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It is not a sport but there should be penalties for serious cheating.

The idea that cheating is only a point reduction or "correct it and keep playing" is a joke. Cheating, including an illegal list, should be an immediate DQ and removal from the event space. No playing, no watching your friends play, go sit in your hotel room and think about your failure. And in the case of multiple offenses it should be a blacklisting from all events. Stop going easy on cheaters and people will stop doing it.

 Peregrine wrote:
The idea that cheating is only a point reduction or "correct it and keep playing" is a joke. Cheating, including an illegal list, should be an immediate DQ and removal from the event space. No playing, no watching your friends play, go sit in your hotel room and think about your failure. And in the case of multiple offenses it should be a blacklisting from all events. Stop going easy on cheaters and people will stop doing it.

This is why we can't have nice things. List mistakes are generally just that, a mistake. There are a lot of crossed wires on how things work because of local metas, raw/rai, and gw itself sometimes not understanding how things work when it comes to list building. A draconian get out policy that also eliminates the majority reason for the hobby (social interaction) is such a heavy opening swing for adjustment it just makes sure adjustments aren't talked about. Like it or not it's fairly complicated and there should be an intent standard. I think that's mostly what got Happy hammered. Intent seemed high plausible from past interactions with some players on their team (not all). Where as Sean's team in general wouldn't have intent and a dude that plays once a year at this event very likely didn't. There is a difference.

Every time you don't significantly punish a cheater, it encourages others to cheat.

It's not as if we don't have a mountain of evidence for this.

No other game offers immediate DQ for breaking any rule. Things like that are reserved for extreme violations like the use of performance enhancing drugs or excessive unsportsmanlike conduct (I'm talking "stomping on a downed player" level here).

What we need is a codified list of penalties. If you do this, you get that points reduction, if you do it enough times within a certain period you get that harsher penalty, the following excessive violations are considered appropriate for a suspension, etc. etc.

 Hulksmash wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:
The idea that cheating is only a point reduction or "correct it and keep playing" is a joke. Cheating, including an illegal list, should be an immediate DQ and removal from the event space. No playing, no watching your friends play, go sit in your hotel room and think about your failure. And in the case of multiple offenses it should be a blacklisting from all events. Stop going easy on cheaters and people will stop doing it.

This is why we can't have nice things. List mistakes are generally just that, a mistake. There are a lot of crossed wires on how things work because of local metas, raw/rai, and gw itself sometimes not understanding how things work when it comes to list building. A draconian get out policy that also eliminates the majority reason for the hobby (social interaction) is such a heavy opening swing for adjustment it just makes sure adjustments aren't talked about. Like it or not it's fairly complicated and there should be an intent standard. I think that's mostly what got Happy hammered. Intent seemed high plausible from past interactions with some players on their team (not all). Where as Sean's team in general wouldn't have intent and a dude that plays once a year at this event very likely didn't. There is a difference.

This is what i mean about making excuses. The 0-3 rule is not ambiguous. There are only two ways to break it: cheating, and not giving a about playing a legal list and verifying it. As long as people keep complaining about "ruining their social experience" and refusing to DQ them list cheating/mistakes will continue to happen as there is little incentive to avoid them. DQ/ban and people will put the effort into not getting banned.

There's a difference between excusing a behavior, and mitigating the punishment for that behavior. Running an illegal list breaks a rule, but there is a range of actions a TO can do to remedy that rulebreaking.

You can look at things like any attempts to hide the rule breaking, the savviness of the offender, how beneficial that was, etc.

TO's main job isn't to enforce the highest level of competition, but rather host an event that's fun for all attendees. Being DQ'd for a dumb error is the opposite of fun.

 Peregrine wrote:

 Hulksmash wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:
The idea that cheating is only a point reduction or "correct it and keep playing" is a joke. Cheating, including an illegal list, should be an immediate DQ and removal from the event space. No playing, no watching your friends play, go sit in your hotel room and think about your failure. And in the case of multiple offenses it should be a blacklisting from all events. Stop going easy on cheaters and people will stop doing it.

