*Eclipse of the Honey Moon

[Baron1898]

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Volume I | Volume II

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On July 8, 2017, a user named @SexualEarwax joined the league and created a tight end named Carmel Gibson. Recruited from a post on r/CFB, he was one of many prospects in the S2 draft class and eventually went 58th overall in the eighth round to the Baltimore Hawks, who had traded for this pick from the new expansion Philadelphia Liberty. Gibson expressed excitement at the draft process and promised not to let Baltimore down.

Four days later, he made his last ever visit to the forums and was never seen again.

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INTRODUCTION: FULL MOON

The Season 2 Hawks seemed to take an immediate step forward from their 4-10 inaugural record. In their first eleven games of the season, they went 7-4, bolstered by the additions of many rookies from the draft. To the wide surprise of many, Carmel Gibson was among those key contributors. Gibson never earned or applied a drop of TPE, but even at the base build he was leading all tight ends in receiving yards and touchdowns and boasted a crazily impressive 8.8 yards per reception. Perhaps this could be attributed to a combination of sim luck and a weak receiving duo in front of him. Or perhaps, as @Player1 oh so briefly theorized in his article on weekly tight end performances from August 18, there was something a tad illegal about his success.

Despite never updating his player since creation, Carmel Gibson has 160 TPE. Interesting, perhaps scandalous, and certainly helps explain his production while inactive... Doing the math manually, he appears to have 160 TPE though I don't know where it came from. There are no updates showing gaining or applying TPE and the player has not made a post since mid-July. Should the Hawks be punished if this is the case?

Player1 might have been content with idly kicking up questions, but @124715 was inspired by the article to look into it further. The result was astounding. Gibson's build was indeed an entire 160 TPE over the base archetype. Even more shocking, this faulty build was approved both by @Noble – the head updater – and later by @Bwestfield – the updater for the Hawks. Barring a last-second edit by Gibson before his player thread was approved or an edit by a GM or member of HO, neither of which would leave an "this post has been edited by..." tag, this enormously erroneous build seemed to have simply slipped on by multiple stages of verification and boosted Baltimore's offense for almost an entire season. How would Head Office respond to this scandal?

The first reactions to Numbers' media ranged wildly in their preferred outcomes. Some jumped immediately to banning Gibson from the league; others rebutted that he was already inactive, and that any punishment would be counterproductive given the absence of any clear guilty party. Many liked at least suspending Gibson for the rest of the season and resetting his TPE to the correct levels, but some thought that without malicious intent he should just be reset and allowed to keep playing. Importantly, this would the first time in the fledgling NSFL that Head Office ever issued a punishment. There were concerns in all directions about setting the wrong sort of precedent that might overburden a team to track its players updates or, alternatively, fail to fix the issue with the updating system. And with the Hawks having benefitted from Gibson's incorrect build tremendously, contention arose about the fairness of their success and what recompense, if any, the other teams would receive.

The answer was none. Head Office's first ever punishment thread came the same day as the drama broke with no actual punishment for the Hawks, who could not be shown in any way to have knowingly participated in a cheating scheme. Gibson was suspended immediately for the remainder of the season and postseason and reverted to 50 TPE. There were a few discontented voices bitter that there would be no lingering penance for Baltimore, but most deferred to the testing of @ErMurazor – the league simmer – whose comparison of season sims with and without the broken Gibson build showed little actual difference in win rate. Head Office member @AsylumParty also mentioned in the thread that there were discussions being held on whether Noble needed to be held accountable here, but nothing ever emerged from them.

6. Baltimore Hawks (7-2) ?-4
The Haws sat strong after week 9 with the number two seed that they got fair in square*.  Here’s the thing, I don’t know if the Hawks are better than any team, but I think it’s going to be looked at with a microscope as the suspension of Carmel Gibson looms.

The view of the Hawks is 'we did not do it, it wasn't our fault, it did not matter anyway, and never bring it up again.' For something that was apparently not their fault and had no impact they sure are awfully defensive.

I'd talk about all the great things the Hawks did this year, but my asterisk key is broken.

