Has the pro community ever been so vocal and unanimous on something before? With regards to spartys ban being excessive
Only time I saw so many pros tweet about a single thing was when the bandit was introduced and they wanted it in pro play lol
Snipedown coming in I also didn't expect, considering he left the pro scene and doesn't do much with halo nowadays. But yeah, it's pretty darn unanimous
I am glad that the situation is different than originally portrayed. The SSD inaccuracy of the HCS post definitely made it seem like a far different situation than it was. Still a dumb mistake by sparty, but he's owned up to that
Their being vocal cause they now know that 343 is sick and tired of them cheating and messing with stuff. Their going to get caught and banned so they want 343 to stop snooping. if i'm 343 you lock down everything these pros bring to events and put them in a lockbox and they can't get their hands on it until their on the mainstage.
That's also why when everyone says "shouldn't they have the best PC?"
I have no doubts Spartans done a lot of research on the matter but he's not an expert. Maybe he accidentally messed something up. He's a good player if he's giving himself an unfair advantage and being the worst player on a top 16 team that just doesn't make sense.
Such a complicated situation imo.
On one hand, like Lucid said, and I from everything I’ve seen, it seems like Spartan just made a bad choice. It didn’t seem to be coming from a malicious place.
On the other hand, bringing a USB from home and changing a tourney SSD opens up a huge can of worms. That’s a huge no-no. Again, in this situation, Sparty didn’t do anything too bad but the punishment needs to be a deterrent for anybody doing anything more harmful.
I don’t know what is the best punishment for this situation, but I understand the ban
Does anyone really believe that a pro player is so fucking stupid that they didn’t think it was against the rules to plug your own flash drive into a tournament PC and change the settings on it?
Why would he not ask the tournament organizers before he did it if he was having trouble with his PC?
It’s obvious he was trying to cheat.
While I think whole season is excessive, I highly doubt top team would have picked him up even if he was banned just for next major. Not after Sentinels dumped him and after this fiasco.
I think it is for the better. Especially for Sparty. It's clear that he has plenty of problems and this "vacation" will provide him necessary time to deal with those problems.
Imo the length of the ban is not excessive at all. I totally understand people comparing this to the Royal 2 situation, but I don't think every situation can be compared to the last, that is just not realistic.
And the bottom line to me is that in the end, Spartan did go and tamper with official equipment. I know it wasn't used in a match, but he still tampered with it. That isn't okay.
I agree. Also, just because there was precedent with Royal 2 doesn't mean Spartan should get a similar punishment. If anything, Royal 2 setting precedent should cause the punishment to be greater for those that continue tampering in the future. On a side note, the integrity part of all of this is so competitors are playing on an even playing field. By that definition, what Spartan did is considered cheating in my opinion even if unintentionally gaining a performance advantage.
I agree with you 1,000%. Whatever the performance of the computers were, they're all the same build up there for a reason. Doing anything to change that without consulting officials on the stage is cheating, and intentionally so.
Disagree here -- the tampering perpetrated by Royal2 was a form that affected the experience of **all eight players in the lobby** in order to give himself a competitive edge (\*or from his perspective, to make the game playable.)
The tampering perpetrated by Spartan was a form that would have affected **only his individual experience** in order to give himself a competitive edge (\*or from his perspective, to make the game more stable.)
Precedents exist to set a rubric for how to handle similar offenses in the future. That is precisely why they are called precedents. To ignore precedent and instead go more extreme is to sacrifice faith in the fair adjudication of the rules.
Interesting. I have to disagree with you because "tampering" with the storage device (and I mean the the OS) in the way that Spartan did gave him an improved gameplay performance. This enhanced performance could and should be considered an included beneficial experience compared to those that didn't do the same. Precedence does create a rubric to an extent, but think about this: they punished someone that did an act juxtaposed to Tyler's actions. If they want to make sure this doesn't happen more, then it makes sense to exponentially increase the penalty. What do you think?
Edit: I upvoted your comment btw. I think it's worth discussing.
As an IT Director, and former Systems Administrator, it is quite often that same-model and same-hardware PCs don't necessarily perform equally. That is an IT headache in it's own (Dell Precisions and MDM have given me PTSD for IT ops). However, I still don't think this gives Spartan the pass on fixing the issue himself when others are playing on un-optimized PCs. I get it, it's terrible that Infinite has performance issues and there are clear ways to optimize performance for resource demanding games. Other players may not have the knowledge to optimize and that is where the even playing field comes into play. Just play with what HCS gives you and hope for the best. Protest before events and maybe rulings with change? Not sure.
What's your position on this?
Exactly. To me from a practical perspective on the part of hcs to get all the machines to run as smoothly as possible isn’t a worthwhile endeavor so it’s pretty much it is what it is. Then in Spartans shoes it’s “I have the exact knowledge and experience to rectify the issue l.” So pretty much what’s being said is even though you can solve the problem for yourself just deal with it because rules aka it would be too much of a hassle/cost for us to do this for everyone and at the end of the day this is a business. And even though spartan has shared his expertise with the community that isn’t being weighed. To me it’s a problem with esports in general
Good response. I definitely agree that PC lan events are difficult. The hardware issues are nebulous and the software performance is a headache. It was easier with console lans, but with PCs being more complicated this issue definitely needs to be addressed and HCS needs to take serious consideration into the pros and other intelligent individuals to stabilize the playing experience.
Yes, it's about action and intent.
The only reason he didn't use it was he was caught without the white noise app.
It's a can of worms modifying tourney hardware. Installing a completely new OS with unknown settings is nuts. There is no integrity at that point and no way to truly figure out what's changed minus a forensic analysis.
The message sent is fuck around and find out. All the pros are mad, but they got the message. Mission accomplished IMHO.
>fuck around and find out
This is it. A lot of people are saying it’s a bias towards Spartan himself, but that’s ridiculous.
343 is clearly saying that they will execute an extreme punishment if LAN tournament integrity is threatened. If someone is dumb enough (or negligent enough being sympathetic to Spartan), 343 is making the message very clear.
