Weimar Republic on Theodore James Tedofsky

Nick Boragina

Yes, I am 16, and I cheated a year ago. Some of you who are reading this are more than likely the same age, and have done the same thing. Some of you may have read articles from older people who have done it, but mostly, kids and adults cheat for different reasons. An adult will cheat to up his rating. A kid will cheat to see if it can be done. An adult will cheat so he can brag to his friends how he won. A kid will cheat so he can brag to his friend how we cheated. I am not 100% sure what happens in other minds when they cheat, but I can share my experiences.

I cheated. I barged into a game and attempted to fool the GM and ruin the game for everyone involved. I committed an act, in the Diplomacy world, equal to murder in the real world. But this is only one side of the story...

In 1999 I found this website, www.diplom.org, just a bit after creating a new e-mail address and falling in love for the first time. russia1914@hotmail.com quickly rose to become a good diplomacy player... well that's not true, but I did play in a fair bit of games. I eventually tried more variants and became interested in history. One thing that interested me was the lull between WW1 and WW2. The time of the Weimar Republic in Germany. I found a variant that was about this period in time and signed on. I was so excited.

An example of a day in my life back then would be like this:

• Wake up and realize the world is a horrible place, debate jumping off a bridge, then decide its a bad idea.
• Eat breakfast, realize today is the best day in the world, and wonder if I will become the Prime Minister of Canada after all.
• Go to school, then realize that the world IS a horrible place, decide jumping off a bridge is a good idea, but to do it "later" cause I am "busy".
• Forget about the whole thing by recess.
• Go out for recess, fall in love, have my heart broken, then fall in love again.
• Go to class and think about my new love.
• Go to lunch, and realize she is ugly.
• Go back to class and be obsessed with her again.
• Next Recess and debates with my friends about what the future will hold: world peace, or WWIII.
• More school, and more imaginary stories about the KEE Empire {more on this in future articles}.
• Go home for supper, have a heated debate over when Dinner is, then play Nintendo for 3 hours.
• Go on the net.
• Go to bed.

So as you can see, 5 minutes is a long long time for someone like this. The game took 2 weeks to get 6 players... needless to say it was taking for ever and ever and ever... or so it seemed. I eventually got angry and decided to sign on from my other address to get the game moving. I decided that I would take this advantage and resign which ever e-mail address got the power I liked least. But the GM was wise to my plot, and banned me from diplomacy forever. I was angry to say the least. This was, I am sure, an OK story and if I had left it at that, I may have been allowed back in then. But...

I tried to fool the JKs by using my friends names and address, getting them banned in the process. Eventually, when caught one to many times, I exploded and made up a story about being the son of a high-ranking Russian politician and that we were gonna "sue the pants off" the JKs. I also made up stories about how the KEE Empire was going to avenge my diplomacy death... and how there was a street battle over it... and how.. well I don't remember it all, just that in the end I send an e-mail saying, "if you get this, it means I am dead". I decided to take a break from diplomacy and invented the address weimar_republic@hotmail.com. Eventually, when I thought it was safe, I returned under that address, using a fake address and name on my registration. Things were going rather well until I wanted to get into the Vermont Group. In order to do this, I needed to give Doug Massey my banned e-mail address. I freaked. If I gave it to him, he would know, and I would be banned forever. If I didn't give it to him, he would get suspicious, find out its me, and I would be banned forever. So I decided to lie.

Eventually, google.com took over the deja forum, so I couldn't send any kind of reply to anything up there. I ran into an article I wanted to reply to, about how cheaters are dealt with, and sent it to all JKs. Eventually Doug Massey connected my banned address, with my weimar_republic address, with the JK I was banned on, and this reply about cheaters. I knew that unless I wanted to continue the lies I would have to stop. So I decided to tell the truth. It took about a week when I didn't know if next time I signed on to a game it would tell me I was banned or not. Today, David Norman, USTR judge, the JK that had banned me, replied that he would let me back in. I still don't know whether the other JKs will or not, and I may lose half of the games access or more. But most of all, what I have lost, if any chance of getting into the Vermont Group. It all seems bad, but I could not tell the truth when I approached Doug, and I could not just back off, cause if he looked into my record, he may see that its really me. One lie starts many, and if I had approached the JKs after it happened, things might have been different...

