Wishgate 2024 - what went wrong?
Anyone who is entrenched in the Universus community is probably familiar with what I’m about to explain. If you are, please feel free to skip forward to the place where I get to my actual point.
This week, a high profile player was issued a two year ban from playing the game. This ban came in tandem with removal from the official Universus Discord server. That player alleged they were not informed what the ban was for.
To further complicate matters, this player won a high-profile tournament on Sunday, March 10, which took place over two days via webcam. This player has taken first place in many webcam tournaments. Announcers have joked that he has a “webcam buff” because he tends to only take first place in webcam tournaments.
The ban was issued on 3/13/24, but was backdated to 3/10/24, which negated his most recent win, because he technically should not have been permitted to compete in day 2 of that tournament. This means that anyone who was in day 2 would have placed differently and most (if not all) pairings for each round of day 2 would have been different.
Universus announced at around 4:45 pm on 3/13/24 that the first place prize would instead be going to the second place competitor and also that they do not discuss details about these sorts of things. Public outrage followed.
A screenshot of a Discord post that says @everyone Due to an adjustment in the final standings of the Wish Tournament from this past weekend we would like to congratulate Mitchell Cimino on becoming our Champion. We look forward to hearing your wish, Mitchell. As a reminder to our community - UVS Games does not discuss penalties, disqualifications or suspensions with any players/organizers/etc. who are not involved in the infraction.
3/14/24 at 7:55 pm est: This link is a statement from the store owner whose players are at the center of this controversy. He further addresses some questions of “what happened?”
PSST – THIS IS WHERE ANYONE WHO ALREADY KNEW THE SITUATION SHOULD COME BACK
I am not going to comment on whether the punishment fit the crime or what the crime was. As the owner of an aggressively inclusive game store, my concern is with the systemic issues that caused the public outcry, as well as the general way that UVS Games is handling the sharing of information surrounding bans and rules enforcement.
1. Good will of the public is an integral part of maintaining the long-term health of any trading card game.
Trading card games are, at their core, social. Games live and die based upon the health of the community that plays them. Players spend significant portions of their paychecks, sometimes 100% of their disposable income, in an effort to keep up with the latest gameplay trends. In expecting that players will, quite literally, buy into your game, there is a duty to respect and treat them equitably. When a company that owns a trading card game fails to anticipate that banning a major public figure within the community will cause strong emotional reactions within the playerbase, they are failing to acknowledge their duty to their community.
2. Transparency is vital for creating fair and equitable gameplay.
In most competitive card games, judges will have access to a wildly comprehensive document which outlines various offenses, and the expected penalties. In addition to that comprehensive document there is typically a publicly accessible record of past rulings. Universus yesterday reiterated it is their explicit policy not to discuss, in any capacity, infractions or the punishments those infractions have triggered. This means that stores and judges, who are expected to enforce rules, are impeded from making consistent decisions across the entire game. So, what might result in a warning or game loss in one store or at one event, could result in a disqualification or banning elsewhere.
In cases where extreme cheating have taken place, particularly over an extended period of time, this also means that stores and players are left without the knowledge of a new technique that was not caught, so could be more easily replicated by other players in the future.
3. Rules enforcement of webcam tournaments is problematic.
Casual rules enforcement in webcam tournaments, for weeklies where there are low stakes, and no one is getting a one-of-a-kind prize is probably fine. There is an issue inherent to people sitting in their own homes, on webcam, where it’s very easy to accidentally move their hands out of view for a second or two, frames skip, and technical issues result in momentary black screens – among other things. Players, from what I’ve seen, do tend to give each other the benefit of the doubt in these scenarios. This unfortunately creates a situation where someone who is comfortable cheating is able to do so almost completely unchecked. There is no question whether a judge will happen to look your way while you’re doing some sleight of hand. When they join your channel, you hear them pop in. When they leave, you’re alerted to that as well. Unless one player or the other happens to be streaming or recording the match, it’s one person’s word against another’s, assuming the video quality and level of attention are both high enough to even catch sleight of hand in real time.
“There is no excuse for what Jose and Omar did, but the environment cultivated by UVS Games at these events because of their lack of proper education for judges and stream teams is what led to abundant opportunity for these players, and, I assume, others.”
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I firmly believe that players should face consequences for their actions. I also firmly believe that those actions and consequences need to be clearly documented so players know what actions they will be facing if they execute them.
If they choose to continue holding high-level tournaments via webcam, perhaps they could require that one or both players record each match so that when a judge call is made, the judge is able to review the footage. Perhaps they could station a judge in each channel, or require that players attend an in-person regional hub (a designated local game store) where they are able to sit in a room with other players and a judge without having to fly across the globe.
I am hoping that going forward, Universus will address the issues I outlined above with meaningful changes to company policy, and by either making significant changes to their webcam tournament structure or by discontinuing the use of webcam for high level competitive play altogether. How they choose to handle organized play in the coming months will determine, for many stores including my own, whether we and our players will continue supporting this game. As an LGS, our role is much more complicated than simply selling product. We are in many ways brand partners, who market on behalf of the companies whose games we carry. I am not sure I can, in good conscience, partner with a company that shows by its actions that it does not respect the emotional investment of its player base, does not exercise any amount of transparency, and which demonstrates that equitable and consistent rules enforcement across all levels of play is not a priority.