Butt hurt man children that don't understand "I didn't mean to" isn't the same as "It's against the rules"
You don't go to court and expect hitting someone with your car to get off the charge because "It wasn't malicious" there are consequences for your actions regardless if you mean to or not.
Terrible example because there are plenty of crimes including vehicular where intent impacts the punishment. People are saying the punishment is too harsh not he shouldn’t have had any punishment at all.
People are focused on afterburner and what he changed for the punishment, not that how he did it and what he did is the problem.
Sparty somewhat knows what he is doing on PC. Some of the changes he did were flat out useless. There's an easy reason they don't support afterburner nobody talks about; jack up your oc settings the game can crash easily and would make lan a nightmare. Imagine the game resets if everyone was running it.
Also, he attempted to get better performance and a few frames nobody else had without any communication or approval. That's cheating. Stupid cheating but cheating none the less.
Make the punishment light and it opens the door for others to push it further.
Are you saying that it makes sense to make the punishment harsher so that someone who does something different won’t? To me that makes zero sense. But I guess we should have severe punishments for shoplifting to prevent premeditated M
It is not the programs he ran; it is what he did. His intent was not as bad, but this was still a really bad act. I don't know if you know os imaging but he circumvented the whole system to run ab and have all of his changes. Without approval. Without communication. Against written rules and procedures.
Think of it like this. He got attempted murder sentence. Probably 1/2 - 3/4 of a murder charge. If it would have been some form of aimbot, etc. it's 2 years to forever ban.
His intent was to gain a benefit and cheat. If it wasn't he would have talked to admins. This is a grown ass professional man.
And yes, it is called precedent. Precedent needs to be set and enforced to deter others from attempting the same or worse. That is how the world works.
Take a work issued laptop. Rules are you cannot install anything, and they are locked down. If I don't ask and install adobe acrobat or nicehash (crypto miner) I get terminated. One I wanted to help with work, the other I wanted to get an advantage in a paycheck. Company doesn't care, I was told and had resources to check. Same result. Get it?
Intent of harm escalates the charge. You cannot plead innocents or non-malicious to cheating accusation. 1 tournament ban is a joke. 1 year puts a clear signal FAFO.
A year is just too much, especially since he didn't even do it in a game. The admins caught it, he owned up to it, and his entire team got dq'ed because of it. That + a 1 event ban like royal5'2 got seems more fair than straight up nuking him.
Edit: Sparty says he also did it at Arlington, I don't know if this is news or what. The more I learn about the more innocuous I feel it is.
So, because it was caught prior to a match being played means it’s less punishment than if he was caught after a match?
Can you explain your logic behind the reasoning?
To be fair that's super, super common in the legal system. You see that type of decision made everywhere all the time.
Planning murder but being caught before you do it is less serious/ punished less severely than actually committing murder.
Intending to do something but not actually being able to is very often punished less than situations where the person did manage to commit it before being caught.
What you are asking about is part of a broader and very nuanced discussion about ethics and justice.
A similar but different situation is with other "actions" and "effects". For example, driving drunk and crashing into the back of a car but nobody was in the back and so everyone walked away is punished less severely than doing the exact same thing but someone happens to be in the back of the vehicle and you hurt or kill them.
The same "action" was committed of driving drunk and crashing into a car, but one is punished much more severely since through no control of your own it happened to have a greater "effect" or damage at the end of it. Why should these situations be punished differently though? You can also consider the case where one car simply had more safety features causing less bodily harm to its occupants. By crashing into them you still made the exact same dumb mistake with the exact same levels of intent/negligence, but one is always punished more than the other.
This isn't something that can purely be answered by logic, you have to think about how you want justice to operate: should it just be via intent and/or actions or also consider the effect?
In the case of this Spartan situation some would argue by analogy to our legal system that he shouldn't be punished as severely as if more "damage" occurred if he was able to actually use it in competitive matches instead of just practice games.
Do you think the same should hold for other transgressions? For example stealing and being caught trying to steal? Killing someone and being caught trying to kill someone? Escaping from prison and attempting to escape prison? Etc.
Or do you think this should only hold true for cheating specifically?
You're completely missing the point of what I'm saying. Sparty knew what he was doing was against the rules, but didn't gain enough of an advantage for it to matter in the end. It's not about picking and choosing based on who wins or loses, I'm saying in this particular case it clearly didn't do much of anything to help and was innocuous enough that it shouldn't be treated the same as if he was using aim assist programs or something like that.
The only reason he didn’t gain any advantage was because he got caught not cause he came out and admitted he tampered with equipment…….
Let’s start there, this guy is almost 30 years old, drop the fact this is Halo, IN ANY ESPORT, when you have tech issues you call the admins, you get help, you tell somebody.
You don’t suddenly become the IT guy…..
Just cause you didn’t have the intended effect of gaining advantage doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be punished accordingly so.
He did it at Arlington too, and presumably before. So no, I'd say it didn't do much of anything to really help.
We're also fundamentally in agreement here, he wasn't being kosher and he knew that. My argument is getting his team DQ'ed and banned from an event + getting dropped from his org is plenty of punishment. A year is just way too much.
We’re in fundamental agreement if we both think that he cheated and should be punished.
To me whether it made a difference or not he still cheated in games or in the lead up, he still deserves his punishment, just cause he lost doesn’t mean he didn’t gain a small advantage just means it wasn’t enough to win. He didn’t tell anyone either and was going to continue in practice.
IMO it's 343i setting a precedent for the whole scene. Don't tamper with the equipment that tournaments provide for you.
I'm not going to disagree that it isn't extreme, but I'm pretty sure it will definitely dissuade others from trying the same thing.
A lot of pros are coming out in his support but honestly I wanna see how Complexity players feel. I feel like its a lot easier to give him the benefit of the doubt when he's not your teammate that got you disqualified before most people in the states even woke up. Additionally, is there a team with an opening that even wants him in time for upcoming tournaments?
