Melissa asked me to post this for her, as she has information that applies to this situation:
Quote by Melissa:
I can vouch for the fact that all of Enemybritbomber's achievements were earned during the week. Every Sunday, Evol and I update scores every 10-20 minutes after 9 pm, to see if we need to pull something out, and last Sunday night (the night of the 11th) he was online, playing NFL tour for a while before midnight. I mentioned it to Evol, because one of the things we do in our score calculations is project how many points other teams can get if they complete what they're playing (for instance, last night when calculating, we added in the 1200 points that Circus had left on Fallout 3 PC, because he had the ability to pop those with 5 minutes to go, and we estimated about 2k for Brit because he had been playing offline last week, but he's never shown the ability to break 2k in a week-- also if he had that ability he wouldn't have had to resort to sneaking around offline) and last week Brit only had the ability to earn 150 more points. He stopped playing shortly after midnight without popping that last achievement. So yes, for the first few days of last week, it showed his last online date as 9/12. What happened is that in his effort to look nonchalant, he was logging into xbox.com, which erased his record of being offline-- and he essentially outwitted himself, because now he has no proof of when he earned those achievements.
He's certainly no friend of mine, and I would enjoy seeing someone who thought they were SO damn sneaky and intelligent get a strike for their own stupidity, but I think the actual issue is getting buried under this "did he cheat, did he gamesave" crap, and it needs to be brought to life.
As Evol said, the issue here is that he intentionally played offline to make the updates useless, make other people unable to gauge how many points they needed to not get a strike, and trick people into feeling safe while they were actually not. (If you believe he didn't do it on purpose, he was at some friend's house who HAD live but wouldn't let him online to update his score, and while at said friend's house for an entire week, he spent all week playing games, then got home just in time to log in without risking not updating in time, I've got a bridge I will sell you). We weren't fooled by it, I'm sure we're not alone in that, but I think a couple of teams were, possibly even the team that will be getting the strike if Britoger does not.
The issue is, will this be ruled an allowable occurance? As Bongo noted, it really is impossible to know when achievements were obtained unless people are logging in every Monday, and then not logging in all week so the timestamp of "last online" stays current. On top of that, like Evol said, this WILL create anarchy if allowed. As Jr pointed out, we can all just play offline for 2 weeks and upload our scores after the free week, and screw people over.
The problem is, to outright ban offline achievements is unfair. I have personally had a few times where my profile was kicked offline without me knowing, obviously those achievements should still count-- but I log in every day when I play, and when I get achievements offline, I usually realize I'm logged out and sign back in before the next one pops. But deliberately defrauding the rest of the teams by intentionally staying offline until 0 hour seems morally wrong to me, and not in the spirit of this "friendly" competition. If it's allowed, the people who DON'T play offline will be the guaranteed strikes every week, updates will be moot, and any camaraderie will give way to distrust and suspicion between teams.
No one likes to lose. I'm all for being competitive, it's the only thing that has kept me in this competition playing games I have ABSOLUTELY no interest in for the last 9 months. But winning without sportsmanship is crap, and nothing to be proud of. I'm not surprised who the first person to pull this was, because it's someone who no longer has ties to this community and doesn't care if he burns bridges. I'm no longer a member of the site, but I absolutely am tied to the community, and care about the other people in this competition, so I can't imagine thinking "hey, here's a good strategy."
Bongo, I wouldn't want this decision that you face (as simple as it is in my mind- obviously when you said you'd allow people to play offline you didn't mean in this manner) but I hope that you look at the real issue without the issue of cheating in the way. I will flat out tell you right now- if Britoger does NOT get the strike, and it's ruled that playing offline is acceptable, I will be playing offline every week and logging in at 11 PM Sunday for the rest of the competition. Not because I want to screw everyone else over, but because I'm competitive enough to not choose moral superiority over what's in my team's best interest.
OK, thanks for reading, have a good free week, guys.
lol
