Level Two - Lesson 21
Subjective Investigations
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Hello there!
Welcome back to the level two lessons for the Star Wars™: Unlimited Judge Program!
As always, I’m your host Jonah, and this is the second half of our level two lessons on investigations. This lesson is going to be focused on subjective and interpretive investigations - the ones where you’re trying to identify a player’s intent.
Today, we’re going to be talking about how to investigate for cheating.
If you haven’t already read or listened to the preceding lesson on objective investigations or the elective that covers disqualification and escalation procedures, I strongly recommend that you do so before going deeper into this lesson.
Intuition and Judgment
A stark reality of investigations is that a lot of it is based on your intuition and judgment. The number of investigations that conclude with the player saying “I did it, you caught me!” or with hard evidence of the player’s intentions (not just their actions) is incredibly small. You’ll absolutely hear stories of the player who said “Well, the jig is up!” when they were deck checked, but the vast majority of the time, players don’t confess.
Furthermore, even if you know that the player made the mistake, even if you know that they’ve made the mistake before, and it changed the outcome of the match both times they made the mistake - even though those can be facts - you still won’t know whether or not the player did it on purpose.
You’re going to have to rely on your intuition, judgment, experience, and the quality of your investigation to make your final ruling.
This is why the head judge should be handling investigations - if a floor judge begins an investigation, then comes to the head judge with every tied up in a neat little package, the head judge still needs to be able to understand it wholly. If they’re not able to say with confidence “I’ve listened to both sides, and know how I’m going to rule” then they haven’t done their job. Another person’s intuition and judgment is no substitute for your own.
That isn’t to say that you must investigate on your own as head judge. Having the floor judge who noticed the issue shadow you is hugely valuable - they’ll be able to catch any contradictions from the players. Consulting with other more experienced judges amplifies your experience - but the final ruling is still your perspective.
Also, keep in mind the relative difficulty of learning how to investigate for cheating.
Unlike the rules, it’s not consistent. Every investigation is going to be different. Unlike policy it’s not objective - your perspective and opinion will change how you handle it. Unlike logistics, it’s not something you do every event - you can’t get rote practice with it.
Having a workshop that covers policy, even though the partipants are acting as players, you’re not trying to derive intent from them - you’re just gathering facts, and so you can practice outside of events. With rules, policy and logistics, they happen all the time - and frequently they are very similar in structure.
With investigations for cheating, you’re not going to have many - maybe even any - at your local game store, even over the course of years. If you’re working larger events, the vast majority of judges won’t be involved in significant cheating investigations. While the Head Judge team may investigate ten or twenty players over the course of a Championship Qualifier weekend, most judges won’t be present for those conversations, and won’t even be able to see one of them.
Many judges feel like investigations are one of their biggest areas of improvement, and frankly, that’s going to be true and remain true for a while - but we’re going to show you some things you can do to improve your skills.
Ruling Out Cheating
The first thing I’m going to recommend is something that you can take to every judge call you respond to.
Ask yourself (and answer), “Why isn’t this cheating?” This process will help you determine when you need to ask more questions.
Most of the time, the answer is incredibly obvious - the player wants to use the restroom. They want to know the fourth mode on vigilance.
Other times, it feels straightforward, but it’s something you’ll have to check. A player only drawing one card for regroup during the first round of the game isn’t particularly suspicious. A player only drawing one card for regroup when they have three cards in their deck is more concerning (but not necessarily cheating in and of itself).
You want to look at the context of the match, and the gamestate and you can very quickly rule out cheating for many things. If the player was disadvantaged by their error - probably not cheating. If the player called for a judge on their own error - probably not cheating. If the error is some obscure bit of rules trivia that only the Rules Admiral and four other people on the planet really understand - probably not cheating.
Questions you can ask yourself, and probably answer without asking the players are “what parts of the game state does this impact? How relevant are those tools?
As you develop the ability to rule out cheating, that consequently leaves us with scenarios that you can spend a bit more time on.
As you get to something where you’re not able to rule it out immediately, you can ask a few questions just to help clear up your understanding. “How did this happen?” or “What was your plan?” (the latter asked without the opponent present) are both relatively open ended questions that allow the player to explain why the error occurred.
A player who recently switched decks or cards in a deck is more likely to make errors with them. Maybe the player received an incorrect ruling from “another judge” which caused them to make the play. Again, these explanations don’t fully exonerate the player, but as you’re able to more quickly rule out cheating, you’re going to be able to proceed through investigations more efficiently.
