views on bertoncinigate?

[Philip Dickinson]

http://mixedknuts.wordpress.com/2011/12/12/unlocking-the-cheats-of-...

anyone have any particular opinions on this? sensible ones, that is.

[Paul Hodgson]

Child's play is a bloody good charity imo, it's raised over $10m since it started and is a way to get a generally quite apathetic group of people to do something good for a change.

Comparative length of the bannings is crap, and seems to be totally arbitrary

[Philip Dickinson]

you understand that the Child's Play decision is just a PR move though, right? you honestly don't see anything wrong with "we are specifically selecting this particular charity to get more exposure"

Dan Barrett said:

I think debating the "worthiness" of charities is a fruitless waste of time. It's not like they're giving money to something evil, it will do good in some way.

[Simon Baldwin]

Someone could argue that any charity donation would be a PR move (they could have given the check to the person who came the place after him in the tournament instead for example). 

Trying to compare charities for worth will just end up in trying to find which is the bottom turtle, and any result would still be open to debate. As there are a huge number of possible charities, it would be near impossible for anyone to try and support all the ones that would be worthwhile (this planet is a pretty shitty place), so people usually stick with charities that are about an area they are personally connected with (one big example is the breast cancer runs - the runners usually have a message on their back saying "running in memory of X" or similar). So it would stand to reason that a company whose focus is on games would donate to a related charity, as everyone involved would be able to agree that it is something relevant to them. Otherwise, they would just get into arguments over with other worthwhile charity to support. Trying to support all of them will just diminish the donation to the point where its not as worthwhile. 

The other problem with things like famine and vaccines is not just lack of money, it is also a social/political problem. It is all well and good sending food to starving people, but then it completely devalues anything produced by farmers there, so they can't afford to grow anything  next year, which continues the problem. That is if the food actually gets to the people who need it and isn't stopped on the way by government officials or the ruling group of the country (there was that story in the news recently about the rulers of a country denying there was a famine in their country while many staved and food donations were rejected). 

One thing to bear in mind is that company culture in the USA is going to be a lot different from the UK. So what we might see as screwing someone over here, would be business as usual there. Also, as SCG is a company, they do have to keep PR in their minds, which could explain their apparent harshness of their actions. They are not a court of law so don't have to act like one (not that that is an excuse for disregarding fairness), and might want to take a hard line on cheaters, because if people think they are soft on them, then fewer people would go to their events because they don't want to participate in an atmosphere where cheating is either common or not treated seriously. 

I think one thing to come out of this is that if anyone ever asks for a warning to be downgraded into a caution in future events, they will be looked at with a huge amount of suspicion. Whether that would be deserved, I don't know.