This is why we can't have nice things. List mistakes are generally just that, a mistake. There are a lot of crossed wires on how things work because of local metas, raw/rai, and gw itself sometimes not understanding how things work when it comes to list building. A draconian get out policy that also eliminates the majority reason for the hobby (social interaction) is such a heavy opening swing for adjustment it just makes sure adjustments aren't talked about. Like it or not it's fairly complicated and there should be an intent standard. I think that's mostly what got Happy hammered. Intent seemed high plausible from past interactions with some players on their team (not all). Where as Sean's team in general wouldn't have intent and a dude that plays once a year at this event very likely didn't. There is a difference.

This is what i mean about making excuses. The 0-3 rule is not ambiguous. There are only two ways to break it: cheating, and not giving a about playing a legal list and verifying it. As long as people keep complaining about "ruining their social experience" and refusing to DQ them list cheating/mistakes will continue to happen as there is little incentive to avoid them. DQ/ban and people will put the effort into not getting banned.

You and I have been down this road before so I won't totally rehash the myriad of reasons your attitude is terrible for the hobby in general. I'll agree to disagree with you. Thanks

 Peregrine wrote:


Never. We'll hear endless excuses for how nobody can prove it wasn't a mistake, I played that guy once and he was fun, bans are too harsh and might result in someone being upset after spending lots of money to travel, etc. Unless of course they aren't a popular member of the community, in which case they'll be banned forever because nobody cares about them.

I think right there is a valid concern, that certain people get the "burn the heretic" approach when caught cheating, vs other players who are more in "the click" so to speak caught cheating and its "hey now, no one is perfect"

OrdoSean wrote:
Quality control here.

We’re very sorry that our admech player took 4 engineers instead of three and one dominus. He hasn’t played in many events in months and I hate to say it but we’ve been busy with other things and none of us checked it very closely.

When it was brought to our attention we gave up full points in the round and they asked him to drop his dunecrawler to make up the points difference of switching the enginseer for a dominus.

There was discussion of further sanctions such as our player removing an entire battalion in order to make the list legal instead. We voiced that we would be accepting of those terms if that was asked of us, as we felt extremely bad for letting the event down in such a way. And our player and team were willing to lose the 500-800pts if that was asked of us by the tournament organizers and other captains.

- Sean not the captain of quality control

In case anything else needed to be said here, I was Captain of the team facing Quality Control when we discovered that one of their lists were illegal. Once it was discovered, the game was ended as if my player immediately tabled them. The other four games that round were very friendly, and finished on time. There was certainly no aura of hostility that we "caught them cheating" or any instance them trying to get away with it. I truly don't think it was anything intentional, and I don't think they would try to cheat on something so checkable. Lists were up for over a week before the event, and not a single one of the hundreds of players who read the lists noticed until we played them. I would guess that the ETC players on the team were more concerned with their own lists and ETC teammates and therefore didn't check the details of their ATC teammate. Its unfortunate and careless, but didn't come off as remotely malicious.

The penalty seemed appropriate to me, as it turned a tightly contested game into a ~30 point win for my teammate, which forced the match into a draw as we didn't outscore them by the required margin. They very well could have won if not for that error, which affected their final standing measurably. My team did not get to play Team Happy, but from everything that I heard and saw at the event, it seemed that when confronted by accusations they tried to deny it, weasel out of it, and lied to the TOs while being overall disrespectful to players and event staff. It's unfortunate that both of these situations happened at the same time, but I think that they are worlds apart in intent and the punishments they deserved.

-John the captain of Brohammer: Meh Plus

A comparison to Magic.
(note I don't play competitive magic so this is me just checking the DCI guidelines online https://blogs.magicjudges.org/rules/mtr1-12/).

An illegal decklist, which is the closest equivalent to an illegal army list, is a game loss, not even a match loss.
Considering Warhammer doesn't do boX a game loss is actually harsher then Magic does it.