Certainty
Speaking of ruling out cheating, I want to talk about certainty.
As I’ve mentioned a few times now, you’re practically never going to be 100% certain about your final ruling in a disqualification.
This means that you’re going to need to come up with your own measure of how certain you need to feel before you decide to disqualify a player.
Some judges say that they only need to be more confident that the player is cheating than not. This is sometimes expressed as “51% sure”. At that point, the judge feels like the player is more likely to be detrimental to the event remaining in than being disqualified.
Other judges will state percentage of certainty as a mark of their confidence throughout the course of the investigation, either internally or speaking with other judges. I try to avoid this, because the number is somewhat arbitrary, but it can help you think about whether or not something the player has said has increased or decreased your certainty that the player has cheated.
Something you need to consider when making this decision and evaluating your certainty is the fail case. What happens if you’re wrong? If you choose not to disqualify them and they cheated, they may feel empowered to cheat again because they got away with it. However, you can also later discover more evidence or have a conversation with another judge, consequently changing your mind and disqualifying them from the event later.
On the other hand, if you do disqualify the player, but they’re innocent. They may quit competitive play or quit the game entirely. (Or, as I know has happened more than once, become a judge to do better than you did - please don’t disqualify players as a judge recruitment tactic). A disqualification can end a player’s enjoyment of a game, sometimes permanently.
A couple of philosophical questions for you to mull over are: How many innocent players are you willing to disqualify to catch one cheater? How many players are you willing to disqualify to ensure that there are no players who cheat in your event? (For the latter, the only way you can guarantee nobody cheats is to disqualify all of the players and that’s obviously not our goal)
Strategy - Risk vs. Reward
But let’s return to that first question - how do you know when to ask more questions? And what are those questions?
Well, if you’re not able to figure out why it’s not cheating, you can ask the players. Don’t ask “Hey, do you think this was cheating?” but you can ask “How impactful is your opponent having one extra resource right now?” or “If we hadn’t caught it, would that extra point of damage matter significantly?”
One of the most important things to figure out is if it would be worth attempting the cheat.
Let’s say on the first round of the game a player says “Play Inferno Four - Unforgetting” and exhausts two resources. Then they put an Avenger - Hunting Star Destroyer into play and say “when played trigger - you defeat a unit.”
The reward here is obvious - Avenger is a much more powerful card (and is coming out seven rounds earlier than it should). However, the risk in this example is extreme - not only are they making a relatively obvious mistake that will be caught as soon as their opponent looks at their space arena, but they’re calling attention to it. They’re almost certainly going to be caught.
In another example, a player attacks with a Green Squadron A-Wing and says “hit your base for four”. However, last round their Red Three - Unstoppable was defeated, but they’ve already attacked their opponent's base three times for four damage each time.
Here, the reward is still obvious, but the risk is also smaller - the opponent is used to taking four damage from the A-Wing, and so it’s less likely to be immediately apparent. Furthermore, as soon as the opponent takes an action or two, or the regroup phase passes, if players are only tracking base health totals with dice or tokens, evidence of the error is harder to point to. While the reward is smaller than the previous example, the risk is also much smaller.
So how do you evaluate for risk and reward? It’s complicated! Part of it is that you’re not expected to know every match up for every deck played in every format that you judge - that becomes excessive quickly. But you know who we can reasonably assume has some perspective on the match-up?
That’s right! The players! You can absolutely ask the players separately how they feel about the match-up as a whole, how they feel about the current game state, and what sorts of things they’re worried their opponent might do. If the error was an extra point of damage on the base in the control mirror - that’s probably not as impactful as in the aggro mirror. When you discuss strategy, always make sure to do it with the players separated, so as to ensure that you don’t give either player an unfair advantage.
However, asking players is an incomplete solution. It helps with this case, but not others. Watching matches being played helps immensely - whether at events or videos online from content creators. In fact, watching content creators allows you to access someone else’s analysis in addition to your own, so you can develop a better understanding. Of course, playing the game itself is also hugely valuable. Particularly with more technically complex decks, having expertise in that deck can help you catch issues that other judges might not.
An error being an audacious cheat doesn’t mean that it’s not a cheat, but it can factor into your understanding of the player’s intentions.
Cohesive Narrative
So now we have the beginnings of a structure - we know what happen from our objective investigation, we haven’t ruled out cheating, and we’ve determined that we need to dig deeper - something is telling us that this is a bigger problem - maybe because the risk is low and the error is very advantageous. Whatever it is, we now need to ask more questions.
