Column: EUL's rehost fiasco exposes a need for transparency -- make the rulebook public

_{Image via SiegeGG}

Competitive integrity is the number one issue for any sporting product. You can have the most fun and engaging, easy-to-watch game in the world. You can dress it up with all the bells and whistles you want to. You can get celebrity endorsements, you can go all out on marketing money dumps. 

None of it will matter if the audience doesn't trust what they see on the screen to be real. 

That is the promise of competitive integrity. Why would I watch a game that purports itself to be in the spirit of fair competition when it isn't? There's a case to be made for "professional wrestling", but it isn't one based in a lack of communication with the audience -- we know its fabrications. 

The most recent alleged gap of competitive integrity in Rainbow Six Siege came with an issue with the precise rule on rehosts for players that have crashed out of the game. Long story short: on the first playday of EUL 2022 Stage 1, Rogue was not issued a rehost in their match and was forced to play down a man, BDS was issued a rehost in their match and was allowed to reset the round entirely. Both appeared to call for the rehost at a similar time.

Apparently, something has changed between the 2021 rules for rehosts and the rules for rehosts now. According to tweets from players and coaches, rehosts must be called within the first fifteen seconds of the preparation phase -- a massive change from the 2021 rules. 

There is a chance that BDS followed the rulebook correctly and Rogue didn't. However, we, the viewing public, are completely and totally reliant on the word of the administrators, which has still not been in any way officially communicated. It certainly didn't appear that BDS and Rogue took too different of a path to asking for their rehost. So why was one denied and the other admitted? Zooming out, what other rules have changed?

I'm fully aware that it can be difficult to be a tournament administrator. The rules for competitions, especially ones hosted online, can deal with minutia, and making a judgment call in mere seconds is not easy. To make matters worse, you have to deal with angry players, coaches, and a public who seemingly walk around like little Judge Dredds, ready to blow you away at any slight perceived, fake, or real. It is a thankless position, and a good portion of the job is learning how to be the correct percentage of punching bag and enforcer in each situation.

However, the integrity of the sport matters more, and any idea that opaqueness will protect tournament administrators from harassment is misguided. Transparency is how the public knows whether someone made a mistake or not -- and the chaos and fog of opaqueness is always less desirable than a cut and dry mistake. A mistake can be forgiven. Hiding a mistake runs the risk of decaying the public's trust in your ability to administrate your league -- impacting the perceived integrity of your product. 

If there was a mistake in the administration of the rehost rule, the public deserves to know. There's also a deeper-seeded issue here: the lack of transparency about what the competition rules actually say. The rulebooks used to be public -- why is the 2022 iteration of the rulebook not public yet? When today ends, every region will have played at least one playday. 

There is a need for multiple forms of public accountability here. The public is what makes the league what it is, the public are the Twitch viewership, the public are the ones supporting the scene with R6 Share item purchases. They deserve to know exactly what happened, and they deserve to be able to see the rules, in their entirety, for themselves. 

There's a chance that this could all be an oversight. The rules could be completed, and someone could've forgotten to press the "publish" button. There's a chance that the new rules caused a slip-up on the first day of competition under them. It happens. That's a mistake that can be forgiven. However, the longer the general public is in the dark, reliant on tweets from players to determine what's happening, the more situations like yesterday's rehost fiasco will pop up, and the more trust will be eroded. 

Do the right thing. Give the public transparency. Publish the rulebook. Lift the veil and trust your administrators to make the right call.