or make an honest mistake? I don’t know, but based on the reactions and blind defense, I know this much:
While the community has consistently been talking about cheating, we haven’t really done very much else in regards to deterring cheating in the future.
Currently, there are absolutely no ramifications for cheating imposed by the community. It seems as if the ramifications for cheating doled out by TPCi aren’t uniform either, and sometimes cheaters can go completely unpunished or severely under-punished compared to other bans, but that’s something totally out of the control of the player base.
Community Action
As a player base, we need to impose severe penalties on our peers who cheat; otherwise it will continue to be rampant in the community. Personally, these are the two things we as a community can do to deter cheating:
1. Online group stigmatization. Ban every person who cheats in the future (it’s way too difficult to back log this) from every online Pokémon group (Virbank, Heyfonte, etc.), as well as not interacting with them on Twitter. This might seem radical, but I think it’s the most effective deterrent we as a community have. Pokémon is an incredibly social game; top players have well-known presences on social media and most usually have a large following. This can all be taken away from them if we as a community decide that we don’t want to associate with cheaters. I guarantee that if someone knew they’d lose their main outlets to the player base, they lose the ability to network and promote their brand.
- Make a public list of cheaters. Surprisingly, this doesn’t currently exist, but I believe this is something we really need to do. Pokémon is growing incredibly quickly, which means many new players will never know about players who have cheated in the past, or made serious mistakes. Many people probably don’t remember when Jason Klaczynski double Attached two Energy in the top 16 of Worlds 2013 (happy mistake; no ban), or that Rahul Reddy was caught, disqualified, and then later admitted to palming cards from his discard at the “Last Chance for Championship Points” tournament at US Nats 2013 (reformed cheating; temporarily banned). Yet despite these serious issues, there is no public document that tracks these penalties, meaning that players who do cheat can let a long time pass before cheating again. Creating and maintaining a list of players and their errors is something we as a community can do if we want to take punishing cheaters into our own hands.
Conclusion
I think that if we as a community incorporated these two ideas, we could really deter the number of cheaters in the community. With more money and prizes than ever before, being vigilant about eradicating cheating from the Pokémon community should be even more pertinent. I want to thank John again for letting me write for this series, and I want to thank you all for taking the time to read this. Let’s do our best as a community to completely eradicate cheaters and cheating and keep Pokémon the fun, clean game it’s supposed to be.
This is part of a series on cheating awareness in the Pokémon TCG.
Part One, by Anonymous Author Charizard666
Part Two, by John Kettler