EG PiggyKiki cleared to play as Ban Evasion ban lapses under new policy

In October 2022, Dust2.us revealed that Evil Geniuses Gold player, Kiki "PiggyKiki" Long, had three accounts on the FACEIT platform that were permanently banned due to ban evasion and a fourth undiscovered account that was banned for cheating. While the presence of these bans raised serious questions about PiggyKiki's integrity and presence in the North American women's scene, the practical implications of the bans on her career were largely academic at the time.

This is due to the fact that PiggyKiki's bans were on FACEIT while ESL Impact was being played on ESEA at the time and bans were not yet being mirrored between the websites — despite it being a long-term goal of ESL Faceit Group (EFG) since at least January 2022. As such, PiggyKiki was able to continue competing in ESL Impact while the issue slowly shifted out of focus beyond the oft-memed "Idk actually" comment PiggyKiki provided to Dust2.us.

This status quo of not acknowledging PiggyKIki's permanent bans on FACEIT continued until recently when ESL and ESEA announced that all of their leagues would be moved over to the FACEIT platform ahead of the release of Counter-Strike, including ESL Impact. As such, this would in theory rule out PiggyKiki from playing ESL Impact due to being permanently banned on the platform.

The first indication of this expected outcome may not be the case came on June 30th when PiggyKiki announced she had been cleared of "the rumors against [her] name," indicating she may be able to play on FACEIT once again.

More interesting, however, is that one of PiggyKiki's accounts suddenly had it's ban evasion ban removed around the same time.

When taking PiggyKiki's tweet and the sudden lifting of her ban into consideration, was she actually a victim of unfortunate circumstances this whole time? Was her cheating ban a false positive? Did she say "Idk actually" because she actually had no idea what was going on?

Not exactly.

Dust2.us reached out to an EFG representative to understand PiggyKiki's current status and what factors led to her ban evasion being removed. The representative confirmed that PiggyKiki had indeed been banned for cheating and ban evasion, however new policies within the TO has seen her ban lifted. The representative's statement reads:

PiggyKiki's ban on FACEIT has indeed been lifted. Following the merger between ESL and FACEIT we are aligning policies across our products. As a result and as communicated on our community support portal, our banning policy, including bans due to cheating, has been adjusted on June 26 and past bans have been updated accordingly. In the specific case of PiggyKiki, her ban expired according to the updated policy, meaning she is able to play again on her FACEIT account.

The complete updated banning policy can be found on the website: https://support.faceit.com/hc/en-us/articles/208282375-FACEIT-Banning-Policy

This clears up a number of questions about PiggyKiki's case and provides a significant change to how ESL will be handling bans moving forward. For PiggyKiki, it conclusively verifies that she did indeed cheat and engage in ban evasion but it also reveals that ban evasion bans are no longer permanent.

In particular, the new policy that is set to be rolled out states that when a player is caught engaging in ban evasion, their original ban is reset to its full length. So, using a cheating ban as a example, if a player elects to engage in ban evasion one year into their two-year ban, their ban would now last for two years.

So overall, PiggyKiki is a beneficiary of EFG's general shift away from permanent bans, with the timing being convenient as EG Gold just played on FACEIT on July 11th for the Thunderpick World Championship North American Series 1.