The trash talk began almost instantly. Across both the forums and Discord servers, Baltimore began to take on the label of an unworthy contender, whose players and management were viewed with the distrust of cheaters even though they had no control over the situation or culpability for Gibson's errant stats. Much of this wasn't very serious – then as now, the community will absolutely seize on the potential for memes after a scandal – and @37thchamber went as far as to pen a musical parody of the situation. But there were a few users in particular that latched onto the hate train and refused to simmer down the vitriol. And Baltimore going 1-2 after losing their tight end predictably added fuel to the flames.

One such personality was @kckolbe. The long-controversial user released an article on August 24 bemoaning the fortunes of the Yeti, who despite trouncing Baltimore 43-10 in the final regular season game missed the playoffs off of a three-way tiebreaker. Kolbe was not particularly enamored with the 8-6 Hawks, owners of the first seed in Colorado's conference, who he claimed "may not even be worthy of making the playoffs." Hawks players and others tired of the "dead horse" showed up in the comments to express their frustration with kolbe's narrative; kolbe continued to argue that Gibson's impact had been far from negligible, backed up by another key user.

Man people are shitting on us hard. We were one of two teams to win all our home games, and we beat division rival Philly on the road. We earned our spot. Our PD was insanely high until we clinched, these last two games were meaningless.

>Only the games we played with Gibson matter

>Gibson had no impact on our team

Pick one

This quote came from @Archon, who to put it kindly was one of the most abhorrent, reprehensible users ever to grace the league. Even in the context of the early NSFL's drastically less pleasant environment – you can easily search slurs into the general league discord and find not one, but two former commissioners tossing them around like candy – Archon was the sort of user to publish blatantly homophobic media right on the forums. And unsurprisingly, when it came to stoking harassment and toxicity, Archon was the perfect person for the job.

Meanwhile, the Hawks entered the postseason as the first seed of their conference hoping to get the monkey off their back entirely. They hosted the Wraiths in the NSFC Championship game and, in a low-scoring bout fueled by the leg of Turk Turkleton, advanced to their first franchise Ultimus appearance by a 16-14 margin. But @HENDRIX, the Hawks GM, noticed an error in the update sheet. Baltimore safety Erasmo Broadway's agility score had been mistakenly updated as 775, not the correct value of 75, and therefore defaulted to 100, meaning he had played the game with the equivalent of 275 bonus applied TPE. Hendrix brought this up immediately with Head Office, who discussed potential ways to deal with the situation both among themselves and with the input of every team's GM. The decision was made on August 29, the day after, not to re-sim the game, both because multiple tests had shown Broadway's impact on the outcome had been minimal and because HO was concerned with setting the appropriate precedent.



Most people applauded this decision. It was clear that HO had made the best out of an unfortunate situation and that the Hawks were not to blame – especially since the updater who fat-fingered and made the typo in question, @Bzerkap, was also the co-GM of the Wraiths. Bzerkap apologized for the mistake and received consolation for making an honest error in a thankless job, users welcomed the professional and diligent manner by which the decision was made, and even kolbe acknowledged that it was tough to get too worked up over a four tackle game. But for some others, the frequency at which Baltimore appeared to be getting away scot-free from cheating only made the Broadway debacle fuel for the fire.



Users like Archon were very fond of repeating the claim that the Hawks were 1-2 on the year in games they did not cheat in. That figure would soon be 1-3 once Ultimus Bowl II rolled around and the Arizona Outlaws steamrolled their way to a second consecutive title, 33-6. @iamslm22, undaunted, made a recruitment thread the following morning talking about why rookies should want to go to Baltimore – being the best NSFC team and the one in the best position to topple the emergent Arizona dynasty, as well as having a tight-knit and loyal locker room culture, were among the many reasons to want in. Archon seemed to believe slm should've put an asterisk next to that NSFC Champions title and said as much in his reply to the thread... a reply which readers of the article today can no longer view.