An illegal list is a bigger deal in 40k as compared to a card game.

 jifel wrote:

In case anything else needed to be said here, I was Captain of the team facing Quality Control when we discovered that one of their lists were illegal. Once it was discovered, the game was ended as if my player immediately tabled them. The other four games that round were very friendly, and finished on time. There was certainly no aura of hostility that we "caught them cheating" or any instance them trying to get away with it. I truly don't think it was anything intentional, and I don't think they would try to cheat on something so checkable. Lists were up for over a week before the event, and not a single one of the hundreds of players who read the lists noticed until we played them. I would guess that the ETC players on the team were more concerned with their own lists and ETC teammates and therefore didn't check the details of their ATC teammate. Its unfortunate and careless, but didn't come off as remotely malicious.

I don't usually post in the Tournament Discussion threads, but this is something that is becoming far, far, far too frequent. I'm genuinely curious as to how it is that if lists are up for "over a week before the event" nobody catches these things? Do you guys not read each others' lists? Does nobody bother to do even a cursory check with a physical book? We saw this with the whole Cadian Relic thing when the Guard book first dropped and still we're having issues with people doing basic list checks?

 Kanluwen wrote:

 jifel wrote:

In case anything else needed to be said here, I was Captain of the team facing Quality Control when we discovered that one of their lists were illegal. Once it was discovered, the game was ended as if my player immediately tabled them. The other four games that round were very friendly, and finished on time. There was certainly no aura of hostility that we "caught them cheating" or any instance them trying to get away with it. I truly don't think it was anything intentional, and I don't think they would try to cheat on something so checkable. Lists were up for over a week before the event, and not a single one of the hundreds of players who read the lists noticed until we played them. I would guess that the ETC players on the team were more concerned with their own lists and ETC teammates and therefore didn't check the details of their ATC teammate. Its unfortunate and careless, but didn't come off as remotely malicious.

I don't usually post in the Tournament Discussion threads, but this is something that is becoming far, far, far too frequent. I'm genuinely curious as to how it is that if lists are up for "over a week before the event" nobody catches these things? Do you guys not read each others' lists? Does nobody bother to do even a cursory check with a physical book? We saw this with the whole Cadian Relic thing when the Guard book first dropped and still we're having issues with people doing basic list checks?

We do, and many errors were caught. But it was 370 lists to go through. Easy to cast stones when you're not involved in that daunting process.

Back in the day when I was tournamenting... this was about 15 years ago now... we used Army Builder files to validate lists for any event I was a TO at. Made things a lot easier on us.

Something for modern day TOs to consider. Some kind of software army builder that will make your life a ton easier.

auticus wrote:
Back in the day when I was tournamenting... this was about 15 years ago now... we used Army Builder files to validate lists for any event I was a TO at. Made things a lot easier on us.

Something for modern day TOs to consider. Some kind of software army builder that will make your life a ton easier.

Battlescribe was the required software for everyone to use.

 djones520 wrote:

We do, and many errors were caught. But it was 370 lists to go through. Easy to cast stones when you're not involved in that daunting process.

And yet basic things like "they had 4 instead of 3" got through.

I would understand things like the Cadian Relic on a Primaris Psyker, that involved someone actually having to know their book and how Relics work--but 4 instead of 3? That shouldn't be too hard to catch.

That is why the onus should not be on you but on the player and there needs to start being repercussions. I am sick of these it's just for fun, people make mistake arguments. The person that made the mistake should not matter. TO's should be thinking about the people affected not the person that caused the issue. If you have a restaurant and your cook sends out a subpar dish do you tell the customer hey I will dock him a dollar pay for your meal!?! No! you make it right with the people affected. This backward thinking that we don't want to hurt the feelings of the person that screwed up needs to stop. As far as list building goes there is no excuse for showing up with an illegal list. excuses for that need to stop too.

 djones520 wrote:

auticus wrote:
Back in the day when I was tournamenting... this was about 15 years ago now... we used Army Builder files to validate lists for any event I was a TO at. Made things a lot easier on us.

