(I have largely summarized this following post in Smogtours discord, so if you have read that, there's not a ton of reason to read this. Also, the writing is a bit poor, because I intended to end the post a few times and ended up writing a bit more. Apologies in that respect:
Edit: I also must recognize that there was another example in this thread brought up where public evidence was helpful. I don't recall the incident but it's disingenuous to pretend that it didn't happen, though admittedly, it's not enough to change my opinion.)
Congratulations everyone, the following is a rare completely sincere teal6 post, the likes of which I had to beg a few friends to be allowed to post (banned due to being a problem child).
The allegation underlying the creation of this thread is one that has been leveled, from what I can tell, since Tournament Direction became a function of some of the site staff. The idea that the tournament directors either purposefully or unintentionally do not perform an adequate level of due diligence prior to announcing a tournament ban is frankly absurd, and in this case, I can, and would like to, speak directly from experience.
During my tenure on the site (2015 onwards, mostly) there has been one single tournament ban that comes to mind that was 'unjustified' and it was one that I handed out myself, banning Lavos during the year that much of US West received tournament bans. Why was that one unjustified? I had consistently misread the information given to me, attributing a line to Lavos that wasn't actually his. However, Lavos did not even appeal this! The TD team (really, it was mostly just me and Isa working on this) noticed our mistake and rescinded the ban. The context here is vital - there was blatant, general chat ghosting occurring and Lavos had a line in the midst of conversation. To suggest in any real sense that he was unaware of this going on is brutally absurd, farcical from top to bottom, but Isa and I recognized our mistake and concluded he had not actually said a ghosting line at any time, thus the ban was rescinded. The point I'd like to make here is hopefully clear: there is **a lot of leniency** assumed whenever the TD team is presented with evidence of cheating in any way. At almost every turn, from my experience, the assumption is in favor of the player in question rather than against them.
I cannot say for certain that my next few statements apply to this thread, I've largely segregated myself from the general tournament community barring the handful of people that I talk to commonly. I do not know a single player that was recently tourbanned, nor do I know the individual that posted this thread using these bans as an inciting incident. However, that aside, I can say with complete sincerity this: the vast majority of the time one is looking to appeal a tournament ban it is done in entirely bad faith. By and large the evidence against such a player is usually so overwhelming and indisputable (logs, screenshots, shared screens, accidental admissions, etc.) that an appeal is usually baseless sans those that argue the length of the ban. It is the practice of most individuals that appeal, again from my experience, to solely obfuscate the core issue in order to find some sort of semantical trick that will absolve them entirely. It's frankly insulting to some extent, the TDs are not idiots, they know what the attempt is.
I say the above with no real moral judgment, either, but rather as what I consider fact. Allow me to provide an example: there was another tournament player whos ban I presided over prior to the strictness with showing evidence was truly in place. This individual had the evidence we had, and what's more, they had a ton more evidence. I spent hours upon hours responding to PMs from this individual wherein they showed me logs of ghosting that we had never seen yet, attempting to argue with me, saying things like "so is THIS ghosting then?", implying that our rules were too strict. For the record, almost all instances were indeed pretty outright ghosting (admittedly this was closer to the time where the lines were a bit more blurred between what is and isn't ghosting, old vs new Smogon, if you will).
Tournament banned users have an advantage in any of these discussions over the tournament directors. They do not have to argue or present themselves in good faith. Indeed, they have a battle of attrition to win, constantly shifting goalposts or nitpicking nonsense within the evidence solely to shift the grounds of the discussion and try to find some light at the end of the tunnel. Were this a court of law, I'd have no issue with that. However, it isn't, and having a pretty good idea of the pre-ban investigative process that goes into each of these tournament bans, I can say pretty comfortably that I genuinely don't feel there needs to be a 'user vs TD' trial the vast majority of the time either. If you, as a user, feel susceptible to forged logs or something of the sort and a TD refuses to hear you out, that is time to talk to SS, which is the correct route of escalating a complaint. However, this seems to be rarely done, and I'll remind everyone that the TD team (usually) shares or makes available all information relating to a ban to SS - they DEFINITELY do in the case that a user appeals directly to SS, of course.
I suppose I'll sum it up by putting it this way - from my personal experience the lengths the TD team go through in order to verify a claim of cheating is sufficient to warrant a lack of distribution policy with respect to the evidence. The potential downsides both for the user that supplied the evidence as well as the can of worms this opens in terms of brutally bad faith arguing against the TDs themselves outweigh any potential benefit I can see by changing the policy. I do not believe in any real sense that there is a risk of massive forgery to ban an otherwise clean user - you'd have to reckon someone would have doctored up some logs against ABR by now if this were a real problem. And indeed it's this bad faith disposition that I despise the most, and on Smogon, there is no environment within which you face it more than when you are a TD. People lie blatantly and consistently to you that they are innocent, even when it is incredibly clear otherwise.
I'll end this post with an anecdote about another notable investigation that I took part in to show the lengths the TD team goes to give the user the benefit of the doubt. A number of years ago Ciele and I (as well as the other TDs at the time, but he and I were the most active IIRC on this case) were investigating a World Cup team and the cheating allegations toward them. Our evidence included WhatsApp logs where the timestamp happened slightly before the match, with one of the users involved saying something to the effect of 'get in call' (no, not Mazar). Similarly, the otherwise active team chat had a ton of 'missing' lines during the course of the match, with it being particularly active before and afterwards. There was a massive amount of smoke, but we never could find the fire - we could not find a call starting at that time, and the evidence in our hands was decided to be not enough to institute a tournament ban. Did the individuals in question cheat? Well, I'm not a TD so I can say, come the fuck on, obviously they did. However, did they ever admit to us even once that they played a match in call, even after hours of conversation? Again, very obviously, they did and would not. In these conversations the deck is actually stacked against the TD team who are pretty consistent targets of mockery, harassment and from time to time, hatred. It is that last line that caused me to step down twice - I was being treated absurdly poorly from a user that was tournament banned and finally I decided it wasn't worth it to be in that position, even if I could do some good otherwise. While a review of the appeal policy is, in and of itself, completely fine, the undercurrent of this thread and the implication of it's creation is absurd to me from every single angle.
The biggest problem the TD team has right now isn't unjust bannings, or laziness, or lack of responsiveness, or out of touched-ness(??) like it may have been in certain years in the past. Hell, they've done a great job with SCL, and I'm really looking forward to that. The only thing I see here that they need to look within about is the seemingly insane decision to allow Perry to be the spokesperson at a point here, an individual who seemingly does not have a single PR bone in his body. While I don't fault their actions in an administrative sense, being a TD carries a degree of weight with it, and the continued lapse of judgment shown, particularly with....inciting? the users in this thread is baffling to me and worthy of reconsideration.
Thanks and peace