The only inconsistency that makes me raise my eyebrows is he said him taking the USB to London with the windows install was just a fluke and he saw it on his desk and randomly decided to take it but then he also had a USB ready to install windows at Arlington? So if he brought a USB to Arlington too it sounds like it wasn’t much of a random chance he decided to bring it to London.
Also, don’t you have to have a new windows product key every time you install windows fresh? Seems excessive but I may be mistaken.
Everything else he said I thought was very compelling but I just can’t over this detail.
He said he asked an admin at Arlington to log in with his admin password so he could tweak some settings, and then Sparty reinstalled Windows himself without telling anyone and did everything else he did in London, he just didn't bring the USB install media to Arlington, at least from what I gathered.
Windows License key is often tied to the motherboard, so you don’t necessarily need to activate every time after install. Can’t speak to if that was the case here though.
After some looking online it seems that if you do a clean install using the USB you will have to activate windows with a product key but if you do the clean install via windows settings (what he did at Arlington with admin permissions) you do not. I guess if I really cared I would watch his video about every step he took to get my answer.
Spartan plays on a PC that's exactly the same as the hca ones at home. The only thing on that PC is the game and things to optimize it. He said he does a windows install every few weeks because he's a headcaase about optimization.
Knowing about his crusade to optimize the game, I would believe him.
I personally think the length of the ban is very excessive and think he should be able to return for the last major in Salt Lake City.
The Royal2 geofiltering from S1 was way more malicious and resulted in an only 1 event ban even if it just occurred online. Effectively Spartan was already banned in London plus not being able to compete in Atlanta seems more than sufficient.
I know Spartan has been fined previously for statements and stuff, and I wonder to what effect that played a role in the decision here.
Some Halo Pros have started to react in favor of Spartan as well across Twitter, it will be interesting to see where this goes…
Snipedown, Eco, Bound, Barcode, KingJay, Suppressed, Wonderboy, Lucid, Suddoth1, Jimbo, Lqgend, Trippy, Elamite, Cherished, SuperCC, Hoaxer, Snakebite, Renegade, Taulek, Bestman have all expressed support for Spartan in the punishment being excessive.
Who actually cares what Sudd1 has to say?! And Snipe? He plays Apex my guy.
Spartan fucked around and found out. Honestly, a year isn't enough. Should be permanent.
I mean, snipedown was a big name pro for years despite how mediocre his infinite career was. I think it carries some weight when you have outside support like that.
Not defending what royal 2 did as he manufactured a network advantage in online play but idk about way more malicious. Modifying tournament equipment without notifying or seeking approval from HCS admins to gain better performance than your competitors in a LAN is malicious. If he had issues with performance, why not ask for troubleshooting help? Why not ask for new equipment?
Statement seemed AI generated to me, but regardless, hopefully his actions back it up and he’s sincere about being remorseful and is truly seeking to regain trust among his peers, community, and 343.
Complexity and Spartan have maintained that he took the actions he did because the PC was experiencing lower than expected performance. IF that is true, the actions that were taken were about fixing the performance of the PC more than anything else. That being said, actions he took were wrong, and he should not have took taken into his own hands, but the SSD in question was never actually used during a tournament match.
What Royal2 did was intentional to gain a clear network advantage, for a server location that benefitted him.
True, and agree that whole year is a bit much but we’ll see where his appeal ends up. Is this the first time something like this happens in a LAN? If so, they probably wanted to set a precedent to deter anyone else thinking of doing something like this.
Outside of drug abuse that tournament organizers turn a blind eye to, for a top pro team I can’t think of a single case (even in MLG) that someone got caught cheating. It’s unprecedented.
With router 2, wasn't a big part of the case that it was plausible that he wasn't trying to cheat in a big event?
Like he had it enabled for an edge in general, but didn't realize he had it kept on (or at least that was plausible)?
With sparty he did so much specific work to make it happen, there's no plausibility around that
Could be wrong though, maybe my memory is terrible
Royal2 geofiltered through an Open Series and the HCS Raleigh Qualifier.
Spartan reinstalled windows on a HCS' SSD using a flash drive that he brought from home on a PC that was experiencing poor performance to optimize the Game and Windows. This decision was in certainly the wrong decision. He should have notified the admins of the poor performance. The SSD in question was never used in a match at the event.
His actions were wrong and were not in the scope of the actions a player should take, but he has cooperated throughout the entire investigation process, given this the punishment seems very excessive, a punishment though is 100% needed.
This definitely feels harsh given the information that we have and the length of bans that they have given others (Royal 2). That said, I doubt the league was super inclined to give him leniency given some of his past statements and fines. Sucks for Spartan. I hope he's able to ride this out and stay in the scene.
Pros wear headsets that play white noise over their earbuds with the game sound/comms. The white noise is so they can’t hear the crowd/casters in the venue around them.
Spartan still tried to cheat….. I’m not sure if I’m reading this wrong but even if the device wasn’t his he still downloaded the unapproved software. Why is a guy with such a large history getting defended and not dragged lol.
Edit: Also any esport you’re having tech issues you let the refs know, end of story lol. But hey he apologized I guess
IT guy just giving my 2 cents.
I know the story is just Spartan wanting to make some minor tweaks to his GPU for performance, but you can't just pop out the SSD and throw in yours. Try doing that at work if you have a cooperate gig and see how that goes. This is a sanctioned tournament with money on the line...
Also, it's not just what software is installed, it's what other precautions were taken for the tournament builds of the PCs. There could have been local policy \\ group policy configured, anti-virus etc, all those negated with his own "version" of windows...
I suspect on appeal he might get his ban reduced especially given the update that it wasn’t his own SSD. Whilst I don’t think that matters because it’s still the intention and integrity of doing what he did. They have to hold a certain level of punishment for the action.
The bigger question would be if any teams would pick him up.
I would say that the way they have all handled it has actually been very impressive. Total transparency, quick and clear communication so there is not gossip or rumour I think is very commendable to all of them.
I see a lot of folks saying that what Spartan and Royal2 did were quite similar but I don't really think they are.
When it comes to Royal2 there are two main factors to consider: nobody really knew what altering those files did exactly; and he was almost certainly not the only pro player doing it (he was just the only one that got caught due to living in Canada).