Something for modern day TOs to consider. Some kind of software army builder that will make your life a ton easier.

Battlescribe was the required software for everyone to use.

And there's the issue. Battlescribe isn't great.

I did, in fact, read and summarize every single list going into the event. But, this was 73 other teams with 5 lists each, I went through them with an eye for competition not legality. I counted number of Onagers and thought about how quickly they could kill my Carnifexes, and about how their Knight Castellan wouldn't be able to shoot down our 90 Plaguebearers. I saw enginseers and thought basic slot fillers, I didnt count four out until we were actually playing them on Saturday. Plus, "Q" is pretty far down the line of teams and by the time I got there, a lot of lists were starting to look the same and I was skimming. Picking out one illegal battlescribe list out of 375 that I read in a week is pretty damn hard when I'm comparing each of the 375 to five lists of my own, and thinking about how I will pair against it.

However, with that being said, there were many illegal lists submitted for ATC. Most of them were caught by the community in advance, this was the only one that to my knowledge was not. If this was a TO-only system of checking, you'd be hearing about five teams being penalized. Crowd-sourcing the lists certainly reduces the problem even if it didn't eliminate it entirely.

EDIT: Since the comments are coming fast here, I just want to note that there were repercussions for both teams in question. QC, with their illegal list, was penalized a game that ended up turning a potentially winnable round into a draw. They then edited the list and played well under points for the remainder of the event. Team Happy was initially penalized points as well, but after repeat offenses was then shown the door.

 jifel wrote:
I did, in fact, read and summarize every single list going into the event. But, this was 73 other teams with 5 lists each, I went through them with an eye for competition not legality. I counted number of Onagers and thought about how quickly they could kill my Carnifexes, and about how their Knight Castellan wouldn't be able to shoot down our 90 Plaguebearers. I saw enginseers and thought basic slot fillers, I didnt count four out until we were actually playing them on Saturday. Plus, "Q" is pretty far down the line of teams and by the time I got there, a lot of lists were starting to look the same and I was skimming. Picking out one illegal battlescribe list out of 375 that I read in a week is pretty damn hard when I'm comparing each of the 375 to five lists of my own, and thinking about how I will pair against it.

However, with that being said, there were many illegal lists submitted for ATC. Most of them were caught by the community in advance, this was the only one that to my knowledge was not. If this was a TO-only system of checking, you'd be hearing about five teams being penalized. Crowd-sourcing the lists certainly reduces the problem even if it didn't eliminate it entirely.

Please bear in mind that I'm not specifically saying your team cheated or anything. I'm an outsider looking in when it comes to the tournament scene--but I'm exceedingly tired of the drama that spills over into other aspects of the game when it comes to this kind of silliness.

I don't understand why you're looking "with an eye for competition not legality". One would think you'd look for legality before competition if illegal lists get you DQ'd.

 Kanluwen wrote:

 jifel wrote:
I did, in fact, read and summarize every single list going into the event. But, this was 73 other teams with 5 lists each, I went through them with an eye for competition not legality. I counted number of Onagers and thought about how quickly they could kill my Carnifexes, and about how their Knight Castellan wouldn't be able to shoot down our 90 Plaguebearers. I saw enginseers and thought basic slot fillers, I didnt count four out until we were actually playing them on Saturday. Plus, "Q" is pretty far down the line of teams and by the time I got there, a lot of lists were starting to look the same and I was skimming. Picking out one illegal battlescribe list out of 375 that I read in a week is pretty damn hard when I'm comparing each of the 375 to five lists of my own, and thinking about how I will pair against it.

However, with that being said, there were many illegal lists submitted for ATC. Most of them were caught by the community in advance, this was the only one that to my knowledge was not. If this was a TO-only system of checking, you'd be hearing about five teams being penalized. Crowd-sourcing the lists certainly reduces the problem even if it didn't eliminate it entirely.

