Seriously, can we please keep individual player’s names out of this?
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More than reasonable. In my opinion, if a player is repeatedly caught cheating, it is the TD’s responsibility to exclude that player from events. Allowing them to continue playing compromises the integrity of the event and is unfair to every other person who participates.
Bravo to the mod that edited this . . . especially where you removed the state as well.
I don’t want to be throwing Tom Brady under the bus either, so if you prefer to mod that to a similarly generic example of someone in another sport, go for it. 
But Brady and Belichick are dirty rotten cheaters as fans of 31 out of 32 NFL teams can attest :^)
[quote=“pinwizj, post:84, topic:416, full:true”]I don’t want to be throwing Tom Brady under the bus either, so if you prefer to mod that to a similarly generic example of someone in another sport, go for it.
[/quote]
There’s the Chaos Orb incident with Magic: The Gathering where a player had exploited a loophole to cause the card to have much greater effect than normal. With that, the community generally considers it an amusing skirting of the rules rather than anything offensive or controversial. Maybe that can be used as an example.
(For the record, the card called Chaos Orb asks the player to throw the card up into the air, and any card or cards in play it lands on are removed from the game. One player decided to tear the card up into confetti. Because it would land all over the table, this effectively removed every card the opponent had in play. The ruling was that this would be banned after the first tournament where it happened, as it constitutes physically tampering with cards.)
By Pinwizj: We encourage those to put on their own events as a way to both earn WPPR points for SCS (which is a real issue for * who currently sits in [close to qualifying in his home state - mod edit], but is finding himself on the outside looking in for many events he’s not allowed to play in), but more importantly to give themselves a chance to interact with the player base and try to rebuild that reputation as a ‘good person’ for the hobby/sport.
The idea that a player who has been caught cheating is allowed to continue collecting wpprs at IFPA sanctioned events seems plain wrong. I believe we are doing ourselves as a community a huge disservice by allowing cheaters to compete for wpprs without receiving any kind of punishment from the IFPA.
Why would the IFPA encourage anyone with a blatant disregard of even the most basic rules of competition to run their own tournaments for wpprs? Would the International Cycling Union ever tell Lance Armstrong to run his own tour so that he can cheat his way to even more prize money?
If you are caught cheating in any sport, you are banned for x amount of time. It does not seem unreasonable for the same to apply to competitive pinball. It certainly would show that we take the problem of cheating seriously, and are willing to do something about it.
My suggestion is that the IFPA would tell proven cheaters that while they are free to compete at places that will have them, they are ineligible for wpprs points. I don’t think this would be stepping out of the boundaries of the powers of the IFPA.
The IFPA are doing so many things right, so my hope is that this issue will also be added to their long list of successful accomplishments.
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The bigger issue here with respect to where the IFPA stands is when the player contacts the IFPA saying that these claims of cheating are completely baseless 
I was thinking of this as well. If the momentum is towards sanctions, then you had better be damned sure you can prove the player was cheating, and have evidence to back it up. Otherwise, you are just witch hunting no matter how sure you are or how many other people back you up. Gotta have proof.
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I think it’s only right that the IFPA allows due process before handing out any sanctions. Hypothetically, if presented with evidence of cheating, what would the IFPA stance be?
In many cases of cheating, it is less likely that they are caught on tape. Here’s a situation: You see a player restart their game after a bad first ball, and nobody else sees this. You don’t have any proof other than what you just saw. Is is a witch hunt if you tell the TD without providing any other proof than your word? And what if that player has a long pattern of this kind of behavior?
We entrust all this with the tournament directors that are running IFPA endorsed events. If they have a player conduct ruling to make we expect them to handle those things in an ethical manner.
I would say no, but at best it’s your word against the other player. He could just as vehemently deny he did anything wrong, so that’s a tough one.
For me, past history is irrelevant when deciding if an infraction has occurred. To take history into account potentially biases a decision and that’s not fair either.
IFPA should hire its own unbiased ‘Ted Wells’ to write a concise report from any investigatory findings in those situations.
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That’s just silly. If one player has a long history of being caught cheating, lying to tournament directors, and engaging in other unethical behavior, why should they get the benefit of the doubt? How is that fair to every other person in the room?
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Thread tldr:
Pinball community is generally great and players respect each other.
Players are generally fair.
Rarely they are not.
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There are two problems with this.
Assuming that a long-time cheater is guilty when presented with a new situation is a form of confirmation bias, a logical fallacy. The tendency is to assume guilt when that may not be correct.
If the cheater is accused falsely, they have little to no chance to defend themselves. Some unknown cheater with few scruples could take advantage of this situation to get someone punished when they may in fact have done nothing wrong.
If past history is a problem for a given player, then simply don’t allow them to play. Once they are allowed into a tournament though, they must be treated the same as any other player.
Welllllllll… maybe you keep a little bit of an extra eye on them. Not to get vaguely political, but profiling is not necessarily a bad thing. But I do agree WRT taking ones word over another without extra witnesses.
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I have no problem with that - I was more getting at how you treat said player when a ruling needs to be made or an accusation is leveled. Trust has varying levels of comfort.