Archon noticed. Bringing it up in the general discord that his post had been deleted prompted Bzerkap to check the moderation logs, and he confirmed that the post had not only been deleted but that Archon had been reported for trolling two minutes prior (by slm). Kolbe soon blurted out that Hendrix was the responsible party, and Archon did the responsible thing and brought it up with Head Office privately posted an incendiary media article titled #Deletegate that had the express purpose of "[facilitating] open discussion" about both the abuse of mod powers and the unfair advantages the Hawks enjoyed throughout most of the season and in the conference championship game. So was any discussion facilitated?

Yes, quite a lot, and most of it wasn't pretty. Users on the Hawks lined up to defend Hendrix and call out their most persistent critics for beating a dead horse and refusing to let Gibson and Broadway go. Those in question – Archon, kolbe, and @Kristy95 – expressed disbelief that Baltimore still had yet to be punished for everything they benefitted unfairly from, with Kristy calling HO soft and ruining the fun of the league; in this disappointment she was joined by none other than Numbers, who saw HO as holier-than-thou in its handling of the prior punishments. The critique of Hendrix for abusing mod powers spiraled beyond these core three, though, with calls for him to lose anything from his moderation privileges to his job as GM and pushback on the latter scenario from other users in leadership positions.

And anyone who says whatever we "did" is making this league not fun needs to try having people call them and their team cheaters every single time they log on. It's so much fun. So much fun that I've even considered retiring my player because the drama from the SHL is seeping over into this league. So, thanks everyone for ruining this league, too.

Head Office's second-ever punishment post would be their first with an actual punishment. Hendrix's permissions on the forums would remain intact in the GM section but removed globally, a partial moderation suspension that would last for two full seasons and incur a $2 million fine. They also explicitly added guidelines to the rulebook on the abuse of moderation power, marking Hendrix's punishment as the standard first-time offender and ratcheting up the penalties and possible bans from league roles for repeat abusers. This was seen as a fair ruling, even by kolbe and Archon.

And so the league moved on to the offseason. The trifecta whopper of Gibson, Broadway, and #Deletegate seemed to have officially branded the Baltimore Hawks as the league's resident cheaters, the punching bags of every offseason retrospective. They bore the full brunt of the league's nascent toxicity at the time, settling into an insular mentality of them against the world that began to turn off some of the Hawks from participating in the league at all.

One example of this casual sort of harassment came from the usual suspect. Archon published media establishing negative awards called the Deflatees, and surprise, surprise, Baltimore received two. One was for drafting @cosbornballboy, a purported friend of Archon who he ripped for being "an avowed Nazi" that plagiarized two separate real articles for his media on concussions and who the Hawks could relate to as being cheaters; the other was for the team, a crew of inflated egos and cheaters whose "GM got castrated by Ballin' Ballerstorm". This thread was reported twice by @evryday, the user of Erasmo Broadway, who was shot down on one attempt and ignored on the other for trying to draw a distinction between media and the Thunderdome. Fellow Hawks like cosborn and slm agreed with him and argued to that end; others called the double reporting "the most absurd thing I've ever seen" and told those offended to stop being so soft and take a joke.





Maybe the Hawks would get an offseason boost. Cosborn announced on September 10 that Baltimore would unveil a team rebrand the next day, keeping the name and location but updating the team's logo, colors, and uniforms. This was an understandable undertaking. Like many of the early league brandings, the original Hawks logo was ripped straight from a real team, and the team's founder left the league almost as soon as they joined – one of the first GMs, @.Broken, even promised a move to Toronto, Ontario that never materialized. So the Hawks banded together around the concept of the soft reboot, adding an "old gold" color as the team's new primary color.

Surely, the rebranding would turn out great.

Right?



One of these images is heavily pixelated because I was unable to find a higher resolution of the original logo. The other is, uh...

Reactions to this logo, outside of the initial burst of hype by the Hawks themselves, were almost universally negative. It was almost identical to the original. It featured an ugly "gold" that commenters described as resembling baby vomit. The borders were terribly choppy and pixelated. The "pukebird", the "pixelbird", seemed to be the cherry on top for a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad last few weeks for Baltimore, and gave further license to mock them. And this proved to be the last straw for @manicmav36, who expressed the grievances and anger of the entire Hawks team in a fiery Thunderdome post.

