A 29-year-old New Jersey woman has been arrested for falsifying documents to actually attempt to enroll at a New Jersey high school. Hyejeong Shin decided, for reasons unknown at this time, to enroll at a New Brunswick, NJ high school, falsifying documents to get in.
Obviously, people are concerned on a safety end, but no one truly knows why Shin actually did this. Shin actually graduated from Rutgers University.
She's not the only one to do something like that this month: Churchland High School in Virginia has terminated it's girls' basketball season when 23-year-old Arlisha Boykins, the coach of the team, decided to fake she was 13 and take the court in a junior-varsity contest!
Those two things I have less expertise in than the third one, but we re-enter the world of video games for this one.
In it's latest Endwalker patch series, Final Fantasy XIV premiered "The Omega Protocol", the latest Ultimate difficulty event. As such events go, many of the top players in the game began to attempt to become the World's First team to actually complete the event -- an event that is now going at least a week and not only has it not have been legally completed yet (despite teams putting dozens of hours of playtime apiece into clearing it), but the entire World First Race may be completely discredited.
To give some background: A prominent group of XIV streamers teamed up with a computer-accessory company to sponsor and air, for 144 consecutive hours, the first six days of the race -- The World First Race For Charity, a fundraiser for Extra Life. It raised over $37,000 for the children's charity.
Too bad it might well be the last one of these, and I can see that coming down two different ways. Is anyone going to want to sponsor future events if this run becomes this compromised, and is the XIV team going to want to make more Ultimate content if it becomes clear that the amount of time needed to legally clear the content is either excessive or impossible?
(Disclaimer: I will mention that I was banned from chatting on their Twitch channel due to several vehement disagreements with the channel and it's moderators -- largely due to some of these issues which have now gotten the attention of the game's Executive Producer, Naoki Yoshida. Let that be simply ancillary -- it has only the merit that it was clear this race was compromised days before Yoshida's announcement today as to an investigation of illegal conduct surrounding the race. My issues in posting this here are not with the Twitch channel, except for the fact I saw this coming days before things went down and the race became largely -- if not completely -- discredited.)
As I said, there are several facets to this, which led, today, to Naoki Yoshida launching an investigation on a number of "Illicit Activities in the Omega Protocol Ultimate". The link is to Yoshida's announcement.
I can count at least five different major issues (at least two of which I brought up in the chat on the channel -- to be shouted down by the moderators and eventually banned, after an argument) which basically proves the Race To World First for The Omega Protocol has been hopelessly compromised.
First, the presence of a team who refused to "show their work" on-stream, and that they were consistently, for most of the streaming event, the leading team. Neverland, the winners of the previous Ultimate World First (a retelling of the end of the Dragonsong War from the Heavensward expansion), were consistently ahead of most of the other teams, but that was only verifiable through the FFLogs website when Neverland openly chose to upload it's logs.
The logs themselves are a second problem. The logs basically use parsers, attached to the programs and taking data from the FFXIV gameplay, which is illegal (and Yoshida made note to state it as such) under the Terms of Service.
Third: It should be clear to many that, though "We aren't going to show other teams how to beat us to World First." IS a valid strategy (and it won them the last Ultimate Race), it basically blows up any such event such as the one the Twitch channel was trying to hold, and (to admission) worked very hard to put on a very good event -- only, IMODO, to see player misconduct send it down in flames.
It not only means the chances that the streaming event will get the World First winner are quite low, but also there's no real point in holding the streaming event if it is clear that the World First will never make it to the stream. I mean, think of it... Would there be a point in broadcasting the Olympic marathon if there was very little to no chance the winner would actually be aired?
But at least Neverland's situation (probably because of it's track record and it's victory in the previous event) probably only goes to suspicion. There is far more than that in the other two parts.
But there is enough suspicion that the person running the Twitch channel will no longer track any team refusing to stream at all, FFLogs or otherwise.
A prominent American player, Mr. Happy, who has a massive social media following and a consistent series of broadcasts around the game, has had his team for the event, Kinda Awk, under scrutiny for additional illegal third-party program usage.
If the history of the FF MMO series is any indication, he's hardly alone -- but for someone so prominent to basically risk his social-media presence on this kind of a situation, knowing, now, that his team will be investigated by Yoshida for possible suspension or worse, does not speak well for anyone of that level of purported "skill". And, because of factors I will explain, it could end up blowing up the entire FFXIV endgame/high-skill community.
