ESEA issue clarification on RIKO ban
ESEA's head admin, Alexander "Aluminati" Rymaszewski, responded to Dylan "RIKO" Sabin-Arnce's assertions that he had falsely received a malicious activity ban in a statement released on the ESEA forums yesterday.
Aluminati starts by noting the suspicious timing of RIKO switching over from using his main account to his alternate account when playing with his friend "sovve", and how the timing also coincided with the pair beginning to play with "kiss" and "lewd", the players that were retroactively banned for cheating.
sovve made it to the top of the leaderboards, winning nine of ten matches with RIKO, kiss, and lewd from April 15th to the 17th, along with roughly thirty other matches without RIKO present. Given their impressive win rate, sovve, kiss, and lewd stood to receive hundreds of dollars worth of prizes from ESEA come the end of April. Instead, on April 30th, kiss and lewd were banned for cheating and sovve was banned for malicious activity, the result of attempting to profit off of the aforementioned cheaters' actions.
It was at this point that RIKO submitted a ban appeal on sovve's behalf. The language of the appeals that both RIKO and sovve submitted implicated both of them as having remained silent about the cheaters, since sovve's position on the leaderboards was a result of their carry.
sovve's appeal even went so far as to say, "RIKO [...] played with us and he instantly knew they were cheating and said not to queue another day with them or I will most likely get banned". RIKO has since stated that he was misinterpreted, and that he never definitively said the pair were cheating.
Aluminati also pointed out that at the time of their bans, "neither sovve nor RIKO had [added either of] those players to their suspect list or made a ticket or attempted to escalate this situation in any way to a staff member to indicate that they believed those players were cheating, should be disqualified or their matches overturned."
Given the evidence that ESEA and Aluminati have collected, particularly the statements made by sovve, it appears that the malicious activity ban will continue to be upheld.