When I joined, the league seemed like a friendly place, with some good-natured shit-talking sprinkled throughout. Now, however, it seems to be a league run by (and filled with
) gossip-spreading, mean-natured, teenage girls. It's a shame when as a member of the Baltimore Hawks, I feel like I can't show my face on the boards or on Discord without preparing to be shit on for everything I do. Just look at our recent team announcements. Not a single positive comment to be had. I joined to have fun WITH other people, not AT THE EXPENSE OF other people. This league should be ashamed with themselves. This attitude does not foster growth, or an active league. It will be the dath of the NSFL as you drive good-natured, friendly people awa.

This sentiment highlighted the toxicity in the NSFL's core. Just as frequent as the responses sympathizing with mav were the posters who assumed the Hawks were blowing things out of proportion. All the harassment was just trash talk because Baltimore was good, and they needed to take it a little less personally and dish it out in turn. Just "cup your balls and take the insults", stop being "cancerous softie unicorn milk suckers", honestly "you are the problem" because "we love seeing you absolutely fall the fuck apart" over some mild ribbing, you are "too sensitive, whats new." This frat bro, 'locker-room talk', hostility-driven environment went far deeper than the drama with the Hawks. It would take years and years for the league to outgrow this type of culture. But it only took months for the league to almost fall apart in the meantime.

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PHASE I: DEEP PENUMBRAL

When the NSFL was first getting off the ground, and Ballerstorm was filling out the GM positions for the six original team, the sixth and final slot came down to @ADwyer87 and a second candidate. Baller gave the other user the job but, having never heard of him before despite the user's claimed history in sim leagues, grew suspicious and checked the user's IP address. As it turned out, and as Baller soon confronted him with, the mystery user was none other than Noble.

The distance of time hides just how notorious of a name that was in 2017. Noble was a long veteran of sim leagues, infamous for having cheated and for operating multis in the SBA and SHL that had landed him in hot water. Obviously, his attempt to wipe the slate clean in the NSFL failed to pass muster, and the franchise that soon became the Arizona Outlaws would have Dwyer as its GM instead. But Baller stopped short of closing the door. Whatever his faults, it could not be denied that Noble was an incredibly dedicated user, the type to take on multiple jobs when no one else would. Perhaps, chastened by his failed deception, Noble would truly turn over a new leaf.

He certainly burrowed his way into the league. Noble may not have landed the GM gig, but he became @DELIRIVM's founding co-GM instead in Colorado. He also became an updater hired by @galatix and by July had risen to the head of the department. When the Colorado GM spot became available in early Season 2, Noble instead took an upward promotion and joined Head Office, not only as a member but as the main founder and organizer of the upcoming DSFL. And while his updating team received a fair bit of scrutiny in the wake of the Carmel Gibson scandal, internal discussions on holding Noble to task fizzled out without reaching a concrete resolution. He was the star quarterback of the Colorado Yeti, one of the league's hardest working employees and top TPE earners, and very proud of those facts.



Maybe Noble got a bit too proud. Even his forum signature bragged of having the most TPE of any player in the league. For @Muford, this struck him as odd, since Noble tended to leave placeholder responses on the first page of PT threads and yet somehow stayed ahead of everyone in earnings. Idle musing on the topic during a gaming session between him and Er, who worked in the PPT, turned into a night of investigation of Er's grading records for every point task. Hours and hours of sorting through the evidence multiple times confirmed their suspicions: Noble had, repeatedly, gone back to edit his responses past the due date and edit the corresponding claim thread to award himself TPE.

Er submitted the pair's findings to Head Office on September 10. HO's subsequent investigation lasted five days, and it confirmed Noble's misdeeds not only in abusing his "DSFL commissioner" moderator powers to edit posts – which as a reminder left no notice of being edited – but also deleting the moderator logs of those same changes – an accusation that Noble denied after the fact. He had siphoned 73 TPE for himself this way. Their punishment, posted on September 15, came down severely with a two-week ban from the site, a $10 million fine, and a penalty of 73 TPE. More significantly, the player Logan Noble was suspended for the duration of Season 3, rendering him unable to earn further TPE, and Noble was banned from holding any jobs for the next five seasons. Most importantly of all, no more posts could ever be edited by any user, even HO, without an "edited by" tag.

