trexfever45 wrote:
I was watching the Fabricator's Forge tournament from last weekend and in this video vs Orks I saw the Chaos player lie about his dice three times in the first round. At 18:25 he rolls a 3 for the number of mortar shots, but then rolls four dice and tells the ork player to make four saves. At 24:26 he says that his poxwalkers ignore a wound, despite clearly not rolling a 6 (he rolls a 1, a 3, and two 5s). At 16:56 he rolls a 2 to hit when shooting into a forest with a blightlord's blightlauncher, keeps it, and rolls a 4 to wound (failing), but says "plague weapon" and re-rolls the 4. At long range plague weapon re-roll should only work on a wound roll of a 1. Am I seeing all this wrong? The dice seemed pretty clear to me at 1080p (there's also a twitch stream that seems even sharper). At around 38:10 the chaos player somehow convinces the ork player that the PBC is alive on one wound even though it actually took 4 mortals and 9 damage (after reduction) and should be dead. I stopped after the first round. People pay to go to these tournaments. The Chaos player probably ended up getting prize money since this was the semi-final game. Does this look ok to you?

I'll go through the time stamps and provide some unbiased observer view to corroborate or deny your allegations:

- The mortar at 18:25: I don't see him rolling a 3 for mortar shots. I don't see the D6 dice roll on either of the cameras. He rolls 4 dice, so I presume it's a 4 (going on trust).

- At poxwalker FNPs at 24:26: again it's really hard to see the dice, but I have to agree that I didn't see any 6s there. Looks like: 1, 5, 3, 5 to me.

- At 16:56, yes I did see the 2 and the 4 as you mentioned. So if he was shooting through a forest and unless he had full wound re-rolls I think this was wrong.

- I don't understand the Ork stuff so I can't comment on how many wounds it did, but it seems like the players agreed on the wounds remaining after TJ told the Ork player that it starts with 12W.

There's definitely some sketchy stuff going on, and as a general comment this is more common than you'd think.

I had a consistent long-time opponent who beat me 8 games in a row before I took 1 off of him. In many of our games I could not see his dice rolls, as he was doing them fairly quickly behind a ruin. It kind of bothered me, but it's just a game and I was new to the hobby. I remember thinking, "wow those 4++ saves are amazing!" and none of my stuff was getting through anywhere near the statistical rates that I had calculated. Like consistently more than 1 sigma worse across multiple games.

Well let me just tell you, the game I won, I saw all of his dice rolls. We were playing on a slightly different table/setup and I made a point to walk around the table more. We haven't played since lol.

Now I can't say for sure if anything shady was going on - without evidence I won't accuse - but I will say this. For everyone's sake, make your dice rolls visible! I do it myself because I really don't want to accidentally do something wrong, a habit I started as a beginner. I used to forget hit modifiers for example, so rolling in the open let my opponent help catch when a hit on 3 should fail for instance, which I appreciate and helped me learn the game.

In the case above with TJ, I think these mistakes could go either way. Maybe they're malicious or maybe they're careless honest mistakes. I don't know to be honest. Unfortunately I'm inclined to give less benefit of the doubt because of how experienced of a player he's supposed to be. I've been playing for less than a year and I'm never hitting through a forest on 2s for example, and very rarely mistaking a 5 for a 6. Now I can totally understand mistaking some dice if you have a mild dyslexia or something of that nature, so let's keep the 'careless mistake' possibility in there.

The best solution in the future is having all dice rolls visible and recorded. I think on that much we can all agree for events like these. If not possibly visible to a camera, then visible to your opponent at the very least.

Edit - I don't understand the downvotes, I just replied to what I saw at the timestamps, and am keeping an open mind. I mean accusing someone of cheating is a big deal, so there should be more investigation, but not rushing to pitchforks.