Thaigo banned from EDL

Drama has struck the usually calm and mature Quake 2 community. Top Finnish player Thaigo has been banned from the Quake 2 European Duel League. Thaigo was a Finnish national team representative and was the founder of one of the top teams, Wzzrds. He has been on the scene for over 10 years.

From Q2Scene:

By organising EDL we truly hope that we are doing it for the players, so we are giving our time to please you and we are trying to do our work. Of course we know we can’t please everyone, but we keep trying to make it as smooth and fair as possible (which is not as easy as it sounds). That’s why we created rules.

Unfortunately not every person plays by rules and as a matter of fact Thaigo has broken the rule number 1.4. One of the general rules, which says: “Any behavior taken by a player to intentionally harm the league or one of its matches can be punished”.

It all started in 2×2? league when Thaigo’s demos were uploaded to demosquad. Thaigo started blackmailing wision – if he won’t remove uploaded demos from DS, he will ban wision on every possible server (wizards, exhale, scarab, okidoki, quaek, euroq2l) where he has admincode and no q2scene league games (2×2?, EDL, EuroQ2L, etc..) will be allowed to be played on those servers. Threatening basically whole scene and admins is without a doubt serious thing to do and it shouldn’t be accepted without any consequences. Some more info about that can be found on 2×2 site.

Wision did not remove those demos and even uploaded more from 2×2? league. This resulted in Thaigo breaking the rule 1.4 in the EDL playoffs match wision vs gerppa. Players were searching for an equal server. When they finally found one and readied up, thaigo has kickbanned wision from the server and as a result of this, players had to switch to worse server for both and play on higher ping and significant amount of packet loss. By doing this, thaigo has clearly interfered with a league match he had no attendance in and broke the rules by harming the match for two players. This action took a place on a server which does not belong to thaigo and he has no right to ban players there for his own satisfaction. It’s also necessary to mention that Thaigo has already been warned before in 2×2? league that abusing server admin rights on servers to harm the leagues will never be tolerated.

This only action is fairly enough to make a decision like this, but we also considered his previous behavior in the league, where he was bending the rules to his liking, abusing admins’ willing to let players play their games in later stages by not forcing games every week, unwilling to schedule matches with his oponents, coming up with ridiculous modification of the rules, not giving his oponents many choices for playing their games, not willing to send screenshots and so on.. This is not what sportsmanship is about and as in any other tournament we require it from players too. All this behavior is creating troubles during the league and harming participating players.

Let us also mention that one admin of those servers which Thaigo got admin passwords for already showed big disappointment in Thaigo’s actions and felt that his trust was betrayed by him.

Because all the reasons above, this player has never been easy to work with, we decided to remove him from EDL and also we want to inform that thaigo is not welcome in any upcoming season of EDL. Decision is final. Since his abusive behavior took place before his match with Jol, Jol will advance to next playoff round and play against Gerppa.

Wow, what drama!! It seems like from this statement though, it’s only the tip of the iceberg of why Thaigo was banned as there are many other things happening behind the scenes. If you go to q2scene.net, you can just see from the comments that it’s something the community has been wanting to do for a long time. I guess his shenanigans were too much!

Because of the stature of this player, it seems like a lot of rules were bent on many occasions to accommodate for him. In any gaming community, there is a reason there are rules and no players should be above them but it seems that for a long time, Thaigo was. Do you think that better players should get the rules bent for them? Leave a comment or tweet your thoughts @HelloLiefje