At this point, it’s important to begin developing a cohesive narrative.
When you’re writing your statement at the end of the investigation, if you decide to disqualify the player, or as you’re talking about it to your mentor, you don’t want your explanation to be “I just kinda felt like they were cheating.”
Not only will this be personally unsatisfying, it will absolutely frustrate the player, and furthermore, it doesn’t give information to FFG when they’re determining whether or not a suspension is warranted for this behavior.
You want to be able to answer three key questions: What happened? How did it happen? Why did it happen?
The first question gives us that the player did something illegal and that action gained them an advantage, which are two of our three criteria for a cheating disqualification.
The last piece we need is “Was this person aware that what they were doing was illegal?”
Let’s say a player has an extra card in their resources. How did it happen?
This is where asking the player an open-ended question can help. In this case, “Can you walk me through your turn, and mimic the physical actions you took?” This will let you see where their hands were when they were manipulating cards.
Maybe two cards stuck together when they resourced off of a smuggle effect. Maybe they dropped a card from their hand after revealing it for an opponent’s discard. Maybe they forgot to defeat a resource from their Han - Audacious Smuggler ability. Or maybe they felt like they were behind and played two cards as resources during their regroup.
As the player presents their story, parts of it will build upon earlier parts. If the player insists that they never went anywhere near their resources - they didn’t smuggle anything, haven’t had any cards in hand the whole round, and they’re not even playing Han! Then it becomes less likely that this was accidental.
Let’s take the Red Three and Green Squadron A-Wing example from before - but instead of attacking the base for four, the player attacked a unit with four remaining HP. However, their opponent’s base also has four remaining HP. When you ask them why they attacked the unit, they say that “I needed to defeat it, otherwise they’d be able to take out my A-Wing.”
This statement is strange - if they believe that the A-Wing has four power, then why don’t they simply attack their opponent’s base and win the game? Is it possible that they believe that the risk there is too great? While it’s possible that they do genuinely believe the A-Wing has four power, and miscounted their opponent’s remaining HP, it’s a part of the story that doesn’t add up.
Turn the facts that you uncover into a narrative, and then attempt to prove or disprove that narrative.
Now, proving or disproving to your own measure of comfort is hard. What you need to do is ask yourself “What can they say that would convince me?”
If a player’s sideboard has old sleeves, but their maindeck has new sleeves, so sideboard cards are marked, I’ll ask them, “How did you sleeve your deck.”
If they tell me “I bought new sleeves because I saw that my main deck was getting super worn out, but the pack came with sixty and I’m playing Data Vault. My sideboard didn’t look marked when I shuffled it in.” that’s somewhat compelling. You know what would make it more compelling? “Do you have any of those old sleeves still?”
If they pull out sleeves that are extremely worse for wear than the sideboard, or if I’m able to talk to one of their friends who helped them resleeve, that further reinforces their story.
If, on the otherhand, you have a player with a marked card, and they say “oh, I borrowed it from a friend” and you ask if the friend is at the event and they say “No” and you ask what deck the friend usually plays and they don’t have any answer... it starts to look less good.
This information can also come in the form of non-game information. If a player says it’s their first TCG, and their first event other than a prerelease, if you’re inclined to believe them, it’s much less likely that they’re trying to savagely cheat, especially if the mistake they made is somewhat idiosyncratic or specific to TCGs or Unlimited in particular. You can take into account practically any piece of evidence in a cheating investigation. While you don’t use the knowledge that a player is new or experienced when issuing a gameplay disruption penalty, you can use it to help determine if the player took the action intentionally or not.
Each of these pieces of information will change your perception, and you just keep asking questions until you get to a point where you’re comfortable with the decision that you’re going to make. However, you’re also going to get to a point where your confidence isn’t shifting much anymore - and that’s because you might not have any questions that can significantly swing the conversation one way or the other.
Shadows, Consultations, and Other Resources
Before you stall out, take advantage of the other resources you have available to you. If you’re the head judge of the event and the call was brought to you by a floor judge, you should be using that judge with you throughout the investigation.
Best practice is to have the original judge shadow you for all of your interactions and have a third judge ready to take one of the players off to the side - to ensure that they don’t wander or lurk (and sometimes to ask a few questions).
You can also reach out to your mentors and ask for help. The first player I disqualified, “solo,” only happened after I texted and called my mentor to walk through the facts as I had collected them. Sometimes, all it takes is someone saying “Yeah, that sounds like it’s cheating to me,” and you have your confidence. Other times, they’ll ask you a question you hadn’t considered, or provide some insight into what would exonerate the player in their eyes, and that helps you develop a question that leads to either confirming your narrative or squashing it completely.