My gripes:

• My problems with this were small and simple. I still think the punishment is cheaters is too harsh. I have, in a weimar_republic game, been the victim of a cheater myself. I still think that even he should be allowed a second chance. I think all cheaters should be allowed a second chance and just a judge wide ban. But if he does it again, a system wide ban forever. If you truly intend to change, you will do so fast, trust me.
• Also, the disbelief. David Norman refused to believe that I was going to resign after I signed on to that game... I think most people do. I DID contact him right after this, and he refused to listen at that point of time. The other JKs and I got into bigger arguments, especially the USEF JK and I. With the system wide ban, its either leave, and never play the hobby you love so much aver again, or lie. Its kinda like someone holding a gun to your head and saying. "if you move, I pull the trigger, if you don't move, I pull it anyway". I never had motive to cause these major problems, but the punishment and disbelief forced me to. Its kinda like euthanasia, where some feel it should get a lighter punishment then murder. I think that acts of cheating that are not severe shouldn't be punished the same as severe acts. My gripe here is not with the JKs but with their rules. There needs to be written rules about how to deal with cheaters! Aren't our laws written? In Canada we have "the criminal code of Canada" where 99% of crimes are written down. Shouldn't cheating rules also be written down?

How to fix it:

Simple. First, write down the rules. My suggestion would read as such:

• Cheaters: second chance legislation
1. Anyone caught cheating will get a 1 month system-wide ban, and go abandoned in all games he/she is currently in, and will not get the points back. After the month is over, he/she can return to the game for a second chance, but will have a life long ban on the judge on which the act was committed. {this section to be reviewed if more then 50% of games are run on that judge alone}
2. anyone caught a second time, whether it took place simultaneously with the first or uncovered as happening previous to the first recorded offence will be banned from all judges forever, and cat-23 and bounced and whatever else will be notified of this. This means signed on as a total of 4 powers, but only 2 games.
3. the cheat's e-mail address will be made public, but if this is used by GMs as discrimination against allowing the person into a game, then this policy will have to be changed. This purpose of this section is to let others know this person is on his second chance, not to take away that second chance.
• My feeling is simple. Most people who cheat do it for fun. About half of them only do it once. Other times you cheat is when you feel you need it. For example: a long wait for a player who needs 1 move before he dies, you sign on to finish him off. Although these rules at current are very good for those hard-core cheaters, they hurt the little guy. Everyone should be given a second chance, people can, and often do change. There are however, some people that will cheat no matter what. But this policy should make them easier to detect, it will make the GM think "well he has cheated before... is he cheating now" making it all that much harder for the cheater to cheat again.
• My last idea is the one I proposed in that first letter to the USTR JK &emdash; Why not tag your ISP address to all your other address? The dippouch JKs should say. "ok, every hotmail/freemail address needs an ISP tag" this way cheaters cant have 100 freemail address, unless they have 100 friends who are willing to let them use their ISP. And it will be this tagged ISP address that will be made public. Meaning it will follow them around everywhere.

So in closing. Yes I cheated, yes I lied. But I feel like Emilio Estevez's character in that movie where he is a crook and cant get a job cause no one wants to hire a crook. So he decides that rather then rot away he will go to banks and, not rob them, but burn their mortgage papers so that the people late on their mortgages don't have to pay until the papers are made back. If you make one wrong act should it ruin your life? Would you hire a crook? What if you stole some money in a drunken stupor, and became a crook? "well I am sure I could just explain I was drunk at the time..." honestly, would you listen to a crook go on about how he is innocent? Things like this make both parties feel wronged, and I am sure that the JKs feel just as wronged as I do right now. This is why I think that cheaters and JKs should rally around these 3 suggested rules.

It's always hard to see someone else's side when you have been wronged. But David Norman has done a lot of working through anger and other emotions to see my point, and I have seen his. Hopefully, this act will not die with the both of us, I would hope that if these 3 rules are not implemented, that similar rules will be. Prevention is the key. Both sides need to see the other side. JKs need to accept that some cheaters truly intend to never cheat again if given a second chance. Cheaters need to accept that the JKs are volunteers and that they could be paying a fee to use the judge, (good idea actually). And that the JKs responsibility is to ensure that other players don't get their game ruined by a cheater.

~Nick Boragina

AKA

~Theodore James Tedofsky, Emperor of the KEE Empire

{the KEE Empire is an organization, we will have a web site soon, I hope}

Nick Boragina (weimar_republic@hotmail.com)

[Ed.: -- I happen to totally disagree. There is absolutely no excuse for cheating, and I fall into the "tough on first offenders" category. "It was the first time I broke the law" is not really an excuse, and people should learn to live with the consequences of their actions, whether their age is 15, 55, or 115. Bet you didn't expect THAT from a Canadian :) -- TH]

If you wish to e-mail feedback on this article to the author, click on the letter above. If that does not work, feel free to use the "Dear DP..." mail interface.

[Ed. note: It appears that e-mails to this address are bouncing, if you have a reply, you can send it to me at tdhill@student.math.uwaterloo.ca. If you could include the word 'pouch' in the title, it would help my sorting. :) --TH]

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