I don't really expect this view to get a lot of support, but this is how I've come to feel and I think it's justifiable.
As I mentioned lightly in my previous post, it's arguable that banning all these quality players will harm rather than help the quality of future tournaments. As a tournament player, what matters to me above all else is quality of play. That's not to say that I'd rather people ghost one another if it means everyone plays better, but, at times like these, it can be difficult to see the merit of such a harsh war against ghosting in team tournaments.
Structural elements of team tours make ghosting extremely likely; as I said on the last page,
- bad players that know they’re bad but still want to win will accept ghosting
- better players that know the bad players are bad but still want to win will ghost
This will occur as long as individuals are heavily rewarded for the success of their teammates. Furthermore, it's fairly easy to see that WCoP is easily the most ghosting-prone tournament we have, for pretty obvious reasons: you often know who your teammates are going to be far in advance, many stay constant from year to year, etc. WC teams are generally knit tighter than SPL (or whatever else) teams, and this is especially true for a team like Germany; they share a language and even their own forums/community. WC is also, needless to say, on Smogon's highest tier in terms of anticipation and glorification. Because this is the most ghosting-prone tournament, it's pretty fair (though not infallible, obviously) to assume that if you catch 10 (random number) users ghosting in WC, not all of these players engage in ghosting outside WC.
It's impossible to deny that the war on ghosting is and always will be largely futile. The only way to catch someone ghosting is if they or someone in their circle fucks up badly. Most people will never fuck up badly; for every offender you catch and ban, there are a great deal more still roaming free. This will never change. You also can't stop people from cheating by banning them, though you can stop them from playing legitimately (funny how that works...). So, in addition to the fact that you'll never catch the vast majority of cheaters, you aren't really giving them any reason to stop cheating; you're just showing them they need to be more careful about hiding it.
I'm going to go out on a limb here (not really, but let's pretend) and say that most teams are guilty of ghosting by your definition. It's pretty hard for people in a team channel during a game to refrain from blurting out what they think the best move is, and it's similarly difficult for players to refrain from looking at the channels. I can recall making a habit of closing the team channel during games because I didn't want teammates' mid-game assertions to cloud my judgment. Likewise, there are also almost always players on my teams that come to rely on the channel for guidance during games. If you actually were to catch and ban everyone who ever cheated in a team tournament, you’d not only decrease game quality by banning most of the best players in favor of worse ones, but the number of banned players and the discontent among them would be so great that they would likely just forsake your community and make their own (you'd also lose a TD or two (or more), but hey, no need to go there). The banned cheaters would also just be replaced by more cheaters, because, again, the format of team tournaments has a tendency to give rise to cheating.
The group of players you've just picked off for an entire year includes some of the best players and community members in tournaments. Conflict, for example, is one of the most influential and respected tournament players; he has a strong chat presence, is known for speaking his mind, and is (probably) the most skilled at what he plays. He’s also the biggest staple on one of the most consistently successful SPL teams. xray and cosine180 are fixtures in ST playoffs, and bluri is probably the greatest BW player of all time. It's clear to see that (taking their supposed dishonesty out of the equation for now) banning this group of users will decrease the quality of tournaments significantly.
Analogy: there are 100 robbers in a village, and you want to put an end to robbery in the village. You get your hands on concrete evidence against 5 of the robbers, so you remove them from the village. However, these robbers can still steal shit from outside the village if they feel like it, so you aren't doing much to decrease the amount of robbery that goes on. When the aforementioned 5 robbers are in the village, they make significant positive contributions to the society through their day jobs that can't be made from outside the village. Does it still make sense to remove them?
It’s also worth noting, in the context of the analogy, that if you were to establish evidence against all guilty robbers and remove them (which you can’t, but you want to), the village would likely be impaired to the point where it could no longer function (or function a lot worse than before). In such a case, the old robbers would probably just be replaced by new robbers, because certain circumstances (team tournament formats) make the village robbery-prone. These new villagers would be significantly worse at their day jobs, while all the removed villagers would probably form a new (better) village...I could go on.
Fucking flawless analogy, I know. But anyway, the conclusion I'm trying to draw from all this:
there is reason to believe that banning these users will significantly decrease the quality of play and competitive discussion in the tournament community without having any significant effect on the amount of cheating that goes on. Ultimately, if you want to stop ghosting in team tours, you’ll probably have to
a) stop rewarding individuals so heavily for their team’s success and either abolish or significantly alter team tours or
b) just accept ghosting as an inevitable aspect of team tours (which it is, due to their format and your inability to catch and punish the vast majority of offenders) and revert back to aldaron's ghosting standards.
Either way, you should stop implementing solutions that harm the community significantly while barely contributing to the fulfillment of your goals (goals which, if actually achieved, would likely fuck over the community beyond repair).
tl;dr (though this isn't all-encompassing) banning good players for ghosting in team tours is dumb, because ghosting will happen anyway due to the nature of team tours and you're just decreasing the quality of play; additionally, if you were to somehow ban everyone that has cheated (by your definition) in a team tour, you'd end up banning so many people that the community would probably just migrate.
Oglemi I'm not sure what your counterargument here is, but I'll rephrase slightly if you insist: why you do think aldaron chose to espouse that definition of ghosting as opposed to your current one, bud? Maybe he didn't want to ban the entire team tournament community.
I've never written anything nearly as long as this on Smogon, but I do think we're moving in a pretty grave direction here.