bit of a meta-commentary on the nature of our communities and their relation to standards of evidence, that might or might not be useful in this and in future cases:
In trust-based, largely informal communities like these, the null often is trust until and if otherwise broken by evidence of cheating. This leaves an ever-present impetus for paranoia about the possibility of the existence of cheated times that we just don't know about. This is an unfortunate yet inherent flaw in any system that flips the burden of proof on its head from the get-go.
Another inherent flaw therein is the existence of asymmetric evidentiary standards for high-caliber runs from one player to another, that attempt to compensate for amorphous and subjective trust standards - standards that fail to be applied universally collapse to rulings founded in non-negligible part on favoritism or prejudice.
Yet another inherent flaw is the periodic yet somewhat warranted witch-hunts we see from one community to the next, where a wave of potentially justified paranoia sweeps the playerbase and erodes trust for a short while, leaving only historically assymetrically applied standards of evidence as the sole sources of database integrity, while cheaters may or may not be weeded out according to these standards alone, until tensions calm again. This territory is nothing new, different playerbases have been through similar conversations dozens if not hundreds of times. Like a broken record. I'm not innocent on contributing to this cycle but I'm also not inexperienced in navigating the waters.
Changing this system from a foundation of player trust to one of evidence substantiation would maximize chart integrity, but would entail a complete restructuring of every database and community - and I couldnt even get the tiniest basic fucking reforms in edgewise so good luck if you have inroads to get something more substantial, but I doubt it'll happen on this domain. MKW is somwhat of an exception here, in that the community, following multiple successive purges of cheaters from their ranks, inverted from a trust-based community early on, to an evidence-based community with (approximately! idk for sure how rigorous these are) direct, fairly applied evidentiary standards for submitted runs. However, this inversion took place largely outside the mk64.com domain, as the community migrated to CTGP, which has tools hardcoded in the game to assist in run substantiation.
And, this points lastly to perhaps the largest underlying flaw driving the meta-attitude the (older, at least) communities have towards evidentiary standards: These games aren't designed for proving runs, at all. Many rules that would be needed to enforce high standards of evidence to ascertain a high degree of database certainty would be 1) unenforceable, or 2) prohibitively cumbersome to many players. (It'd also put old scores in the rather unfortunate position of retroactive scrutiny under standards that didn't exist at the time, but this is a whole other issue - if you find fake times purge em but you have to actually FIND them - you don't get to just, infer them from shoddy guesses at how some long-gone player behaved some long-ass time ago.)
As such, while the trust system is extraordinarily flawed, it's the thing we're stuck with, from both historical and from practical standpoints.
That's in large part why I take a relaxed approach in my attitude towards borderline-ish cases. We gonna ban Marius because he cheated in another game but we have no direct evidence of any such illicit activity on the sites in our domain? Or Aslinger, who (planned to? did? idk) submit(ted) one single false time at the beginning of their career, but has since then not had any illicit times, even after scrutiny a similar degree of which is levied at other trusted players? Doesn't make a lot of sense to me. (Also, your "typically" in that post regarding behavioral trends is really doin some fuckin legwork. By that I mean, you underestimate peoples' capacity to change early on. Later on, cases of older people like Fenner etc yeah obviously they're far less likely to change in any way shape or form so keep em out.) That information is unknown, and as established, the operative null is trust. Applying a higher standard of evidence to Marius or Aslinger, but not to other players with similar-quality demonstrations of their runs, to compensate for retroactive disollution of that trust would be, in my opinion, unwarranted, and would merely contribute to the problem of asymmetric standard application, a problem that I'd argue erodes the integrity of the ranks more than it bolsters it.
tl;dr chill out this aint fuckin world-league e-sports
also no delet me post pls fungis
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