13 minutes ago, Holmelund said:

Does it rhyme with TaraDoomaPlayer

Ah young one, you know nothing of the dark times that were before...

It actually rhymes with ban, though.

40 minutes ago, spacelion said:

How many people actually get banned from these forums?

Arguably not enough.

On 4/16/2017 at 6:51 PM, Rikk1980 said:

How about letting the "victim" set their maneuver when the ship activates, that is a pretty big punishment for the offender without breaking the game.

This, with the added benefit of any stress tokens on the victims ship may be removed before activation. Freeing them up to do "any" maneuver.

4 hours ago, Turbo Toker said:

I get that a game loss sounds extreme, but you picked up an >>>opponent's dial and looked at it<<<.

Doing that may not even make enough of a difference to change the outcome of the game. I've seen people do it and go on and lose anyway, because the one maneuver they saw after all the dials were already down didn't have that much of an impact on how the game played out.

In fact it's fairly unlikely that a single maneuver will make or break a game. Also when you start knocking people out of tournament, and a single loss is more than likely going to be the difference between top 8 or not, without out proof of ill intent, you're going to start to see a decline in people showing up. Worse you'll see in increase in people using these things to their advantage.

So you can't prove intent, and you haven't proved that the level of harm rises to the level of a game loss. That means a less severe penalty is appropriate, until you can prove or at least use a pattern of behavior to indicate intent.

The "Then you can get away with it once" is frankly pure BS and a strawman. Since honest people are not going to try to get away with it even once, and dishonest people won't be able to resist doing it more then once.

4 hours ago, Turbo Toker said:

Let me get this straight. It would just result in a game loss.

But yes, if I had picked up an opponent's dial and looked at it improperly, I would realize my mistake, notify my opponent, and then I would accept the game loss. Maybe I'd call over a judge on myself just to make the rule clear to my opponent.

I understand that we should be friendly and Fly Casual and all that, but this is extreme. I get that a game loss sounds extreme, but you picked up an >>>opponent's dial and looked at it<<<.

Good. You are at least holding true to what you say. It is still akin to burning down your house to kill a spider, but at least there is consistency.

*double post. Nothing to see here*

*tripple post. Move along*

13 hours ago, Stoneface said:

Under some lighting conditions, I find difficult if not darn near impossible to differentiate between Imp and Scum dial backs. Maybe it's a glitch in my eyesight. Whatever it is, I have grabbed the wrong dial on more than one occasion. Not in the same game but more than once. The situation was dealt with amicably and the game continued.

To the OP if the only solution you came up with is an automatic loss, step back and rethink the situation. Something else might pop up that is fair and equitable.

I sympathize with this, because, while I've never picked up an opponent's dial, I make rather a lot of errors. I don't get to play all that often and I don't often fly the same list over the course of multiple games, so I'm always forgetting triggers or forgetting to give myself a stress because I'm concentrating on NOT forgetting triggers, etc.

However, this is competitive tournament play that we're discussing here, so I think that some things should be kept in mind:

1 I sympathize with the mistake maker, but I sympathize more with the 'victim', even if I'm the one who made the mistake.

2 I would be open to some lesser penalty than a game loss IF I could think of a lesser penalty that could not be exploited.

3 Competitive tournament play requires a higher standard than casual games; if you want to win a tournament, know what you're doing. If you're prone to certain errors then put something into place to avoid them - mnemonic devices, marked dials, etc.

4 When coming up with tournament rules for infractions, one must consider not only what's 'fair' to the players involved in the incident, but what type of incentives are created. A relatively minor (or, in some cases, irrelevant) penalty incentivizes the undesirable behavior.

3 hours ago, Trubble said:

This, with the added benefit of any stress tokens on the victims ship may be removed before activation. Freeing them up to do "any" maneuver.

So, if it's the lowest PS ship on the table and has no stress tokens then there's no penalty at all?

Another limper from the stable of repetitively crappy ideas.

Its funny but while I have zero issue with stoners (I live in a state where it's legal and could care less about it) but somehow, a bad idea from someone with your forum-handle seems strangely appropriate.

The OP is just a bad idea, there are many better ways to resolve this.

7 hours ago, Koing907 said:

Because most X-Wing players don't want to cheat. That's why accidental dial pickings-upsings isn't the issue you're trying to make it out to be.

This.

6 hours ago, NakedDex said:

Because to expel someone from an event, you have to prove wrong-doing. You can't, in this case, unless it's a repeated offence, in which case there are already steps in place to address that right up to and including expulsion.

You seem to believe that everyone is out to cheat you out of a win.

Paranoia is a hell of a thing.

5 hours ago, spacelion said:

How many people actually get banned from these forums?

3 or 4 in the time I've been here. It's not exactly regular but it does happen (PGS, Tipperary, etc)

And FWIW, if someone is deliberately doing this then there are ways to handle that but saying it should be an instant DQ is ridiculous. I have seen this happen a few time and it has never fundamentally changed the course of any match and having such an extreme penalty is asanine

What's with all of the ad hominem?

FYI, at no point did FFG officially judge on either call where this happened. I was a judge at both events.

At gencon when it happened to Paul, the players resolved the situation at the table and moved on. This was a mistake in my opinion. Always get the judge to make a call!

