NiaK about Titan's DHW exclusion

In a personal blog titled "DreamHack Winter 2014 Epilogue" on Titan's website, the team manager Jérôme "NiaK" Sudries further talked about the way Valve handled communication with the organization and why he thinks it presents a major problem in eSports.

NiaK (behind the team) looking for answers from Valve about his team's past results

"In the wake of November 20th, I myself alongside the rest of the Titan staff have been working very hard on bringing light to the events that preceded the VAC ban of our former player Hovik “KQLY” Tovmassian.

As a general rule, Valve currently refuses to discuss the circumstances of bans, and our own requests for more information in the case of KQLY was met with:

We are not able to discuss any additional details about a VAC ban.

Now, it is reasonable to believe that this decision was made in order to respect Steam’s subscriber agreement, as well as ensure that the VAC-system’s detection process remain secret. However, this strategy is not aligned with the path that esports is taking, and I will try to explain my reasoning below.

In a case like this where a player is accused, we cannot as an organization, a community, as players or as media, be made to rely solely on the statements of the player involved. We have no opportunity to check the validity of the player’s comments, to know if the third party program was used during professional play, in a specific competition, or if the offense itself should now legitimately call into question a title or event qualification. We are left without certainty in a climate of untenable doubt.

In our specific case it is also important for the rest of the team to know if the recent months’ performances, following the arrival of KQLY, were legitimate.

The lack of communication in regard to a ban can also raise unjust problems. Imagine that a player gets banned by mistake: how can he defend himself? The players don’t play just on their personal computers. They move, participate in boot camps, in tournaments where PCs aren’t formatted after each use, play at friends’ houses, etc etc. It may very well be possible for a player to be exposed against his will and to be banned as a result. In this case, how could he clear himself without having any information surrounding the ban to defend against?

We mustn’t kid ourselves; the allures of esport today (and in future) may sadly tempt unscrupulous people to cheat during a competition. The more money that’s at stake, the more evolved and hard to detect the illicit technologies will be.

The fight against this sort of practice, however, is similar to anti-doping for sports, and Valve, just like the international organizations in this field, have to be able to communicate more detailed information on the cases concerning professional players.

As it currently stands, we don’t even really know if VAC detections are retroactive. Does Valve store data allowing them to identify a cheating player weeks or even months after the third-party program was used? Or are players only caught if they very recently, or currently, are running the program, whereas past offenses can go by undetected?

If the system was reliable and could be validated, then more communication could serve as a massive deterrent and make up the first line of defense against cheating. Also if proof could be given that cheating occurred during a certain event of qualifier, then past titles could legitimately be stripped and claims of retribution be made, providing yet further cheat disincentive."

Furthermore, Sudries explained why he thinks DreamHack and Valve's decision to exclude his team from the subsequent qualifier is harsh, and why the responsibility shouldn't be assigned only to Titan but also others he fooled as well.

"As a result of the events on November 20th, both Epsilon and Titan were banned from competing in the tournament. This raised a major question: is it right to penalize a whole team for the actions of one player?

There are two possibilities here in my opinion

- Either the ban was an isolated case, where no proof exists to implicate other team members in an organized cheating scheme.

- Or we are facing a case where it is proven that management or other players were either informed of, or even worse participated in, illicit practices.

In our case I can personally guarantee you that our policy towards this issue is very clear. There has never been, and will never be, any tolerance towards this cancer which has already done so much harm in sports. I would be ready to put everything on the line to fight against this practice which so easily could ruin the credibility of years and years of work.

Now, it’s obvious that discovering a cheater can truly call into question the performances of an entire team. However, we also can’t allow such speculations to tarnish all collective performances without providing a least a minimum of proof, and this is what we tried to get from Valve.

In the case of DreamHack Winter, aside from losing our invitation we were also excluded from the last minute qualifier. Is this reasonable or even justifiable? Taking into account what I have outlined above, I don’t think so.

I do not shy away from responsibility when it comes to the fact that we worked with a player who may have cheated in a team context, and believe me, this fact affects me, the team and the entire organization a great deal. I personally will be more vigilant and put more effort into making sure that this sort of suicidal behavior is prevented from ever occurring again. However, we aren’t the only ones working on cheat prevention. Valve and the tournament organizers are both partly responsible for providing systems which effectively and reliably target cheats.

In KQLY’s case, he is a player who’s been competing on a professional level for more than a year and a half, who participated in a lot of online tournaments with multiple anti-cheat programs, as well as several off-line events, on servers protected by Valve, in front of thousands of spectators. If in the end it turns out that he tricked us all for months, you can hopefully understand what a simplification it would be blaming Titan for everything. This in turn is why I find DreamHack and Valve’s decision, and some of your comments, very harsh towards us.

Here we can again look at professional sports, which benefit from federal organizations making sure that everyone’s rights are respected. In cases like these, the whole team would have been penalized only if it was proven that other team members or team management were involved, either through malevolent action or omission of action after becoming aware of the situation. I ask myself if this is in fact what DreamHack and Valve are suggesting?

By excluding us like this, the image and reputation of our players is tarnished.

All the aspects addressed here deserve real reflection, and discussion, so that clear rules can be established which claim real responsibility and respect the integrity of all parties.

This blog was in no way written with the purpose of escaping our responsibilities; we assume them, and would act on them even further if given the support to do so.

In order to stand a fighting chance, however, we must work together and make sound decisions so that we effectively can combat that which threatens to ruin the game we all feel so passionate for." 

The original blog can be found on Titan's website here.