birjolaxew

Redefining it to be an alright thing to do is not the only valid response to it being impossible to catch (which it isn't necessarily, as seen with de_zenith).

I don't necessarily think that you need to catch every attempt at cheating. I do think that there needs to be a commonly agreed upon idea of what is allowed to enter the competition. In this case the rules obviously do not match what most people expect that to be. As you can see from de_zenith, the devs have been very open about how long the map has in development for. As far as I can see, there's no attempt at cheating - it's simply a case of them thinking that entering the map is fine (because the rules says so), while most other people think that it is not (because it has a huge advantage). This disagreement needs to be cleared up - it all depends on what the official reaction to the fact that people can cheat is; you can choose to stand strong on what you consider ok, at the cost of illegitimately gaining an advantage still being possible, or you can choose to redefine the competition so that what was previously an illegitimately gained advantage is now within the rules despite it still being morally questionable. In this case it seems that you've gone with the latter. I personally think that most people can be trusted to not cheat, because most people don't like doing things they see as wrong or immoral. Combined with the fact that it's a pretty big effort to conceal a map in the hopes of it being valid for an upcoming contest, and I'd wager that - if it is made clear that doing this is considered not acceptable - cheating of this kind would be close to a non-issue. That does not apply if the "cheaters" feel that it is ok because the rules state that it is. I very much doubt that the de_zenith developers would've tried to hide how long the map has been in development for even if that made the map ineligible. I do not agree with the idea of redefining what is ok just because it is difficult to catch people. This seems a bit like if the speedrun community decided to allow segmented runs on all leaderboards, just because splicing can (and has) happened.

Is this the right place to have a discussion about rule 4? I think we need to talk about it as a community, now that de_zenith has exemplified how problematic it is. I can understand wanting a simple set of rules that you can follow religiously, so admins don't have to decide subjectively on a case-by-case basis. That being said, you cannot always write a rule that covers all cases of right or wrong correctly. In this case, I think that rule 4 is exceptionally far from covering what most people would think of as ok. Taking de_zenith as an example (although I want to clarify that this is about the rule/the enforcement of it, not specifically about de_zenith), it seems that the map was basically finished before the contest started. I don't think there's any arguing that it has a huge advantage over other contest entries, since so much more time and work has been put into it. I don't particularly want to argue about whether de_zenith should be removed from this contest, but I do think that we need to have a talk about what to do about cases like this in the future. It's clear that it isn't fair to have a map that's been developed for several years compete against one that's been developed for a couple of months - and we need to find a way to either change rule 4, or the way it's enforced, so it doesn't happen in future contests.

Specifically what we actually do is spawn a hostage where the now-dead VIP was. What you see kneeling down isn't the VIP player, it's the hostage with a custom model and animation. So the player dies just like in any other gamemode, and can spectate like normal. (I'm the guy behind the vscripting part of the mode)