The head office is extremely disappointed in Noble’s inability to live up to the expectations and dignity of the office of commissioner. Noble exhibited a failure to respect the level-playing field of the league and the hard work and mutual respect put forth by this community.

While some in the community were caught off guard by the sudden scandal, especially considering all Noble had done for the league, users familiar with Noble's checkered past were hardly shocked by the revelation. In fact, there were some who thought the punishment was too light given his record and pushed for a bigger TPE penalty or even a permanent ban. A few brave souls did argue that Noble should be given some moral slack because of his age, but even being fifteen is no excuse for becoming one of the faces of fascism in America being a serial cheater who mishandles power again and again and again. And sympathy became even harder to summon when Noble refused to apologize or accept responsibility for his actions.



There was debate between users over whether Noble's punishment, justified as it might be, was unfair to the Yeti. They would now play an entire season without their starting quarterback, crippling the brand-new Colorado GM duo of @TheMemeMaestro and @Daybe for a situation they had no control over. In a twist of fate, kolbe and slm found themselves on the opposite sides of the Gibson dialogue, with kolbe now arguing the position of Yeti players that the punishment destroyed Colorado's attractiveness and motivation while slm argued that teams weren't owed compensation when their players cheated. Colorado did have to find a way to move on, and they would get their rebuild started under the leadership of rookie quarterback Nicholas Pierno.

No easy way out was available for the other institution in Noble's sphere of influence: the DSFL. The minor league was announced back at the start of August and soon filled up six teams – the Blues under @Jiggly_333 and Muford, the Marshals under kolbe and @bovovovo, the Coyotes under Numbers and @WinstonKodogo, the Pythons under @Anti-Hype and @RainDelay, the Luchadores under @loco and @Sleepy, and the Seawolves under @Oles and @'Perry'. A follow-up announcement on the 17th introduced many of the league's central mechanics, including the 250 TPE cap, filler bots, and the waiver wire, and also mandated that every team send down at least one active and three total players after the S3 NSFL Draft.

These changes came with a number of concerns. Some complained about the NSFL waiver wire losing basically all of its functionality, while some were disappointed or confused that DSFL teams weren't directly affiliated with an NSFL counterpart. Because most new recruits for Season 3 would be drafted to the NSFL, commenters also noticed that the S3 DSFL Draft – and thus the S4 NSFL Draft – would be paper thin as a result. And would expanding from eight teams to fourteen really be sustainable in the long term for filling out rosters?

The short term proved enough of a problem to begin with. The DSFL's launch was, to put it simply, disastrous. NSFL GMs could call up and send down players at any time, even during the draft, without any proper notification. The draft itself ended prematurely, sending players onto the waiver system that would have been taken otherwise. The organization and communication between Head Office and team GMs was dysfunctional and chaotic. And importantly, many of those involved felt that the league simply wasn't full enough to require the DSFL. Teams were filled mostly with bots and inactive senddowns; the call-ups of the Coyotes' top three draftees, including Pierno, left Kansas City with only two active users before the season even started.

Thankfully, the DSFL did also show signs of promise. Not only were the games fun to watch, the league also proved to be an excellent incubator for promising GM candidates learning how to manage teams and soon got its organizational issues under control (and out of the hands of a fifteen-year-old). But unfortunately, getting a developmental league into motion does not magically manifest players to fill it. Concerns about the DSFL's rosters lingered throughout Seasons 3 and 4. This wasn't an exclusively minor league issue, either. And the canary in the coal mine for the NSFL's health came in the form of its least glamorous position group.

In the Season 2 NSFL draft, most NSFL GMs could have told you that you better hit on an offensive lineman now, because it was clear at that point the supply of capable blockers in the league was already dwindling. The league has for a few seasons now fretted over a scarcity of capable quarterbacks, and starting appearances from rookies like Clifford Rove and Nick Pierno give a good reason for this concern. But an equally alarming problem has arisen... The NSFL is amid a continuing offensive lineman drought, and the talent drain at the position is damaging the quality on the field in even uglier fashion than poor quarterbacking ever could.

