Posted by bpielcmc on 12/2/2022 6:15:00 AM (view original):

Posted by fd343ny on 12/2/2022 6:08:00 AM (view original):
SIM AI coaches the Mississippi team that was left without its banned coach - and gets National COY

I was thinking about this and I think it might just be a quirk in how NCOY is calculated because I suppose this is technically SIM AI's first season with the team and somewhere I read that the coaching awards are about improvement relative to the coach's season before.

i believe this is CCOY only, and that NCOY is performance-based. its mostly record and rpi. usually its the highest record team among the top 5-10 teams in the world.

Dang .. go away for 6 months and all hell breaks loose :)

You're one of the last people I would have expected to see saying that cheating wasn't cheating.

Posted by CoachSpud on 12/6/2022 2:34:00 PM (view original):
You're one of the last people I would have expected to see saying that cheating wasn't cheating.

I would never say cheating isn't cheating. I am a software engineer. A programming error by the coder is not cheating by the player.

Keep in mind, they in no way knew absolute value of the error or even if it was an error at all. In fact, they were told it was NOT an error by customer service. You are under no obligation to tell anyone anything you discover about this game. You can explain to people how you UNDERSTAND things work but you don't have to.

Anyone on the pinned comments above (cubcub, gillespe, me, many others etc) would have been banned for that if telling people how you think things work is collusion.

If I say ,, I think 3 HVs are about the same as 1 CV. I can say that on the forums or to someone on the Discord, etc. Or one on one to a mentee. That is not collusion. Why is, put a RS on a guy, if he reacts badly then take it off. It seems it will still consider you if you do that. How is that cheating.

Before they carried promised minutes and starts over to year 2, I promised the HECK out of those to ineligible players. It was a risk, sometimes they get qualified and you would have to play them. That isn't cheating .. and they took care of it by carrying over the promise to year 2. Well, you KNOW that is not what they intended. No, I know that an IF statement can fix that if they want it fixed.

Posted by hughesjr on 12/6/2022 2:08:00 PM (view original):
I am sorry, but I do not think using a recruiting form in the way it is designed (ie, offer a RS and then take it away), is in any way cheating. Also, discussing how recruiting forms work is nothing more than mentoring. I mean, people discuss on the forum how many AR it takes to overcome an HV or CV, etc. We have all had these kinds of discussions with other coaches.

It is not collusion to discuss with a mentor how recruiting forms work. Collusion is discussing how you should recruit this session .. you take Player A and I take Player B.

If you discover that the developers did not take away enough recruiting points when you offered a RS and took it back away, using the form exactly as it was designed, that is not in any way cheating.

If you are discussing how recruiting works and you tell someone, there does not seem to be a penalty if you offer a redshirt and then take it away, there is nothing wrong with that.

I say that all the time for normal operations. Offer the guy you want a RS, if he complains, you can take it back away with no penalty. Put all your training points into Study Hall for disqualified players and attributes do not drop. Telling someone that is NOT collusion. It is explaining the game to a coach.

Now, given that someone even TOLD WIS Customer Support and they did not say, don't do that .. there should have not been ANY penalties for this. This was absolutely not cheating and it was not collusion. What it is .. complete bullcrap.

Now, if it involved passing in an unknown variable that gave you extra points in the url line that is not part of the normal way the form works, that would be cheating. Showing other people how to do it and not reporting that to CS would be collusion.

This is no different than telling people .. use ATH+SPD instead of just ATH or SPD when comparing Guards, etc. Or telling a coach, If i were you, I'd start Jones and not Smith. Or explaining how you have observed Baseline Prestige works.

i don't think this is the whole story. i agree with the sentiment that there is a huge difference between the passing of a hidden variable on a URL line type of circumstance, and using the interface given within the boundaries given. but that difference isn't black and white in terms of designating cheating or not. both could be cheating, both could not be cheating.

with the passing of the URL etc, any of those tool-based exploits, generally speaking the assumption is any abuse is severe intentional cheating and should be punished accordingly (lifetime ban, probably). this would be stuff like using a tool to gain free recruiting effort, or to change another coach's settings, or to change a game sim result, etc... however, countless folks have built tools for games to do various things, from yatzr's tool to facilitate recruiting to various mods for hundreds of different games, which quite often go around the UI in a way which is not generally considered cheating. often smart developers get permission first, knowing the danger zone they are operating in. quite often those tools provide meaningful advantage, either in actual game play or in training, or by summarizing information or optimizing the workflow to save time or whatever else. that doesn't make it cheating, but the general expectation here is that the developers of those tools are being responsible and keeping away from exploits, and that these folks should be held to a high standard of accountability, being informed as they are.

with the working through UI, i think it is similarly an area with a range of scenarios. i agree that the base assumption is that the developers are making the designated UI free of exploits, and that users using the UI are in the clear on fair play, or at a minimum, given the benefit of the doubt and generally less severe punishments. but we both know all software has bugs, there is just no way around that. there is a level of severity where a line is crossed, whether it is finding a way to duplicate items in an RPG or finding a way to do infinite effort in HD or other very severe items. for example, in the beta, using the built-in UI, i could have taken any D- prestige d1 school and signed the 6 best 5* players in the country on a 100/0 basis, assuming all-ins from A+ schools for every player. that is how severely broken recruiting was in the beta.

your argument here is that i could have kept that to myself, went into 3.0 and used those things, and i wouldn't have been cheating. i don't think that flies, i think that is obvious really. at that point, i would obviously be expected to know better - and really any coach would, not just me. there's a line where its not really ambiguous or where pleading ignorance flies anymore, even though its all through the UI. so while the two scenarios, UI-based exploits and non-UI-based exploits have a very different posture (by default the former ok is, by default the latter is not), its definitely not a mutually exclusive type of setup.