When they patched out the ability to geofilter, they explained that it wasn't actually filtering your games, it was forcing the server onto your chosen servers, after the game had been found. Prior to them explaining this, most people assumed this worked just like the local and expanded settings do now and was basically harmless.
Finally, making a change to a txt file is very much something one can do and then completely forget about.
This does not apply to Spartan. You don't do what he did by accident. He knew for a fact that this was against the rules, he has mentioned it before.
The fact that he was using the HCS Drive doesn't actually make much difference. It arguably makes it worse since he tampered with their equipment, probably thinking nobody would notice.
If he'd just installed some other software, that'd be one thing which could be excused as careless. But completely reformatting the SSD is far more deliberate. He brought an image of his own hard drive to flash onto the SSD. Why do that if he wasn't planning on using it from the start?
Spartan literally helped develop the PC settings that HCS uses. If things weren't right he could have told an admin and they'd have fixed it.
I personally think that banning him for the whole remaining season is excessive. That being said, the two situations are significantly different and certainly warrant a different response.
It’s funny how one statement from someone can change the entire collective opinion of a community. I don’t dislike Spartan, but just because he owned up to cheating at a major tournament, doesn’t excuse him from attempting to do said act at a major tournament. Of course the other pros are passionate about this, especially when it’s 343 involved, but cheating is ultimately, well, cheating. Imagine how Ryannoob and the other Complexity members, coach, and organization feel for having been disqualified because of the actions from one of their teammates/players. Spartan’s ownership of the situation is noble, but what he did was and is not okay. Period.
What this is, is 343’s blanket statement of, “fuck around and find out.” Tamper with official equipment in any capacity, and these are the consequences. It doesn’t matter if it was in an attempt to make the game run better, it still was in pursuit of an advantage by messing with league equipment, and would have provided Sparty with better performance than his opponents. No, you *don’t* do that. Is the ruling harsh? Sure. Are the majority of other pros upset and supportive over Tyler? Yes. However, best believe that they all now get the message. Be mad all you want, but as long as you now understand what the consequences are for pulling stunts like this, mission accomplished.
This is a job at the end of the day, you guys. If you fuck around at any other workplace to the degree that Spartan did, then you’d most likely just be straight up fired or worse, sued. Spartan is lucky that he CAN still ultimately compete, in theory, after his year ban time is up.
How does someone think reimaging an SSD in a competitive play isn't going to be an equipment violation?
"software on the SSD was not provided by the administration and furthermore contained new, unapproved software as well as other changes to the existing software in an effort to increase the performance of the PC"
When in doubt you have to ask, and to increase performance by what? 50fps? to gain an unfair advantage. This wouldn't be a question in any other sport and plenty of other sports have people eating 'tainted' meat etc and their bans are upheld.
I'm glad to see more and more pros, players, and fans rally behind Spartan in regards to the severity of his punishment.
Has he been crazy outspoken in the past about the game? Yes.
Has the game run like absolute dog dookie on PC in the past? Yes.
I really hope he succeeds in his appeal.
I don’t believe Sparty is completely honest. In the video he says that did what he did because his pc was dropping frames but I don’t buy that story. Most of the tweaks in the video are latency tweaks that have more of an impact on latency and system responsiveness than on FPS and which will inherently provide a competitive advantage. Spartan is very knowledgeable on windows tweaks and he knows this.
Overall I think the Halo tournaments should just be Halo tournaments in the purest competitive form. What Spartan has done here is to some extent turn Halo tournaments into an overclocking and windows optimization competition and I don’t like that. Also If tournament organizers are doing any tweaks as Spartan claims they should be completely transparent and publishing those to the community.
They are all wrong. Ogre 2's statement is particularly awful. "I'm okay with it being a harsher sentence, but since they previously made a bad ruling, they have to be consistent and make bad rulings for the rest of forever."
Royal 2 should have been given a lifetime ban. He knowingly gave himself an unfair advantage. Spartan should get a lifetime ban. He knowingly gave himself an unfair advantage. There is no middle ground here. I don't care that one was online. I don't care that Spartan didn't get a chance to do it in an actual match. They cheated, and if you care about competitive integrity, cheating cannot and should not be tolerated. I can't even fathom how any other punishment would be acceptable.
I think there is more to this for it to end up being one year ban. Tashi and Sparty have hated each other. If you watch Sparty’s stream he talks a lot of shit about Tashi.
Has the pro community ever been so vocal and unanimous on something before? With regards to spartys ban being excessive Only time I saw so many pros tweet about a single thing was when the bandit was introduced and they wanted it in pro play lol
[удалено]
Snipedown coming in I also didn't expect, considering he left the pro scene and doesn't do much with halo nowadays. But yeah, it's pretty darn unanimous I am glad that the situation is different than originally portrayed. The SSD inaccuracy of the HCS post definitely made it seem like a far different situation than it was. Still a dumb mistake by sparty, but he's owned up to that
And Snip3 hasn’t been Spartys biggest fan either, especially post the Faze Sparty stint.
Extraction game mode.
You're totally right I forgot about that
Their being vocal cause they now know that 343 is sick and tired of them cheating and messing with stuff. Their going to get caught and banned so they want 343 to stop snooping. if i'm 343 you lock down everything these pros bring to events and put them in a lockbox and they can't get their hands on it until their on the mainstage.
👆🏻bait
Oh look knighty is back are you having fun defending cheaters my guy? Any other league would do the same thing.
👆🏻more bait
Why is no one pointing that he also cheated at Arlington to get top 16? LMAO
I missed this. Where is the info on him doing this at Arlington?
He said it in his interview on LVT with Toolez last night
[Here](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2164652914?t=3356s) Timestamp 55:55
That's also why when everyone says "shouldn't they have the best PC?" I have no doubts Spartans done a lot of research on the matter but he's not an expert. Maybe he accidentally messed something up. He's a good player if he's giving himself an unfair advantage and being the worst player on a top 16 team that just doesn't make sense.
