twisty ban

i don't have the full history of twisty in NC melee committed to memory, and i'm not particularly interested in dealing with this anymore because it's been exhausting having to police him over the last year when some new thing comes up every other tournament he attends.

twisty has been the absolute definition of toxic, on and off line. he's made bets with people and refused to pay up when he's lost. he's physically smacked other players' personal property out of their hands. he's been told he couldn't use an arduino at an event months in advance which he did anyway and then bragged about getting away with it. he went to pound 2019 and got into a physical altercation with mike haze where he was accused of grabbing mike when he tried to walk away in an attempt to force him to continue talking to him. he possibly cheated at other majors including but not limited to ssc 2018 and the script 2. he showed up to tournaments during his first ban just to harrass other competitors who wouldn't money match him, and threatened to show up at others saying things like "you're not going to stop me" when informed that he wasn't welcome. he was accused of sending naked pictures of himself to unwilling recipients online. he made vulgar gestures on stream at a tournament where he was explicitly told he wasn't allowed to do so. he argued and lied to tournament staff when they wanted to inspect his controller for an arduino, saying he only brought one controller initially but then admitted that he had a second one in his backpack that he tried to hide that contained an arduino. he's constantly harassed the PR panel about whether or not he's getting ranked, and argues with good faith attempts at transparency by calling us incompetent, biased, and saying that he deserved to be ranked higher based on his own selective interpretation of rankings criteria. he's used racist, misogynistic, homophobic, and transphobic slurs when he doesn't get his way with someone. he's threatened phyiscal violence against other players when they don't want to interact with him. he's gone out of state and slandered other players with baseless accusations that they weren't present to defend against. this isn't to mention "typical melee things" like being excessively salty about losing, calling other players bad/carried by their character/braindead/etc. to their face, and yelling at his opponents during gameplay if he doesn't like how they're playing.

twisty wasn't banned because 3 important people in the scene got together and decided they didn't like him. 15 people, including the PR panel, every active TO, and the braacket admin team, all unaminously decided that he should no longer be allowed at events after being banned for 3 months, being welcomed back on a trial period and showing no remorse for his actions, no improvement in his behavior, and managing to get banned from every individual tournament series except for one on his first or second event back. multiple players have told me that they would explicitly not attend tournaments that twisty was allowed at because he actively detracted from their experience by forcibly engaging with them when they made it very clear to him that they were not interested in interacting. so this isn't a case of "well we just don't like him," this is about someone deterring attendance in a scene that has already been in decline. everyone has a twisty story, and maybe all of them individually don't warrant a ban, but when added up over the course of the year it's pretty clear that the vast majority of the community sees him as a net negative presence at events. he has had second and third and fourth and fifth chances and every single time he's argued about semantics, harrassed people on and off line that make it clear that they don't want to talk to him, and bragged about how he won't ever actually get banned indefinitely.

i'm sick of dealing with him and i can say with great confidence that nearly everyone else in the scene is too. this isn't a legal system where he is innocent until proven guilty and has to be tried in front of a jury of his peers or a judge. this is a local community of ~100 people that plays a video game together that has more or less collectively decided that his behavior doesn't fall even remotely within the lines of what could be considered acceptable and healthy. people will complain that this is unfair and that he deserves a sixth chance but the question that twisty isn't asking himself is why is it the case that the vast majority of ~100 people do not want him to attend their events, and why isn't there a single other person who is comparably "discriminated" against within that group?