You really pick the weirdest things to come down hard on, especially so when you admit you don't know anything about it.
I'm not 'coming down hard' on the Mike Long thing. I really don't know, and I'm explaining 'well gee, that example doesn't help me much, because I don't know so much about it. 'From what I can find, which I assumed would be pretty good, given that you reference him like he's a great known example, it seems like X, which doesn't seem to fit with what you're saying.' Which is basically inviting you to chime in to expand on your extremely short, supposed to be informative post. Maybe it's just my ignorance, but I am guessing that Mike Long does not mean a ton to most of the people on this board.
What I'm coming down hard on is 2 things, but we'll get to those later in the post.
I just mentioned his name in passing as an example I figured a lot of people here would be familiar with. I haven't read his wiki page (Magic players have wiki pages? I had no idea), but I guess it's not surprising it's not mentioned there. In the Magic community, he's a well known cheater though, I promise I'm not making this up or "just saying so". He also acknowledges it, it's again not something I'm making up or "just saying".
Okay. I don't really have reason to doubt this. It seems like an admission of cheating would be something worthwhile to put on the wiki page, but, those things probably don't get so much quality control.
That said, I don't understand why examples of known cheaters who admit they've cheated aren't relevant to a discussion about whether being upfront and straightforward about being a cheater makes you any less of a cheater?
Because none of those people were upfront about cheating. There's a big difference between admitting to something when faced with conclusive evidence (which some people still fail to do), and being upfront about it going in.
I mean, again, I don't know what you even mean by "relevant" though.. it's just an example man. Marion Jones admitted she cheated. This doesn't make her cheating any better. Just an example.
From OED:
Bearing on or connected with the matter in hand; closely relating to the subject or point at issue; pertinent to a specified thing.
I'm saying that it's not pertinent, for the reasons I outline above. Again, not a huge deal. Is it ok for me to disagree with you without you thinking that I'm 'coming down hard'?
Now for the actual content of the post. If a tournament organizer allowed open collusion in a tournament (I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on the "competitive" aspect of them; I consider them competitive because they're playing for something (in my mind) significant, the world championship title),
Gonna break in here to say that that title means nothing to me, given that the tournaments they're won in are, well, more or less a farce. From reports I've read (and yes, this is just hearsay), the judging is not super-professional (not that they're dishonest or not trying), it's all big multiplayer, with things like VP tiebreakers being important, and very very few games determining everything. But whatever, you can think they're competitive, that's fine.
it would absolutely mean something to me with regards to what's allowed and what's not allowed in tournament Dominion. Tournament rules are imo very signficant indeed for what goes and what doesn't go.
Yeah, but tournament rules are very different from social conventions and even moreso from what people say.
I hope you appreciate that I'm talking about competitive/tournament Dominion in my posts, right? I even clarified it with a little Edit thing in my first post. I'm not too concerned with what people do as far as house rules go, from my limited reading of the Variants & Fan Cards subforum it seems all kinds of crazy things go on. Like you say, more power to them.
But the point is, ShuffleLuck ISN'T talking about competitive/tournament Dominion. He's talking about social dynamics of a playgroup. And you just say 'lah-dee-dah, this doesn't matter, you're totally wrong for dominion'. Well, the problem here is, if he cares about social dominion, you don't need to come down on him for not conforming to competitive dominion standards. I mean, you say you don't care about what people do at home, but my question to you is, why do you say this then? This is one of my two big problems, for which I'm coming down.
As for calling Geronimoo a cheater, I'm going to say again that I haven't done that. I said he considers cheating behavior normal, which might have been a poor word choice maybe? "Acceptable" or something, I dunno. If I played him in a competitive/tournament environment and him and his friend started colluding, I'd call him a cheater. This hasn't happened, and I strongly doubt it will.
Yeah, who's splitting hairs now? I mean, why is calling someone a cheater a bad thing? Because it is an attack on their character. If you want to be really strict about it, thinking that cheating is acceptable is WORSE than saying someone did cheat, because just cheating by itself isn't really that bad, if you didn't do it purposefully. Not thinking that there's a problem with it more serious. So I guess, technically, you didn't say he cheated. You said something worse. Which is the biggest problem I have here, especially since you just slide into this area where you move the conversation to just PRESUME that the behaviour in question is cheating. Now, I agree with you that it is indeed cheating, but I would not go around impugning Geronimoo's character about it, as clearly the issue he has is WHETHER it's cheating, and I'm not going to get on someone so hard personally fro not seeing totally eye-to-eye on a relatively irrelevant bit of sub-ethics in a game. And this is the thing that really gets my goat.