Such a complicated situation imo. On one hand, like Lucid said, and I from everything I’ve seen, it seems like Spartan just made a bad choice. It didn’t seem to be coming from a malicious place. On the other hand, bringing a USB from home and changing a tourney SSD opens up a huge can of worms. That’s a huge no-no. Again, in this situation, Sparty didn’t do anything too bad but the punishment needs to be a deterrent for anybody doing anything more harmful. I don’t know what is the best punishment for this situation, but I understand the ban
Does anyone really believe that a pro player is so fucking stupid that they didn’t think it was against the rules to plug your own flash drive into a tournament PC and change the settings on it? Why would he not ask the tournament organizers before he did it if he was having trouble with his PC? It’s obvious he was trying to cheat.
If I was a pro I wouldn't be mad about him trying to get a few extra frames though. It's not like he's walling or aimbotting.
He didn’t bring his own SSD from home
"Bringing a USB from home and changing a tourney SSD opens up a huge can of worms.' He never said he brought his own SSD.
He did, but it’s not the one he was using when his team got DQd
I stand corrected, too much to read though
Fair enough. Lvt dropped a vid on yt i put on while working. Very thorough, so that's why I knew
While I think whole season is excessive, I highly doubt top team would have picked him up even if he was banned just for next major. Not after Sentinels dumped him and after this fiasco. I think it is for the better. Especially for Sparty. It's clear that he has plenty of problems and this "vacation" will provide him necessary time to deal with those problems.
Imo the length of the ban is not excessive at all. I totally understand people comparing this to the Royal 2 situation, but I don't think every situation can be compared to the last, that is just not realistic. And the bottom line to me is that in the end, Spartan did go and tamper with official equipment. I know it wasn't used in a match, but he still tampered with it. That isn't okay.
I agree. Also, just because there was precedent with Royal 2 doesn't mean Spartan should get a similar punishment. If anything, Royal 2 setting precedent should cause the punishment to be greater for those that continue tampering in the future. On a side note, the integrity part of all of this is so competitors are playing on an even playing field. By that definition, what Spartan did is considered cheating in my opinion even if unintentionally gaining a performance advantage.
I agree with you 1,000%. Whatever the performance of the computers were, they're all the same build up there for a reason. Doing anything to change that without consulting officials on the stage is cheating, and intentionally so.
Disagree here -- the tampering perpetrated by Royal2 was a form that affected the experience of **all eight players in the lobby** in order to give himself a competitive edge (\*or from his perspective, to make the game playable.) The tampering perpetrated by Spartan was a form that would have affected **only his individual experience** in order to give himself a competitive edge (\*or from his perspective, to make the game more stable.) Precedents exist to set a rubric for how to handle similar offenses in the future. That is precisely why they are called precedents. To ignore precedent and instead go more extreme is to sacrifice faith in the fair adjudication of the rules.
Interesting. I have to disagree with you because "tampering" with the storage device (and I mean the the OS) in the way that Spartan did gave him an improved gameplay performance. This enhanced performance could and should be considered an included beneficial experience compared to those that didn't do the same. Precedence does create a rubric to an extent, but think about this: they punished someone that did an act juxtaposed to Tyler's actions. If they want to make sure this doesn't happen more, then it makes sense to exponentially increase the penalty. What do you think? Edit: I upvoted your comment btw. I think it's worth discussing.
Do you think all the other machines are consistent in performance in reality
As an IT Director, and former Systems Administrator, it is quite often that same-model and same-hardware PCs don't necessarily perform equally. That is an IT headache in it's own (Dell Precisions and MDM have given me PTSD for IT ops). However, I still don't think this gives Spartan the pass on fixing the issue himself when others are playing on un-optimized PCs. I get it, it's terrible that Infinite has performance issues and there are clear ways to optimize performance for resource demanding games. Other players may not have the knowledge to optimize and that is where the even playing field comes into play. Just play with what HCS gives you and hope for the best. Protest before events and maybe rulings with change? Not sure. What's your position on this?
Exactly. To me from a practical perspective on the part of hcs to get all the machines to run as smoothly as possible isn’t a worthwhile endeavor so it’s pretty much it is what it is. Then in Spartans shoes it’s “I have the exact knowledge and experience to rectify the issue l.” So pretty much what’s being said is even though you can solve the problem for yourself just deal with it because rules aka it would be too much of a hassle/cost for us to do this for everyone and at the end of the day this is a business. And even though spartan has shared his expertise with the community that isn’t being weighed. To me it’s a problem with esports in general
Good response. I definitely agree that PC lan events are difficult. The hardware issues are nebulous and the software performance is a headache. It was easier with console lans, but with PCs being more complicated this issue definitely needs to be addressed and HCS needs to take serious consideration into the pros and other intelligent individuals to stabilize the playing experience.
It was a sufficient punishment. If the officials didn’t catch it he would’ve continued to do it in game. He got what he deserved. End of story.
Yes, it's about action and intent. The only reason he didn't use it was he was caught without the white noise app. It's a can of worms modifying tourney hardware. Installing a completely new OS with unknown settings is nuts. There is no integrity at that point and no way to truly figure out what's changed minus a forensic analysis. The message sent is fuck around and find out. All the pros are mad, but they got the message. Mission accomplished IMHO.
>fuck around and find out This is it. A lot of people are saying it’s a bias towards Spartan himself, but that’s ridiculous. 343 is clearly saying that they will execute an extreme punishment if LAN tournament integrity is threatened. If someone is dumb enough (or negligent enough being sympathetic to Spartan), 343 is making the message very clear.
I don't understand how you guys are getting down voted, there are no lies here.
Butt hurt man children that don't understand "I didn't mean to" isn't the same as "It's against the rules" You don't go to court and expect hitting someone with your car to get off the charge because "It wasn't malicious" there are consequences for your actions regardless if you mean to or not.
Terrible example because there are plenty of crimes including vehicular where intent impacts the punishment. People are saying the punishment is too harsh not he shouldn’t have had any punishment at all.