Well .. in the beta, the goal was to help them test get the stuff right. Instead, finding bugs to exploit and not tell them would be cheating :)

But if you do tell them and then they tell you it is intended, then use it.

WRT Yatzr's tool. That was not passing in 'undefined things' or looking for hidden thing that are not available to everyone. It was passing in the same things using a different form.

It doesn't really matter what I think and the decision is already made.

"This is no different than telling people .. use ATH+SPD instead of just ATH or SPD when comparing Guards, etc"

This is an unbelievable stretch here.

Posted by Benis on 12/7/2022 8:05:00 AM (view original):
"This is no different than telling people .. use ATH+SPD instead of just ATH or SPD when comparing Guards, etc"

This is an unbelievable stretch here.

Well, I would be all in on it absolutely being cheating if it was not a programing error in the game code when using the forms as designed. I absolutely don't see it any difference than offering a Promised Starts and Minutes to an Ineligible player before they made the promises go to the following year. I told people to do that when I mentored them. You got credit for the offer, and unless they got qualified before they signed, you did not have to meet the promises. Under your rules, that is cheating and collusion.

Now, if they had to pass in an unknown variable that was not on the form and it added in AP or opened up more than 5 CVs or something .. that would be a totally different thing. That would be cheating and if people did it as a group, it would collusion.

"Under your rules, that is cheating and collusion."

Well first of all, they're not my rules. Its the Fairplay guidelines provided by WIS regarding finding loopholes.

And I said your comparison regarding advice for a guards ratings was an unbelievable stretch. You then provided a totally different example in your rebuttle.

Posted by hughesjr on 12/7/2022 8:52:00 AM (view original):

Posted by Benis on 12/7/2022 8:05:00 AM (view original):
"This is no different than telling people .. use ATH+SPD instead of just ATH or SPD when comparing Guards, etc"

This is an unbelievable stretch here.

Well, I would be all in on it absolutely being cheating if it was not a programing error in the game code when using the forms as designed. I absolutely don't see it any difference than offering a Promised Starts and Minutes to an Ineligible player before they made the promises go to the following year. I told people to do that when I mentored them. You got credit for the offer, and unless they got qualified before they signed, you did not have to meet the promises. Under your rules, that is cheating and collusion.

Now, if they had to pass in an unknown variable that was not on the form and it added in AP or opened up more than 5 CVs or something .. that would be a totally different thing. That would be cheating and if people did it as a group, it would collusion.

i don't really disagree with this point about the promised starts and minutes on ineligible player, that in theory its not very different. in practice, folks talk about this one openly and CS is aware, and had opted not to fix it, which does make it fairly different.

but overall, i don't think we are that far apart when it comes to your example here. i was not one of the torch-bearers when this issue came up, but, i do definitely disagree with the assertion a few folks made, that using the UI given CANT be cheating. i think it certainly can, and to your point back to me on those issues in the beta... if those were found past the beta, wouldn't it pretty clearly be cheating, if you could abuse the given UI to get infinite effort on players? and then did so without reporting it?

anyway, i think metsmax has a thread that is pretty interesting, if you haven't seen it i would suggest checking it out. it seems like this redshirt no-redshirt was being used pretty severely by at least some of these folks, to gain a pretty major advantage, and he shares info on what he found picking up one of their teams after they got booted. these are long time, well informed coaches, i think folks like that should be expected to do better than they did in this case. their support ticket was extremely thin, not sure if you saw the actual exchange?

I have an obligation to make things public. Because I’m not a douche. I’m not obligated to knock on my neighbors door if their house is on fire and they’re sleeping. But I would do so (an intentional stretch. Like the “use ATH+SPD” comment).

And Hughes, if you’re the guy that likes to push all 6 buttons at the same time and you get infinite weapons and you and your team dominate the internet because no one else knows or does this, that’s all you. But nobody is going to enjoy playing the game with you. And you’re slimy for having to go to that extent to compete. Just play normal like the rest of us. Its that simple to me

and people keep bringing up the ineligible promises thing. It got addressed and changed because it was a bad design. Just like this issue was. The only difference is This was 4 people. The ineligible thing was half the customer base. They don’t wanna ban us all!

Ah well .. It doesn't really matter. It's all good. And Benis, I do appreciate all you did/do for the game. This was not about that at all.

Posted by hughesjr on 12/7/2022 1:18:00 PM (view original):
Ah well .. It doesn't really matter. It's all good. And Benis, I do appreciate all you did/do for the game. This was not about that at all.

Thanks dude, right back at ya!