Valentine Drama

Today is Valentine Day (eh no, it was yesterday). A day of... well should I summarise what is it all about? You have the idea.
However, this Valentine Day is very significant to competitive DotA community, a day when the fans shows their love/supports to their beloved team.

To begin with, I woke up that morning, finding out that Malaysian team KingSurf was suspected of MAPHACKING in their match against 1P in SENNHEISER Prime Defending 9 Playoff stage, and further "investigation" by MYM crew (which was conducted for 2 days), they're proven guilty for maphacking and BANNED for the rest of the tournament and Prime Nation 2. Sad story, the details can be found here.
This, of course sparks the flame war between maphack hater, as well as Asian hater. A lot of flame was thrown to KS and their fan for the cheating. But then suspicion arises: the screenshot given in the link given above are flawed (which has been replaced by the Admin): There is no bonus damage to Spectre, who obviously has radiance, and Warlock having Dagger Path icon despite being ally with Spectre. This sparks for more counter-argument against the maphack claim, not only by KS fan but also another professional player (eg: Maelk, Slahser, Drayich).

Seeing the massive uproar regarding this matter, Dota-Allstars admin, Naz takes a quick action to investigate this matter himself, with the help of one of the best replay analyser in TDA, Seer. It all takes just about 2 hours to clear all this mess, and he concluded that Kingsurf is cleared from maphack.

quoting Naz,

Today MYM announced that they found Ks guilty of maphack in their game against 1p, a lot of the community members were shocked and a lot of them didn't feel like it was conclusive evidence. As the pieces didn't fit together for me I decided to check it out myself with some help from a very experienced replay analyser when it comes to maphack cases seerTneerGevoLI from Clan TDA.

Lets start with this, for those with a short attention span, the incidents that MYM posted at 33:23 (Ks-papaxiong (Athropos)), 40:11 (Ks-MiKeBz (Mirana)) and 44:35 (Ks-x|aOmA (Lina)) are either just plain out wrong or due to both delay issues and Warcraft 3 engine issues.

Update There seems to be a misconception, while I personally do not believe that anyone in Ks maphacked it is still entirely possible for a user - any user - to use maphack without detection. The point of this article is that the arguments given to ban Ks were not conclusive enough to conclude a banning and a public lynching. Innitially 3 players were accused of maphack, one of them (Lina) should be cleared because there isn't any evidence at all in the replay whatsoever (mistake on the admins side). The evidence for both Atropos and PotM isn't conclusive and can just as easily be accounted to the warcraft 3 engine.

To understand this there's one thing that you need to realise, delay plays a part when it comes to registering actions made in a replay. The player can legally click on units as long as they are not in fog on his screen the click command is transmitted to the host to be recorded in the replay - concluding: if the host and the player are not in the same place, the lag time may result in the click firing after the target enters fog. In this case the host was from Denmark which more then covers for the delay in actions for Ks.

Another mechanic that was overlooked in the youtube video made is that as long as you clicked the unit when he wasn't in fog the unit will stay selected untill the user selects another unit. Meaning that the length of selection is irrellevant in the case of whether Ks maphacked or not.

Now to look at these specific cases, all evidence that MYM gathered is based on clicks made 0.1 to 0.3 seconds after the unit goes out of fog, factoring in the delay this makes perfect sense and is not unusual in any way whatsoever. In addition, the claim that Ks was playing in a LAN center with spectators makes it extremely unlikely that they were maphacking.

QUOTE(seerTneerGevoLI)

What happened is this: he selects warlock right on the edge of fog. the command takes 20ms to propogate to host, so in the replay the select fires after the warlock is fogged. the bane does not click on anything for three seconds.
Result: replay shows he clicked in fog, the click "stays" there for 3 seconds - which really means he didn't click anything else in that time.
Warcraft does another optimization on selects so that selects are instant for the player (this is different from spells and attack orders), but the selection recorded in the replay is the one the host includes in the action lists that he sends out to all the other player.

And the same applies to the other two instances as well.

The third case is something special, the claim was that the Lina made the selection while in reality it was the Mirana that made the selection. If you watched the replay you could see the red circle when watching through lina because she shared her chicken this automatically gives her all her allies' selection circles, but she was clicking on herself at the time. Regardless, the click was made 0.1 second after the unit goes in fog and is therefor perfectly explainable like the other 2 cases.

As there both isn't any evidence to accuse this team from maphacking nor is it logical when you consider the circumstances I believe that a mistake has been made and that an apology is in order, I for one would like to give my sympathy to team Ks for being called cheaters while in fact they weren't cheating at all, I'm sorry that it got this far.

Without any conclusive evidense of this team maphacking I expect everyone to refrain from accusation without basis, feel free to contact me if you think there is any conclusive evidence in the replay.

Best of luck to Ks

Naz

12 hours have passed since, yet no word came out from MYM admin, especially s1rro and Snake (who seemingly urged S1rro to publish the news hastily), and the page given in the link above was flooded with over 1200+ comments, mostly defending Kingsurf from the accusation, some with good argument and resoning while others are just trolling. Read all those comment for the details.
Then they eventually come out with the official statement about lifting the ban and accusation, here.


to be honest, I won't truly believe if Kingsurf is maphacking. They play on Kingsurf Cyber Cafe in Johor Bahru (except KS-MikeBz), where maphacking is impossible to be done because you're playing in front of the crowds and fans. Secondly, the accusation rises merely on the basis of the appearance on "red circle" - as seen in the first link given, which is partly caused by Warcraft 3 replay bug - this has already been explained in some of those 1200+ comments. This prrof is further explained in detail here and here. And as summarised by Naz, the delay due to distance from Europe-Asia.

MYM has announced their apology in the second link given, the lasts sentence "A public apology from the myMYM Prime Defending administration towards KS."

my reaction to this incident: I'm bitterly disappointed with the way MYM admin handled this issue - rather unprofessional. I know they did their best to enforce the rule and take immediate action upon receiving suspicion of maphacking, but they never inform Kingsurf for this matter (prolly because of timezone restriction, but still, 2 days and there's no way of contacting Kingsurf?), and most importantly, take a hasty decision on publicising the news without even 120% confirming whether KS is maphacking or not. Maphacking is a serious deal, it can heavily tarnish the good name of such famous team like KS. Even more disappointing is the way they apologise, with those simple line which looks insincere. I'm not clear with the event behind the scene, but I truthfully hope that the MYM admin, especially Snake to personally apologise to Kingsurf, and even better an open apologise to Kingsurf fan.

this is the epic confrontation on Valentine Day in DotA history. A Valentine Day to be remembered for the fan who triy their best to protect their favorite team.

the links:
MYM: KingSurf banned for maphacking
MYM: KS cleared from maphack issue
GG-Game: Some evidence of Ks not maphacking
GG-Game: Clearing KS and MikeBz from Maphacking Accusations