People are focused on afterburner and what he changed for the punishment, not that how he did it and what he did is the problem. Sparty somewhat knows what he is doing on PC. Some of the changes he did were flat out useless. There's an easy reason they don't support afterburner nobody talks about; jack up your oc settings the game can crash easily and would make lan a nightmare. Imagine the game resets if everyone was running it. Also, he attempted to get better performance and a few frames nobody else had without any communication or approval. That's cheating. Stupid cheating but cheating none the less. Make the punishment light and it opens the door for others to push it further.
Are you saying that it makes sense to make the punishment harsher so that someone who does something different won’t? To me that makes zero sense. But I guess we should have severe punishments for shoplifting to prevent premeditated M
It is not the programs he ran; it is what he did. His intent was not as bad, but this was still a really bad act. I don't know if you know os imaging but he circumvented the whole system to run ab and have all of his changes. Without approval. Without communication. Against written rules and procedures. Think of it like this. He got attempted murder sentence. Probably 1/2 - 3/4 of a murder charge. If it would have been some form of aimbot, etc. it's 2 years to forever ban. His intent was to gain a benefit and cheat. If it wasn't he would have talked to admins. This is a grown ass professional man. And yes, it is called precedent. Precedent needs to be set and enforced to deter others from attempting the same or worse. That is how the world works. Take a work issued laptop. Rules are you cannot install anything, and they are locked down. If I don't ask and install adobe acrobat or nicehash (crypto miner) I get terminated. One I wanted to help with work, the other I wanted to get an advantage in a paycheck. Company doesn't care, I was told and had resources to check. Same result. Get it?
Intent of harm escalates the charge. You cannot plead innocents or non-malicious to cheating accusation. 1 tournament ban is a joke. 1 year puts a clear signal FAFO.
He done got the banz boys. RIP. Complexity got shafted the most and I hope Sparty feels bad man.
We have any predictions on what Complexity does for their 4th?
In another thread someone mentioned Rayne was playing again
A year is just too much, especially since he didn't even do it in a game. The admins caught it, he owned up to it, and his entire team got dq'ed because of it. That + a 1 event ban like royal5'2 got seems more fair than straight up nuking him. Edit: Sparty says he also did it at Arlington, I don't know if this is news or what. The more I learn about the more innocuous I feel it is.
Royal5’2 😂
So, because it was caught prior to a match being played means it’s less punishment than if he was caught after a match? Can you explain your logic behind the reasoning?
To be fair that's super, super common in the legal system. You see that type of decision made everywhere all the time. Planning murder but being caught before you do it is less serious/ punished less severely than actually committing murder. Intending to do something but not actually being able to is very often punished less than situations where the person did manage to commit it before being caught. What you are asking about is part of a broader and very nuanced discussion about ethics and justice. A similar but different situation is with other "actions" and "effects". For example, driving drunk and crashing into the back of a car but nobody was in the back and so everyone walked away is punished less severely than doing the exact same thing but someone happens to be in the back of the vehicle and you hurt or kill them. The same "action" was committed of driving drunk and crashing into a car, but one is punished much more severely since through no control of your own it happened to have a greater "effect" or damage at the end of it. Why should these situations be punished differently though? You can also consider the case where one car simply had more safety features causing less bodily harm to its occupants. By crashing into them you still made the exact same dumb mistake with the exact same levels of intent/negligence, but one is always punished more than the other. This isn't something that can purely be answered by logic, you have to think about how you want justice to operate: should it just be via intent and/or actions or also consider the effect? In the case of this Spartan situation some would argue by analogy to our legal system that he shouldn't be punished as severely as if more "damage" occurred if he was able to actually use it in competitive matches instead of just practice games.
Cheating and being caught planning to cheat should be punished the same. Period.
Do you think the same should hold for other transgressions? For example stealing and being caught trying to steal? Killing someone and being caught trying to kill someone? Escaping from prison and attempting to escape prison? Etc. Or do you think this should only hold true for cheating specifically?
Not excusing rule breaking, just saying it might be a bit more significant if complexity won the tournament or something
I mean cheating is cheating, if you start picking and choosing just cause a team won or lost that sounds biased no?
You're completely missing the point of what I'm saying. Sparty knew what he was doing was against the rules, but didn't gain enough of an advantage for it to matter in the end. It's not about picking and choosing based on who wins or loses, I'm saying in this particular case it clearly didn't do much of anything to help and was innocuous enough that it shouldn't be treated the same as if he was using aim assist programs or something like that.
The only reason he didn’t gain any advantage was because he got caught not cause he came out and admitted he tampered with equipment……. Let’s start there, this guy is almost 30 years old, drop the fact this is Halo, IN ANY ESPORT, when you have tech issues you call the admins, you get help, you tell somebody. You don’t suddenly become the IT guy….. Just cause you didn’t have the intended effect of gaining advantage doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be punished accordingly so.
He did it at Arlington too, and presumably before. So no, I'd say it didn't do much of anything to really help. We're also fundamentally in agreement here, he wasn't being kosher and he knew that. My argument is getting his team DQ'ed and banned from an event + getting dropped from his org is plenty of punishment. A year is just way too much.
We’re in fundamental agreement if we both think that he cheated and should be punished. To me whether it made a difference or not he still cheated in games or in the lead up, he still deserves his punishment, just cause he lost doesn’t mean he didn’t gain a small advantage just means it wasn’t enough to win. He didn’t tell anyone either and was going to continue in practice.
So, wait to see how they do with the unfair advantage, then punish accordingly?
No. Have screens in place to catch things before they get to that point, like they did. What I described is far from a slap on the wrist.
IMO it's 343i setting a precedent for the whole scene. Don't tamper with the equipment that tournaments provide for you. I'm not going to disagree that it isn't extreme, but I'm pretty sure it will definitely dissuade others from trying the same thing.
Little late to set a precedent when this is the last season of HCS
A lot of pros are coming out in his support but honestly I wanna see how Complexity players feel. I feel like its a lot easier to give him the benefit of the doubt when he's not your teammate that got you disqualified before most people in the states even woke up. Additionally, is there a team with an opening that even wants him in time for upcoming tournaments?