The offensive line was a resource nightmare for GMs. You needed five starters, more than any other single position group on the team, and if you could not find them in the draft then you had to hope you could convince one of your other active players to switch. And this was an unappealing prospect to most for the same reason that it is today: playing offensive line is thoroughly unglamorous. Those at the position could see their direct impact in the sim through only two stats, pancakes and sacks allowed, of which one is a negative stat to accumulate. Some players loved it, but a great deal only committed to help the team. Users like @timeconsumer didn't see this as an immediate issue, since plenty of S1 and S2 vets filled the trenches, but did think some form of bot system might need to be implemented in the future should recreates shy away from the position.

Meanwhile, Season 3 kept on chugging. Arizona rattled on as dominant as ever, Baltimore looked in good position to repeat as conference champions, and Colorado spiraled into rebuild hell with the league's worst offense. One squad that looked to be squarely average was Yellowknife, whose primary GM, @NUCK, stepped down before the season. Bzerkap stepped up to the plate and conducted a search for a new co-GM to fill the void while the season got into motion. When @tlk742 made an off-hand comment about being Bzerkap's co, Bzerkap thought he might as well follow up on it in case tlk was seriously interested.

There was just one problem, though: tlk's player, Darren Smallwood, was rostered by the San Jose Sabercats. Bzerkap did not first approach the Sabercats GMs, @ckroyal92 and Muford, for permission to do this. Then tlk and Bzerkap had an interview for the GM candidacy, during which tlk offered up the unusual idea of GMing the Wraiths "behind the scenes" while finishing out his rookie contract with San Jose. Bzerkap followed this up by finally approaching ck for a formal trade; ck refused to trade Smallwood away. The pursuit of tlk ended there. Bzerkap's final choice for co-GM, announced on September 26, was none other than S3 draftee Archon.

Tlk mentioned the whole affair in a message in the Sabercats discord server shortly thereafter. But when some other players realized that the team GMs had been left in the dark, and that Yellowknife had committed tampering, they brought it up to HO. It took only around a day before, on the 27th, Head Office announced that Bzerkap was guilty of tampering tlk through this "Shadow GM" scheme. Both of their players were suspended for two games, and tlk was banned through Season 6 from taking any GM position. Since Yellowknife were the potential beneficiaries, they accrued the additional penalties of a $5 million cap hit in Seasons 4 and 5 and the forfeiture of their highest second round pick in the S4 Draft.

Ex Colorado Yeti quarterback Logan Noble will be addressing the league tonight in a press conference following his suspension for illegal substances. All questions will be fair game, the media can leave them below.

The Yellowknife tampering punishment garnered some attention, mainly because of the strange idea of GMing one team while playing for another, but it could not compare to the media bombshell that dropped on September 29. Noble's two-week site ban was up. And despite his earlier comments about staying away from the league for good, he returned to host a presser for which he invited both in-character and out-of-character questions. Many took the opportunity to pile on as many responses as possible that either memed the situation, asked benign queries on his future in Colorado, or, most commonly, expressed visible disgust and reprehension for daring to show his face again after the cheating.



Noble opened up his response media, "Noble Addresses Media", by flexing on HO in the strangest way possible – boasting that he had actually siphoned 86, not 73, TPE. He also clarified that his previous remarks about leaving the league were still true. Noble returned only to correct the TPE reduction error, position switch for the Yeti's sake now that Pierno had taken his job, and take the stand in presser format to air out his thoughts to the community at large. He only ended up responding to around half of the questions he had asked for, promising to answer the rest in "a bit". The questions he did answer still illuminate a lot about Noble's thought process.

Noble expressed contrition at having cheated and thrown away his involvement in the league over the bragging rights of being at the top. He even stated that he should have been banned longer. People shouldn't forgive him, at least not immediately, and he was aware that his tarnished reputation would stick to him in perpetuity, but he also expressed hope that he could rebuild trust over time and grow back into a valuable presence for the community.