Please bear in mind that I'm not specifically saying your team cheated or anything. I'm an outsider looking in when it comes to the tournament scene--but I'm exceedingly tired of the drama that spills over into other aspects of the game when it comes to this kind of silliness.

I don't understand why you're looking "with an eye for competition not legality". One would think you'd look for legality before competition if illegal lists get you DQ'd.

I certainly made sure that my five lists were legal, but I am a college student who works full time. I do not have time to check all 375 lists for legality against their respective codexes, FAQs, and indexes, and then think about how all of the 375 lists pair against my own. I noticed one illegal list when I was reading, and reported it to the TO. It was fixed well before the event, and the team got to play with no penalty. This one slipped by me, because at 2 am on a skype call with my teammates, I was more concerned with which of my players would beat the list than with how many Enginseers were in it.

That being said, I am also sick and tired of illegal lists, cheating, and the like. One offense should not lead to the death penalty though. If this player had an illegal list at last Adepticon, and then cheated at the London GT, and THEN showed up to ATC with an illegal list we have a different situation. If this same player goes to the LVO in the future and has an illegal list, I'd be in favor of banning him. Hopefully this event will encourage people to double-check, peer review, and be more careful when checking lists in the future.

 Polonius wrote:
There's a difference between excusing a behavior, and mitigating the punishment for that behavior. Running an illegal list breaks a rule, but there is a range of actions a TO can do to remedy that rulebreaking.

You can look at things like any attempts to hide the rule breaking, the savviness of the offender, how beneficial that was, etc.

TO's main job isn't to enforce the highest level of competition, but rather host an event that's fun for all attendees. Being DQ'd for a dumb error is the opposite of fun.

You know what else isn't fun? Having my opponent get away with cheating and keep playing. DQ and remove them from event property. If people know the penalty for an illegal list is crying in their hotel room over $1000 in wasted travel expenses they'll be damn careful about avoiding mistakes. Until then people will keep cheating and ruining it for the rest of us.

 Kanluwen wrote:

 djones520 wrote:

auticus wrote:
Back in the day when I was tournamenting... this was about 15 years ago now... we used Army Builder files to validate lists for any event I was a TO at. Made things a lot easier on us.

Something for modern day TOs to consider. Some kind of software army builder that will make your life a ton easier.

Battlescribe was the required software for everyone to use.

And there's the issue. Battlescribe isn't great.

I just had a quick look (did up a quick Admech list) and it looks like Battlescribe doesn't use "The Datasheet Rule of Three"

Probably because it's still a suggested limit for an organised play event?

Beanith wrote:

 Kanluwen wrote:

 djones520 wrote:

auticus wrote:
Back in the day when I was tournamenting... this was about 15 years ago now... we used Army Builder files to validate lists for any event I was a TO at. Made things a lot easier on us.

Something for modern day TOs to consider. Some kind of software army builder that will make your life a ton easier.

Battlescribe was the required software for everyone to use.

And there's the issue. Battlescribe isn't great.

I just had a quick look (did up a quick Admech list) and it looks like Battlescribe doesn't use "The Datasheet Rule of Three"

Probably because it's still a suggested limit for an organised play event?

Yeah, but given that Battlescribe seems to be considered "the tournament choice"--you'd think they'd put it there.

 Arachnofiend wrote:
No other game offers immediate DQ for breaking any rule. Things like that are reserved for extreme violations like the use of performance enhancing drugs or excessive unsportsmanlike conduct (I'm talking "stomping on a downed player" level here).

What we need is a codified list of penalties. If you do this, you get that points reduction, if you do it enough times within a certain period you get that harsher penalty, the following excessive violations are considered appropriate for a suspension, etc. etc.

Actually track currently has hardcore immediate DQ’s for a false start. Usain bolt has even been hit by it.

auticus wrote:
Back in the day when I was tournamenting... this was about 15 years ago now... we used Army Builder files to validate lists for any event I was a TO at. Made things a lot easier on us.