With the shadow, however, you can have more of a back-and-forth, because you’re both present, and they’re involved in the conversations with the players. You can ask them if there’s anything they would ask, or anything that they want to know. You can ask them if anything has changed since the original call, or if anything seems to be off to them.
Lying
Lying to a tournament official is a disqualifiable offense - in particular, this refers to lying to a judge during an investigation. If you believe a player is lying to you in order to gain an advantage, that’s something that you can confidently disqualify on, even if you’re still unsure whether or not the gameplay disruption (or whatever infraction they earned) was intentional.
For example, a player may believe that drawing an extra card is always a game loss, and so when you ask them about it, they say that they believe that they didn’t draw an extra card despite previously agreeing that they may have. This player may be trying to avoid a penalty by saying they didn’t understand - however, if you don’t believe them, it doesn’t matter whether or not they intentionally drew the card for the purposes of a cheating investigation - they’ve lied to you to avoid a penalty.
Note that a player changing their story, or their story becoming more detailed as the investigation progresses, isn’t necessarily an indication of lying. As they think about it more, they may have had time to remember more details or recognize that they misremembered or misspoke earlier. If you believe that their story has changed or if they give you two parts of a story that don’t line up at all, point it out and ask for an explanation.
The Out
This brings us to one of the last parts of an investigation. As I get to the point where I’m preparing to disqualify a player, one of the things I say to them is “This is my understanding of what happened. This is my understanding of how this happened. Right now, I believe that you did this on purpose/didn’t report this on purpose. This is cheating, and the penalty for cheating is disqualification. Is there anything you can tell me that can change my understanding?”
Laying it out clearly lets the player know the stakes - sometimes the player doesn’t have anything, and they’re disqualified. Sometimes they admit that they did it. Sometimes they say “Wait, would it change your mind if...” and procure a new piece of evidence that I’m able to corroborate with someone else and it changes my mind.
Giving them this opportunity allows them to have a chance to feel heard. Being investigated (not even disqualified) can be a very intense process for the player, and being respectful of them is important. Most players who cheat aren’t cheaters - they’re players who made a bad decision.
Some judges try to be coy about their investigation throughout, and while it can be valuable to get some information in the first few questions, and coming at the area of concern indirectly, after a few miunutes most players will recognize that this is not a normal judge call, and that something else is happening. Once the questions start to probe towards intent, it becomes more apparent. And finally, if the player did cheat, they know exactly what you’re trying to find out anyway, because they know that there was someone who cheated at the table, and so investigating cheating seems likely.
Physiological Responses
As judges reveal more information to a player, and as they investigate them, some judges like to lean on physiological responses. Did the player break eye contact? Were they shaking? Was their posture defiant or defeated?
Don’t rely on this - physiological behavior is wildly complex and the same responses can come from different stimuli. My hands sometimes shake - not because of nerves. Other people are simply never comfortable making eye contact. Defiance could be true defiance or it could be acted. This unconscious behavior is not helpful in making a decision - rely on the information you have - the game state, the advantage earned, the risk of taking the action deliberately, the thoughts of strategy from both players, the investigated player’s explanation of events. These are things that you can rely on and explain to someone else. “The vibes were off” isn’t a reason to disqualify someone.
Closing Thoughts
As you make your decision, it’s important to remember that our goal is the improvement of the event specifically, and of organized play as a whole. Consider how you’re going to write your statement. If you believe the player made a bad decision and won’t repeat it in the future, include that. If you believe that the player has a history of such infractions, include that.
Your statement should remain private and submitted directly to FFG, along with the statement of the player and any other relevant participants.
While discussing disqualifications can be a valuable educational tool, make sure to speak in generalized enough terms so that personal privacy is respected.
Judges are visible leaders in the community, and if we’re seen to be badmouthing and witch-hunting members of the community, that behavior will be normalized, which is something we want to avoid. Speaking of leadership, our next lesson will begin to discuss how to lead other judges at events, including some best practices and triage advice. If you’re watching this on YouTube, and you want more level two lessons in your feed, go ahead and subscribe. Join us Tuesdays and Fridays on twitch.tv/swu_judges for live broadcasts covering the content of these lessons as they are released, and join the Star Wars: Unlimited Judge Program Discord to join the community in discussion of this and much, much more.
As always, good luck, and have fun.