On the other hand, Noble's responses also conveyed a serious sense of misaimed regret. He was sorry for trashing his reputation for "stupid online experience points" but professed that he would do it all over again in the same situation, thinking that his service to the league meant he was owed something in return. He offered no serious explanation as to why this problem of cheating kept popping up in sim league after sim league. In fact, on the question of insecurity, Noble stated that he was "very confident and secure" in real life and his actions had nothing to do with it. And when asked bluntly by @Keyg_an why he was such an egotistical asshole, Noble had this to say.

The simple and short answer is because I'm a fifteen year old BOY who's too popular in his city. I've put myself up on a pedestal due to my popularity in Saskatoon and so I carry it wherever I go. I'm the guy who I told myself I would never be and I hate it, so I'm trying to change it. I admit my wrongs, I attempt to correct my mistakes, and I'm listening to opinions while keeping myself open to critics. Honestly, the egotistical part just comes from, well, my inflated ego due to being at the top here, and being at the top in Saskatoon. Instagram creates a platform of instant gratification for me, and so it's hyper ego inflation at it's finest.

This response in particular really resonated with the NSFL community in how utterly pathetic it was. Noble tried clarifying that his answer just said that popularity got to his head, but user after user took turns clowning on justifying cheating in a sim league through being a popular music high schooler on Instagram. The thread was a veritable meme goldrush. Even @ralz9, the user behind Pierno, pledged that he would never share a locker room with Noble, to which Noble responded by saying he was "in need of an ego check." Oh, the irony. Noble did stick around for another week or two, commenting on the odd media post and doing activity checks, but he never returned to full activity. He never even position switched Logan Noble.

My response was just me saying popularity got to my head haha

And they were just saying "what popularity?" You're a high school student in a Canadian city in the middle of nowhere with a population lower than Anchorage, Alaska. Unless you're the incarnation of Wayne Gretzky, I think you should probably get that enormous ego in check.

The one person who offered any sort of comment in Noble's favor was Archon. But in a surprising development on October 2, Archon messaged Bzerkap saying that he wasn't having fun and would be leaving the site. He immediately ghosted the Yellowknife server and positions at updater and co-GM. Bzerkap chose @bovovovo as his replacement partner after a few days of searching, the second Yellowknife co-GM hired in around a week, and Archon came back to the forums on October 8 for the final time to issue a statement on his impending absence. He felt both that he was spending too much time in the league and that he was becoming "somewhat" toxic. For a user that had burned so brightly, Archon's time in the league ended rather unceremoniously.

After this turnover-laden season, the Wraiths pulled through with a 7-7 final record, a game and a half shy of making the playoffs. But they didn't miss much. Season 3's postseason was a dreadfully squalid affair, marked by the Hawks and Outlaws winning their respective conferences 34-3 and 27-7 before Arizona annihilated their competition in the Ultimus, 49-12. It was the third straight Ultimus victory for the Outlaws, and the offseason signaled no serious changes to the status quo coming any time soon. The attention of the league instead pivoted to the offensive line.

On October 23, Head Office announced a bevy of changes to the position, including adjusting starting TPE for the archetypes and, more importantly, introducing the OL bot system. Teams could now pay various amounts for different tiers of linemen to fill out their squad. Coupled with a free positional swap offered to any existing offensive lineman and a $10 million salary cap increase to accommodate the prices, it was clear that the league saw disposing of the unpopular and resource-heavy position as the first step in dealing with the drying up of recruitment. Seventeen players took the deal and made the switch that offseason. And for more than a decade of sim seasons after, the human offensive line turned from a coveted commodity to practically non-existent.

Unbeknownst to most, a different storm was brewing in the S4 DSFL Draft. During the draft on October 25, a user named dustyatters joined the league with the wide receiver create Dustin Atkins. Half an hour later he was drafted at 24th overall to the Chicago Blues despite some protests from opposing GMs that he should've been put on waivers instead. Within four hours, dustyatters had set up his update page, purchased equipment, and inked an over 5000-word media article reviewing the DSFL Draft. It wasn't much longer after that before he secured a job as an updater and went to town updating scores of other players.