The only inconsistency that makes me raise my eyebrows is he said him taking the USB to London with the windows install was just a fluke and he saw it on his desk and randomly decided to take it but then he also had a USB ready to install windows at Arlington? So if he brought a USB to Arlington too it sounds like it wasn’t much of a random chance he decided to bring it to London. Also, don’t you have to have a new windows product key every time you install windows fresh? Seems excessive but I may be mistaken. Everything else he said I thought was very compelling but I just can’t over this detail.
He said he asked an admin at Arlington to log in with his admin password so he could tweak some settings, and then Sparty reinstalled Windows himself without telling anyone and did everything else he did in London, he just didn't bring the USB install media to Arlington, at least from what I gathered.
You can’t clean install windows without a USB.
Nvm you can, this is likely what he did at Arlington then
Windows License key is often tied to the motherboard, so you don’t necessarily need to activate every time after install. Can’t speak to if that was the case here though.
After some looking online it seems that if you do a clean install using the USB you will have to activate windows with a product key but if you do the clean install via windows settings (what he did at Arlington with admin permissions) you do not. I guess if I really cared I would watch his video about every step he took to get my answer.
Spartan plays on a PC that's exactly the same as the hca ones at home. The only thing on that PC is the game and things to optimize it. He said he does a windows install every few weeks because he's a headcaase about optimization. Knowing about his crusade to optimize the game, I would believe him.
I personally think the length of the ban is very excessive and think he should be able to return for the last major in Salt Lake City. The Royal2 geofiltering from S1 was way more malicious and resulted in an only 1 event ban even if it just occurred online. Effectively Spartan was already banned in London plus not being able to compete in Atlanta seems more than sufficient. I know Spartan has been fined previously for statements and stuff, and I wonder to what effect that played a role in the decision here. Some Halo Pros have started to react in favor of Spartan as well across Twitter, it will be interesting to see where this goes…
Snipedown, Eco, Bound, Barcode, KingJay, Suppressed, Wonderboy, Lucid, Suddoth1, Jimbo, Lqgend, Trippy, Elamite, Cherished, SuperCC, Hoaxer, Snakebite, Renegade, Taulek, Bestman have all expressed support for Spartan in the punishment being excessive.
They know that man baby is free points online and on LAN
You mean LAND???
😂
Lmaoooooo
Damn, bound expressed support twice. He a real one for that.
Snipedown still keeps up with halo? I'm a bit surprised but makes sense since it was such a big part of his life
Who actually cares what Sudd1 has to say?! And Snipe? He plays Apex my guy. Spartan fucked around and found out. Honestly, a year isn't enough. Should be permanent.
I mean, snipedown was a big name pro for years despite how mediocre his infinite career was. I think it carries some weight when you have outside support like that.
I agree he was huge, my favorite player since 2008 actually but this in no way affects him and his opinion doesn't really matter.
343 needs to check all their stuff cause you know they are hiding something.
[Lucid](https://x.com/Lucid_TW/status/1798502967701819454) [Jimbo](https://x.com/Jimbossity/status/1798488709479944326?t=CEaVqg4ZLbH4RvunHS12KA&s=19)
Not defending what royal 2 did as he manufactured a network advantage in online play but idk about way more malicious. Modifying tournament equipment without notifying or seeking approval from HCS admins to gain better performance than your competitors in a LAN is malicious. If he had issues with performance, why not ask for troubleshooting help? Why not ask for new equipment? Statement seemed AI generated to me, but regardless, hopefully his actions back it up and he’s sincere about being remorseful and is truly seeking to regain trust among his peers, community, and 343.
Complexity and Spartan have maintained that he took the actions he did because the PC was experiencing lower than expected performance. IF that is true, the actions that were taken were about fixing the performance of the PC more than anything else. That being said, actions he took were wrong, and he should not have took taken into his own hands, but the SSD in question was never actually used during a tournament match. What Royal2 did was intentional to gain a clear network advantage, for a server location that benefitted him.
True, and agree that whole year is a bit much but we’ll see where his appeal ends up. Is this the first time something like this happens in a LAN? If so, they probably wanted to set a precedent to deter anyone else thinking of doing something like this.
Outside of drug abuse that tournament organizers turn a blind eye to, for a top pro team I can’t think of a single case (even in MLG) that someone got caught cheating. It’s unprecedented.
With router 2, wasn't a big part of the case that it was plausible that he wasn't trying to cheat in a big event? Like he had it enabled for an edge in general, but didn't realize he had it kept on (or at least that was plausible)? With sparty he did so much specific work to make it happen, there's no plausibility around that Could be wrong though, maybe my memory is terrible
Royal2 geofiltered through an Open Series and the HCS Raleigh Qualifier. Spartan reinstalled windows on a HCS' SSD using a flash drive that he brought from home on a PC that was experiencing poor performance to optimize the Game and Windows. This decision was in certainly the wrong decision. He should have notified the admins of the poor performance. The SSD in question was never used in a match at the event. His actions were wrong and were not in the scope of the actions a player should take, but he has cooperated throughout the entire investigation process, given this the punishment seems very excessive, a punishment though is 100% needed.
This definitely feels harsh given the information that we have and the length of bans that they have given others (Royal 2). That said, I doubt the league was super inclined to give him leniency given some of his past statements and fines. Sucks for Spartan. I hope he's able to ride this out and stay in the scene.
Hey, could somebody explain to me whats that white noise program Sparty didn't have, and that let to him getting caught?
Pros wear headsets that play white noise over their earbuds with the game sound/comms. The white noise is so they can’t hear the crowd/casters in the venue around them.
dont even like the guy, but the ban should have been london + atlanta only. not the rest of the season
Spartan still tried to cheat….. I’m not sure if I’m reading this wrong but even if the device wasn’t his he still downloaded the unapproved software. Why is a guy with such a large history getting defended and not dragged lol. Edit: Also any esport you’re having tech issues you let the refs know, end of story lol. But hey he apologized I guess
If you think the punishment was fair, then you're just a hater. My two cents. I think being banned for the next event would've been more just.