It hearkens back to some allies of Mr. Happy at Limit Break Radio (don't think I forgot, even if a recent attempt to resurrect the podcast has apparently fallen flat) and at least one of their member's participation in the apparent "World First" (quotes intended for reasons I will explain) kill of Final Fantasy XI's ultimate super-boss of the Treasures of Aht Urhgan, Pandemonium Warden.
The main idea to aid in the killing of the superboss was, at a certain point in the extended fight, all players who had enmity toward Pandemonium Warden would log out of the game to clear their enmity from the list, so they would be able to hold the monster at bay. He would still be "up", and the progress made on the fight would be held as they logged back in, reorganized, and continued. I think the only people who didn't see that as a clear exploit (illegal under FFXI and FFXIV Terms) were most players of FFXI. I've got an entire blog I devoted to that for a long time before I was basically pulled out of FFXI by two friends I had made in the game.
Back to XIV and "The Omega Protocol"... Now you not only have suspicion of the teams (Neverland and at least one other who wasn't streaming) who didn't stream, but at least one prominent top-flight team who did, that basically raises suspicion on everybody at that point, especially to someone (such as myself) who knew that illegal third-party program usage was REQUIRED to play FFXI, and that I felt that the creation of FFXIV was to change all of that.
But that might not even be the biggest problem. In fact, even with the all-but-probable prevalence of all of this, it's likely not to be! Even with the fact this could be a discouraging factor in Yoshida and the FFXIV team making more Ultimate content, that's still not the biggest problem.
The biggest problem, to me, is that someone illegally leaked videos of the fight and of the cutscene after the final kill. I saw the former, Yoshida has admitted the latter.
I'm trying to remember how many days this took, but the teams started hitting a wall somewhere in the fourth and fifth phases of the fight -- the fight has six distinct phases. While only Neverland had made it to the fifth phase, someone... somehow!!!... was able to effectively show off a fair portion of the mechanics of early Phase 5 in the manner which would be consistent with Yoshida (not a game fight in any way, just the one player -- private server? hack the situation???) in his Live Letters...
And then word, admitted by Yoshida today, that it appears that the Japanese group (rightly named "Unknown_") which, for a day or so, had claimed World First and showed the final cutscene to prove it, did not clear the event and may never have played it. Yoshida is now refusing to honor the team as World First, because he believes the team was able to hack the game to simulate a clear -- probably "drops" (items you get for winning) included.
And for anyone who has the memory of January 22, 2009 in Final Fantasy XI: It was very quickly discovered that the only real reason that the North American endgame playerbase got decimated with bans regarding illegal conduct in the Salvage event in the game (and for 2-3 years, at least, besides!) was that it got back to Japan and dishonored the Japanese community.
And that's why Yoshida spoke up today. That it was a Japanese group who claimed World First and all-but-probably hacked their way to it (not even as a function of even TRYING THE FIGHT) has discredited this race, probably fatally, but may not only result in an endgame purge, if the investigations go to the extent they may well can, but also ensure that no such events are done in the future -- seen by Yoshida as a waste of time.
I can tell you from watching the Twitch event on a number of earlier days that I was wondering if there wasn't a "cheat check" in some of this: That the event was never designed to be legally cleared (see Pandemonium Warden, above).
So now you have a possible (I will not say it should or will happen -- only that it CAN be the result.) endgame purge coming, and I can tell you that I can't see many ways forward for this level of content after it's been pretty much beaten to death...
At least two video leaks, at least one major hack and probable third-party usage by a number of teams in the event... Yeah, we can't have nice things.
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And I literally hit Publish on this and three more things popped up in the FFXIV Reddit thread:
1) Why would they do this? Prestige is money in the social media Internet. If you're a verified member of the team recognized as World First ANYTHING, that's clicks, engagements, subscriptions, CASH.
1a) The massive RMT market. There's a meme in the playerbase called "Bought Legend", that a player with the title "The Ultimate Legend" (from a clear of a previous Ultimate event) who was not that good basically exposed they had bought the title. Of course, since both the RMT and the action itself being illegal, would that not be reportable?
2) "Unknown_" not only has admitted cheating, but has stated they felt it was only way to compete with a North American playerbase who was definitely going to cheat as well. The methodology was what was called "zoom hacks" -- basically zooming the field of vision further out than the game will normally allow you to do. At least one player has already been ordered to remove his "drops" by a GM, but was not apparently banned.
3) Yoshida openly questioning "Why are we even making this content if the players are going to misconduct in this manner?"