Dustyatters appeared to be one of those rare wunderkind users, the type that takes to the league like a fish to water. @ItsJustBarry believed otherwise. As a banker, Barry had received a PM from none other than Noble asking whether his bank account was linked to his player or his username – in short, whether he could wipe his balance clean of the $10 million fine by recreating. Only a few hours after Barry informed Noble that his bank would remain the same, dustyatters popped into being. It was this seemingly coincidental timing that spurred Barry to message slm and relay his suspicion that Dusty was actually a Noble multi.

Together with TC, the group found that both users had matching IP addresses and that Dusty had not posted to the appropriate IP sharing thread. This, coupled both with the improbably familiarity Dusty seemed to have with how the league worked and with Noble's history, convinced the trio of their case. Slm and TC asked Barry to take what they had to @Sweetwater, a member of HO. Head Office followed up on the lead by questioning Dusty. He told them that he is actually Noble's neighbor, classmate, and Instagram follower from Saskatoon, and proceeded on the 30th to finally post in the IP thread that he shared the same IP as Noble from school.

HO were not convinced. Dusty's recruitment story changed after being questioned, and his defense as a friend/neighbor of Noble who shares computers in class read awfully similarly to those used by Noble in previous sim league multi scandals. While not unquestionable, the preponderance of evidence was overwhelming enough to convince HO of Noble's guilt and they prepared to write up a punishment the evening of October 31... until Barry, impatient for a response and following in Numbers' footsteps before him, unloaded all the evidence in a media article first. An irritated Head Office was forced to follow suit only a half hour later. Noble was permanently banned, Dusty was deleted, their IP addresses were banned, and both players were suspended for the season. For those who believed Noble's first punishment had been too lenient, this was a well-deserved comeuppance.



But unlike the first time, Noble did not take this punishment lying down. A variety of guest accounts claiming to be Noble, Dusty, or both responded to the thread in his defense. Noble repeated his assertion that he was planning on making that position change and possibly getting traded to a new team, Dusty said that he hadn't taken any actions beyond the standard examples and used the DSFL Index to write his media, and both shared periods at school, time on the volleyball team, and IP addresses for the school and their houses. They shared a photo and even offered to take a video of them talking about the league together.

OKAY this is bullshit I’m not being punished for something I didn’t do. I ave admitted to both my multi in the past and tpe stealing and I didn’t do this. IP banning me isn’t gonna stop me because I’m going to fight it over Discord or whatever I need since there is a ton of evidence against us being a multi

Users from Jiggly and RainDelay to @Waters and @AdamS found themselves agreeing. To them, even if they believed Noble should have been banned back in September, the evidence in this case was too circumstantial to justify a permanent ban. Noble readily admitted to his wrongdoing in past scandals, but not here. Other users simply lacked the space in their hearts to give him the leniency of reasonable doubt after so many repeated instances of him breaking users' trust and cheating again. Having him around in the league wasn't worth the headache.

Head Office closed the punishment thread on November 2, citing a need to review the evidence and determine if the existing ruling should stand. There were no formal updates after that point. Whatever evidence Noble and Dusty presented to HO must not have been convincing enough to change their mind, because both bans remained in place unaltered. At long last, Noble was gone forever from the league. (For now.) Perhaps this would prove to be a good omen for the NSFL's health going forward.

---

CONTINUED IN VOLUME II

[infinitempg]

wake up, new baron media dropped

[zeagle1]

Incredible work, as always!

[Nathan]

Early ISFL sounds completely fucking miserable with how many articles you’ve been able to make about the drama.

[manicmav36]

Hey, that's me!

[Gage2]

I joined the league in S36, I knew a few things about the early league but not this much and I genuinely had no idea things got this bad. I’m glad the community is in a lot better spot than it was then.

[Jaywe88]

Hey, that's me!

Omg that’s you!

[ckroyal92]

For what it's worth, I still disagree with Smallwood being suspended. Suspend the user for the shadow GM bit if you must, but the team should not have been penalized for one of its players being tampered.