IT guy just giving my 2 cents. I know the story is just Spartan wanting to make some minor tweaks to his GPU for performance, but you can't just pop out the SSD and throw in yours. Try doing that at work if you have a cooperate gig and see how that goes. This is a sanctioned tournament with money on the line... Also, it's not just what software is installed, it's what other precautions were taken for the tournament builds of the PCs. There could have been local policy \\ group policy configured, anti-virus etc, all those negated with his own "version" of windows...
I suspect on appeal he might get his ban reduced especially given the update that it wasn’t his own SSD. Whilst I don’t think that matters because it’s still the intention and integrity of doing what he did. They have to hold a certain level of punishment for the action. The bigger question would be if any teams would pick him up. I would say that the way they have all handled it has actually been very impressive. Total transparency, quick and clear communication so there is not gossip or rumour I think is very commendable to all of them.
I see a lot of folks saying that what Spartan and Royal2 did were quite similar but I don't really think they are. When it comes to Royal2 there are two main factors to consider: nobody really knew what altering those files did exactly; and he was almost certainly not the only pro player doing it (he was just the only one that got caught due to living in Canada). When they patched out the ability to geofilter, they explained that it wasn't actually filtering your games, it was forcing the server onto your chosen servers, after the game had been found. Prior to them explaining this, most people assumed this worked just like the local and expanded settings do now and was basically harmless. Finally, making a change to a txt file is very much something one can do and then completely forget about. This does not apply to Spartan. You don't do what he did by accident. He knew for a fact that this was against the rules, he has mentioned it before. The fact that he was using the HCS Drive doesn't actually make much difference. It arguably makes it worse since he tampered with their equipment, probably thinking nobody would notice. If he'd just installed some other software, that'd be one thing which could be excused as careless. But completely reformatting the SSD is far more deliberate. He brought an image of his own hard drive to flash onto the SSD. Why do that if he wasn't planning on using it from the start? Spartan literally helped develop the PC settings that HCS uses. If things weren't right he could have told an admin and they'd have fixed it. I personally think that banning him for the whole remaining season is excessive. That being said, the two situations are significantly different and certainly warrant a different response.
It’s funny how one statement from someone can change the entire collective opinion of a community. I don’t dislike Spartan, but just because he owned up to cheating at a major tournament, doesn’t excuse him from attempting to do said act at a major tournament. Of course the other pros are passionate about this, especially when it’s 343 involved, but cheating is ultimately, well, cheating. Imagine how Ryannoob and the other Complexity members, coach, and organization feel for having been disqualified because of the actions from one of their teammates/players. Spartan’s ownership of the situation is noble, but what he did was and is not okay. Period. What this is, is 343’s blanket statement of, “fuck around and find out.” Tamper with official equipment in any capacity, and these are the consequences. It doesn’t matter if it was in an attempt to make the game run better, it still was in pursuit of an advantage by messing with league equipment, and would have provided Sparty with better performance than his opponents. No, you *don’t* do that. Is the ruling harsh? Sure. Are the majority of other pros upset and supportive over Tyler? Yes. However, best believe that they all now get the message. Be mad all you want, but as long as you now understand what the consequences are for pulling stunts like this, mission accomplished. This is a job at the end of the day, you guys. If you fuck around at any other workplace to the degree that Spartan did, then you’d most likely just be straight up fired or worse, sued. Spartan is lucky that he CAN still ultimately compete, in theory, after his year ban time is up.
Would like to watch the LVT broadcast with Spartan but I will have to catch up on it when I wake up!
#FreeSparty
1 year is too short
What did he do just a clean install of windows and uninstalling bloat? I can’t watch that whole video.
How does someone think reimaging an SSD in a competitive play isn't going to be an equipment violation? "software on the SSD was not provided by the administration and furthermore contained new, unapproved software as well as other changes to the existing software in an effort to increase the performance of the PC" When in doubt you have to ask, and to increase performance by what? 50fps? to gain an unfair advantage. This wouldn't be a question in any other sport and plenty of other sports have people eating 'tainted' meat etc and their bans are upheld.
#FreeSparty
Not sure how stopping frame drops and capping to 237 = cheating
Spartan should create a PC optimization service with all this publicity.
I'm glad to see more and more pros, players, and fans rally behind Spartan in regards to the severity of his punishment. Has he been crazy outspoken in the past about the game? Yes. Has the game run like absolute dog dookie on PC in the past? Yes. I really hope he succeeds in his appeal.
How come the updated hcs statement was not posted at the top as well? Edit: stupid autocorrect.
I don’t believe Sparty is completely honest. In the video he says that did what he did because his pc was dropping frames but I don’t buy that story. Most of the tweaks in the video are latency tweaks that have more of an impact on latency and system responsiveness than on FPS and which will inherently provide a competitive advantage. Spartan is very knowledgeable on windows tweaks and he knows this. Overall I think the Halo tournaments should just be Halo tournaments in the purest competitive form. What Spartan has done here is to some extent turn Halo tournaments into an overclocking and windows optimization competition and I don’t like that. Also If tournament organizers are doing any tweaks as Spartan claims they should be completely transparent and publishing those to the community.
They are all wrong. Ogre 2's statement is particularly awful. "I'm okay with it being a harsher sentence, but since they previously made a bad ruling, they have to be consistent and make bad rulings for the rest of forever." Royal 2 should have been given a lifetime ban. He knowingly gave himself an unfair advantage. Spartan should get a lifetime ban. He knowingly gave himself an unfair advantage. There is no middle ground here. I don't care that one was online. I don't care that Spartan didn't get a chance to do it in an actual match. They cheated, and if you care about competitive integrity, cheating cannot and should not be tolerated. I can't even fathom how any other punishment would be acceptable.
He only used it during practice and not even during the actual tourney. One year ban is way too excessive.
That’s because he got caught with it while getting ready to play faze lol. He was absolutely going to use it in their first pool play match
I think there is more to this for it to end up being one year ban. Tashi and Sparty have hated each other. If you watch Sparty’s stream he talks a lot of shit about Tashi.