Right, Drownie isn't in trouble for making this report and neither is anyone else who believes that Dave may be cheating. As for the outcome of this report, there's nothing here that proves Dave is cheating, merely speculations. I'll explain all the reasons for this outcome.
Lack of solid evidence: The best argument for Dave cheating is that he's using some script to do so, however, no one has been able to prove such a script exists or that Dave is, without a doubt, using it. Dave provided videos and while some may say they're clearly different in skill, being an exact reproduction of a previous video is an unreasonable requirement in a game like ours. The videos still show he's a very capable player when it comes to dueling other's, like predators. This leads to the report holding a weak argument.
While I'm not saying this report is poorly done/without basis, the current argument held against Dave is weak, hard to prove, and can pretty much apply to anyone. Simply saying someone is cheating and how they might do it, along with a video of them playing good at the time, isn't enough to go off of. Nothing in the videos shown was impossible to do or extremely out there given the current situation. People will say he was abusing the MMB exploit in the past, and while we can't prove/disprove that, the argument given is he
was using the MMB exploit and once we patched it, he went out to program a whole new program just to help him land extra hits when dueling someone like a predator. There are too many assumptions in this argument for it to be considered more likely that he's just good at certain things.
Sailor Dave's record with CM: Dave is a long time staff and player. I don't know the exact times off the top of my head but I'm pretty sure it's multiple years at this point. Dave doesn't cause drama, he always does his part for the server, and whenever I've seen this brought up against me he's always been reasonable in his responses. While someone with a more dubious reputation may have that going against them, Dave does not fall under that category. Does this mean he can do no wrong? No, but it obviously means that someone like Dave doing all of this seems less reasonable.
Final Outcome: As I stated, this investigation isn't being held against Dave and will be dropped. There's no solid evidence he's cheating and Dave hasn't/doesn't come off as that kind of guy. I already know certain people will call me an idiot or, "a prime example of how terrible the CM head staff are," but their expectations are unjust as far as I'm concerned. Simply because someone
could possibly be cheating doesn't mean I should remove/restrict a possibly innocent person from our server. While it's easy to judge this from a third person point of view, it'd be vastly unfair for anyone having these accusations placed upon them. If I did mark Dave as guilty for this, pretty much anyone could be flagged as cheating for simply playing well at one point and thus getting banned from the server; so while it's all fun while it's not you being accused, this being resolved as guilty would make it a lot worse everyone. If we're at the point people need to open up spreadsheets of comparing two videos to find anything wrong with them, then clearly there's not enough wrong.
If anyone has anything to bring up regarding this report, you're free to bring it up to me in forum PMs and I'll read whatever you want to say but no one should be harassing Sailor Dave over this at this point. If you are harassing Dave about it, you will get in trouble. If you do want to send me evidence, here is what I don't want to see:
- Random discord PMs/whatevers of Sailor Dave talking about, "a random thing that can vaguely be connected to him possibly knowing how to exploit the game." This is not evidence, this is some contextless chat trying to be used against him.
- Spreadsheets of data from a few rounds about him landing x attacks per-second or whatever. Unless you have a very large sample size which shows solid evidence that something is up, these are meaningless. Everyone is not going to replicate the exact results every time and saying that he did bad one round does not mean he's cheating. If you can manage to somehow prove that Dave is too good for any human, I will listen, but you still need actual evidence.
