Originally posted by methomps
I am a Bandit and here are my initial thoughts. First, as to Ballbright's charge that my opinion is tainted by the fact that I am on the team, I guess the same could be said of his opinion since he has two players on the team directly below us in the conference. I guess the only other option is to consider the responses. Ballbright is practically carrying the charge against Brisbane in this thread with 15 posts all hardline against Brisbane. You will see that I, on the other hand, disagree with some things Cats did and disagree with most of the charges.
While I will assume that joemalaka had an innocent purpose in posting the thread in the team forum, the truth is that it was mostly unrelated to the team. Billyvassi is not a GM for Brisbane. He simply has one player on the team. I think what he did to the other team was gutting and was wrong.
While I think banning joemalaka from the forum may have been a bit of an overreaction, I know it certainly isn't unheard of and I believe it resulted more from anger at introducing a distraction to the team forum than as part of any kind of conspiracy. Catspaw works very hard on the team, especially on having an active and involved group of players. I think he saw this thread a chance for nothing good to happen. And since we had a situation in the past where a disgruntled player (on his way out the door) shared our gameplan with the opposing team, I support his position that joemalaka simply can't be brought back into the forum.
But to go from an overreaction to cries of collusion is pretty silly. Given the fact that you don't even know what all went on with the trade, I find it especially curious that you have so quickly and firmly taken such a strong stance. But I'll assume it isn't due to a conflict of interest w/r/t you being on the 2nd place team in our conference.
Ballbright I believe made an analogy to bank robberies, which is a poor one. Collusion is nothing like bank robbery because collusion involves normal activity (trading) that is subtly influenced against the spirit of the market. Collusion is determined by judgment, not by a clear rule. If you use force to get a bank teller to give you money, that is bank robbery - a clear rule. You often prove collusion through a series of acts that, taken together, suggest something is fishy.
This is one trade of a backup, inactive lvl 12 RB to acquire a backup lvl 12 CB. It is a good deal for Brisbane, but it is the exact same deal that every other team got trading with billvassi. In fact, if you look at the roster of that now-gutted team, it's pretty easy to say that this probably wasn't even in the top 10 in terms of favorable deals:
http://goallineblitz.com/game/roster.pl?team_id=702
Cheating is a pretty serious charge, and I hope that some people would be a little more reserved in their accusations. I never asked to be brought back to the forum. Immediately after banning I PM'ed Catspaw asking why, stating why I wrote the post....apologized if he didn't appreciate it. He didn't PM me first stating...I had to PM him. His response was an attack saying I was on special teams only. Catspaw did not try to work it out. As you stated my post was not an attack, maybe just stupid.
Overreaction big time. And looking at it, come on...with the trades that happened, does it not look like there is a reason for the overreaction?
