It’s my unfortunate responsibility to announce that effective immediately, season 9 has been put on indefinite hold while we investigate concerns that may have directly influenced the outcome of semifinals. Let me explain.

The day after results went up, Phane took a look at the semifinals results, given that the outcomes were so close together. It shouldn’t have been anything special- believe me, every time I get a close result, I double-check the numbers and manually count the close outcomes to make sure I didn’t fuck something up. It seemed legit to me, but Phane is better at Excel (or Google Sheets in this case) so he wanted to double-check for himself. If he hadn’t, we might not have noticed the little weird things that didn’t quite add up.

Timestamps come with every form entry, and since I’ve been requiring an email address and a Google account to vote, it’s taken away some of the anonymity as well to help us identify voters. As a result, Phane noticed several votes within seconds of each other, all from specific voters. That’s fine and all, normally we see a spike right as the form goes up and a spike right after I say voting will be closed soon so I can count things up for results, but we also noticed a significant spike in edits at the same time. It took a good chunk of time to PM some of these people and explain what we thought was going on, but it gave us a better picture of the level to which this whole situation has gotten fucked up with, to put it simply, blatant and wide-spread collusion.

Generally we don’t want to disrupt the actual goings-on of a Scramble season, but we conferred late last night and agreed we needed to do something about this. That’s why, effective immediately, /u/Voeltz, /u/TheMightyBox72, /u/CalicoLime, and /u/Glowing_Nipples have been disqualified from the Scramble and barred from any future entry.

This is an extremely serious punishment, but in our investigations we found bannable actions taken by each and every remaining competitor. They are as follows:

* /u/Voeltz (Magistrate on the Discord) was found to be bribing other users by agreeing to publically like things that they also liked.

* /u/TheMightyBox72 was confirmed to have conferred with dead spirits for writing advice (apparently by offering sexual favors), which is against Scramble rules and spooks the heck out of 7th.

* /u/CalicoLime was found to be letting his son write for him, which explains the dramatic increase in story quality this season.

* /u/Glowing_Nipples didn’t actually do anything wrong, but he owes Phane money, so to quote Phane, “he’s fuckin’ gone until he can turn enough tricks to get me my god damn money.”

Because every remaining competitor has been disqualified due to gross abuse of voting systems, we were left with a tournament with no champion. We wanted to do something to address the situation, but first we needed to address the lack of competitors. The first suggestion was to nominate /u/Ckbrothers as champion because people like him, but I thought the Toblerone meme was stupid, so I vetoed it. Next we considered making Phane the champion, but he admitted that he didn’t actually know how to read or write in a language not invented to speak to computers, so we felt it dishonest to the spirit of the Scramble. In the end, we had to use the only fair system we had left.

Therefore, based upon initial bracket seeding, our interim Scramble champion is /u/Joseph_Stalin_.

With that in mind, I did say that season 9 would be put on indefinite hold, and I meant that. However, that doesn’t mean the Scramble itself is on hold. Season 9 will effectively have no end, and we plan to move on to season 10 with Stalin helping to guide the means of produc- uh, guide the creative direction of the tenth season of Scramble.

Don’t be afraid, though! Scramble has survived for 8 long seasons before this, and just like FIFA, something as small as mass collusion and corruption isn’t going to topple this juggernaut of /r/whowouldwin. I’ve been gathering feedback in the Google forms this season because it’s my goal as GM to always be improving the Scramble, and we felt that the tenth anniversary of the very first Scramble would be a great time to introduce sweeping changes based on everything we’ve heard from people talking on the Discord, talking on Reddit, and talking in their sleep at night. Sidenote, /u/Lettersequence keeps drooling on his pillow. Would anyone happen to have a brand-new (or close to it) limited edition Black Cat D.Va pillowcase they could donate to replace his?

To keep it simple, here’s a list of every change we’d like to make going into season 10:

* People have wanted new tiers, and we get that. The constant chain of Sym > Spidey > Batcap > Sym gets old sooner or later, and Kaio’s highly illegal Fiction Mixers have given us a great opportunity to test new systems while we secretly gather the information necessary to hunt her down and arrest her to be brought to Phane’s gulag. As a result, the tier for the next season will be low A tier, with the benchmark being Feats-Only Saitama on the low end, and Saitama As Implied By Story on the high end. We feel this tier offers the freedom to enter characters never before seen in the Scramble while still nailing down a tight, defined range.

* We’ve heard many complaints that Scramble takes too long, especially in later rounds where more people have been eliminated and are stuck waiting. As a result, from now on every round will be 1 day long, with voting taking approximately 30 minutes the following day.

* That said, we still want to provide a safety net to give new competitors time to find their footing, so the tournament will also be double-quintuple elimination. This means that you have to lose twice to enter the loser’s bracket, then lose twice to enter the bracket after that, and so on until you’ve lost twice a total of five times. This is because two times five equals ten, and we really like the symbolism of doing so on Scramble’s tenth anniversary.

* Some of our users really don’t like the current judgment system for Tribunal, so to hopefully curb the arguments and reduce stress for Tribunal, we the GMs will personally handle every single argument and case and pass judgment the only fair way we can, by going outside and polling random people on the street about fictional character balance. As part of this rule change, the submitter of any character with a respect thread that includes gifs or videos must mail the relevant feats to us in the form of individual flip books.

* We’ve heard that people’s excitement peaks most during the actual process of submission and roster reveals, which makes sense. It’s exciting to get new teams and imagine the possibilities, which is why teams will be thrown away at the end of each round, with a brand new period of submission and scrambling taking place after every single round’s results, regardless of if a given competitor wrote that round or not. To keep things fresh, any submission that was already submitted will be removed. This submission period will last for about 6 hours each time, but each scrambling process will still last a week, despite the actual process taking about an hour generally. If this seems hectic, I understand, but it’s a test for a change we’d like to do in season 11 where we remove the “rounds” portion of the scramble entirely.

This is a lot to take in, but sit on it for a bit and we’re sure you’ll have fun with the new possibilities these changes allow. We don’t want to waste any time, so season 10 will officially start tomorrow, April 2nd.

If you find yourself thinking on it and still don’t like the changes… too bad! I’m GM for life, nerd! What are you gonna do, go write stories in the debate tournies?