At worlds this happened with Jeremy Howard and Marcel. I have the ruling of Jeremy getting to set a dial. Frank was not in the immediate vicinity so a call had to be made and i stand by my call. While i was getting Frank from the break room, Jeremy and Marcel agreed to move on with my ruling instead of waiting for the Marshall appeal.

We've discussed it quite a bit, but no official ffg ruling has been set.

I would offer to concede depending on the situation - it would be up to my opponent to decide the the punishment. After all it's just plastic spaceships and not worth fighting over if I am the one who broke the rule - if I punch someone in the face accidentally playing hockey - I would still expect to be penalized

6 hours ago, Turbo Toker said:

I get that a game loss sounds extreme, but you picked up an >>>opponent's dial and looked at it<<<.

It's sounds extreme because it *IS* extreme.

1 hour ago, SabineKey said:

Good. You are at least holding true to what you say. It is still akin to burning down your house to kill a spider, but at least there is consistency.

it's easy to say you'd go along with it on a forum. That doesn't necessarily mean you actually will in a real tournament.

On 4/15/2017 at 7:06 PM, Turbo Toker said:

How would it be proven that this was intentional? That's such a huge gray area.

It's not like tournament organizers are complete buffoons who cannot observe patterns of behavior. It will become very clear. very quickly who was using that as a tactic to gain an unfair advantage, and would be very easy to then ban them from competition.

I think you're letting your imagination get the better of your reasoning.

On 4/16/2017 at 0:27 AM, Verlaine said:

One tournament I went to had the rule that if you looked at an opponent's dial, you had to take a shot of castor oil. Whenever a player went to the bathroom, his opponent could look at all his dials and change them at will.

I don't know if poisoning people is a very good resolution for this sort of occurrence, lol.

29 minutes ago, VanderLegion said:

It's sounds extreme because it *IS* extreme.

it's easy to say you'd go along with it on a forum. That doesn't necessarily mean you actually will in a real tournament.

True, but since I only have his words to judge by and not his direct actions, I thought it better to give him the benefit of the doubt on this subject.

Automatic game loss is ridiculously harsh. People makes mistakes. (Cheating is a different issue, but assuming someone is cheating, right out of the gate, is taking X-Wing a little bit too seriously.)

Codifying penalties, although the idea is comforting to some players, is pretty difficult in practice.

For instance, take this situation, where a dial is accidentally revealed. If it's revealed deep in the activation phase, then it's a reasonable penalty to allow the aggrieved player to reset his dial (with current knowledge of the board-state). But if it's early in activation, the revealed dial is more valuable information, and changing it is less valuable to the aggrieved player. So something like the dial-revealer chooses one of his unstressed ships and assigns it a stress token is pretty reasonable. But even then, what if one of his unstressed ships is Keyan with a Range 1 shot?

These situations are for reasonable human beings to assess and resolve. If a judge is present, great. If not, players should work it out.

I could also place my dials in an ambiguous-but-not-too-obviously-ambiguous spot just so my opponent is going to flip over the wrong one. To maximize my chances with this strategy, I am going to run a big Z swarm with some scum dials. Plastic tokens, here I come!

I have accidentally looked at another player's dial before during the activation phase on a few occasions over the 3 or so years I have been playing. It is very embarrassing. I would suggest the following "punishment" to fit the crime:

The offending player cannot perform actions or card abilities (during the activation phase) on any ships that activate after the point in time in which the dial was accidentally looked at . However, free actions or abilities granted by cards that do not involve a choice may still be taken during the activation phase.

For example a Tie Defender with x/7 title could take a free evade after moving. A ship that was hypothetically given a free barrel roll during the activation phase could not barrel roll (because barrel rolling includes a choice about which side and how far forward/back).

Based on the above, the player who accidentally looked at the dial would not be able to beneficially impact his game state because of the error.

I'm not quite sure how to deal with accidentally looking at dials during the planning phase fairly.

23 minutes ago, Verlaine said:

I could also place my dials in an ambiguous-but-not-too-obviously-ambiguous spot just so my opponent is going to flip over the wrong one. To maximize my chances with this strategy, I am going to run a big Z swarm with some scum dials. Plastic tokens, here I come!

Be sure to have ~half rebel dials and ~half scum dials, and at least 1 normal dial and 1 dial upgrade for each faction for maximum confusion

Simply put, as many have already stated, this is a GAME in which human players make mistakes.

The proposed "solution" in the OP is just as vulnerable to abuse as the situation it seeks to address. As noted previously, it opens the door to baseless accusations as a door to at least a potential win in a game you're otherwise seeing as near certain defeat.

I choose to believe based on my experience that few X-wing players would exploit such a rule to make the cut at a tournament, but by making that assumption, I also accept the implied corollary statement that few X-wing players would intentionally check an opponent's dial to cheat and gain an advantage.

The fact is that if we want to consider cheats and exploits, the pay off for a false accusation of dial spying is potentially far greater in the OP's proposal than is the payoff for actual dial spying. Therefore, if cheaters are more prevalent in X-wing than I believe, the OP's solution offers more incentive to them than the problem it seeks to address.