Something for modern day TOs to consider. Some kind of software army builder that will make your life a ton easier.

People use BattleScribe now... AB is in the toilet now in terms of supporting the building of 40k army lists. The thing is they are not perfect. Even the TOs and their crew did not catch it.

Beanith wrote:

 Kanluwen wrote:

 djones520 wrote:

auticus wrote:
Back in the day when I was tournamenting... this was about 15 years ago now... we used Army Builder files to validate lists for any event I was a TO at. Made things a lot easier on us.

Something for modern day TOs to consider. Some kind of software army builder that will make your life a ton easier.

Battlescribe was the required software for everyone to use.

And there's the issue. Battlescribe isn't great.

I just had a quick look (did up a quick Admech list) and it looks like Battlescribe doesn't use "The Datasheet Rule of Three"

Probably because it's still a suggested limit for an organised play event?

Turn on Beta Rules.

 djones520 wrote:

auticus wrote:
Back in the day when I was tournamenting... this was about 15 years ago now... we used Army Builder files to validate lists for any event I was a TO at. Made things a lot easier on us.

Something for modern day TOs to consider. Some kind of software army builder that will make your life a ton easier.

Battlescribe was the required software for everyone to use.

Battlescribe data is crowdsourced through github and can be easily manipulated locally. Someone could modify a few values or a few subtle keywords with their local checkout, print that out for the tournament, and potentially get away with it. Someone may forget that a typical Ghostkeel build is 197, or is it 199, or is it 205?

I could see it being an immediate Loss for whatever game you're playing with an illegal list. If you somehow got to round 3 with an illegal list, then all 3 rounds are 0 point losses and your opponent (assuming there were no problems with their stuff) gets max points. Fix the list and submit it to a judge for evaluation before going into the next game.

This does two things. A. it discourages cheaters that try to get an edge with sneaking things into their lists without removing people that make an honest mistake from the social aspect of the game. And B. it gives the opponents an incentive to pay attention to their opponent's lists to make sure the lists are legal. Most tournaments require that you submit a list beforehand, but even then, they will be evaluated by judges that are human, and could easily miss a point difference.

When it comes to other kinds of cheating, like moving models, picking up and throwing too many or too few dice, adjusting terrain, saying your list has something when it doesn't, those are, in my mind, more serious. Still should be punishable by a 0 point Loss with your name put in a book. If your name's in that book more than once, you're heading for a DQ and a ban.

The reason that bans aren't the first things that TO's go to is because this is a big, convoluted game with a lot of confusing rules interactions. It's easy to get confused, even in counting dice when you're talking about a lot of modifiers (positive and negative) re-rolls, and other things. Someone might legitimately make a series of mistakes.

It's when they get a warning and CONTINUE to make those mistakes that you know you have a cheater on your hands. And in the case of ATC, you had a whole team of them, cheating in different ways. We don't know if it was because their local meta flubs a lot of rules, or if they really just wanted the edge that badly, but when you do have that sort of evidence, however circumstantial, then it comes to the TO's to make a more drastic call, which is what people want out of all of this.

Lots of armchair TOs in this thread.

If you're really upset with the way these tournaments are run, run your own and follow these guidelines. TOs typically run these events without being paid, with minimal staffing and in addition to a full-time job. There's no formal structure for this overall (other than ITC), and it's awfully difficult to prove cheating in many instances.

As has been brought up before, it's often been difficult to spot cheating when it happens in a game if you're the opponent. There's also often no proof that cheating happened; the best you can do is see if you can get a judge to babysit the rest of your game (which sucks for everyone involved).

I'm aware this doesn't cover things like illegal lists. Again, if you don't like the way this is run, create your own tournament. The tournament organizers lay out these rules in advance, and if you don't like them, don't attend the tournament. They are the ones putting all the time and effort into running these, and in the end the only way you can really protest is by not going. The other players who do attend are voting with their attendance as well, and as long as these tournaments are well-attended, I don't foresee any changes like this.