Fair play the referee, the review, the ladder

How kills are counted

Every league box pushes its kill feed to the referee as it happens: killer, victim, weapon, distance and whether it was a headshot. Nothing is typed in by a person and nothing is taken from a screenshot.

• Only between kickoff and the end. Kickoff is a match restart. Events received before it belong to the warm-up and are never attributed; events after the referee ends the match are not attributed either.
• The newest match id wins during the restart grace. A restart takes a few seconds and the feed keeps arriving through it, so for the grace window the referee attributes nothing. Any event tagged with an older match id than the newest one seen is discarded; the survivors are counted once the window closes. From then on a different id means the game rolled to a new match and the league match is over.
• Sides are the roster, not the in-game team. A kill counts for the side the player is locked to. A kill on your own side is logged as a team kill and never as a kill. A suicide is a death and nothing else.
• Zone score comes from the server, not the feed. The referee reads the faction scores from the box on every poll and stores each change as a score reading; the final tick decides placings.

The SHEPHERD review

Every report goes through SHEPHERD on ae-gaming.com, the review engine built on the full AE fleet history. It does not guess; it measures a player against everyone else who has played on the same servers and states the odds.

• Headshot rate against the fleet baseline. Binomial odds of that many headshots given the weapons used, so a shotgun player and a marksman are each judged against their own weapon mix.
• Long-range headshots. Headshots beyond the range where the fleet almost never lands them, again as odds rather than a raw count.
• Same-second clusters. Kills stacked inside the same second in a way the kill feed rarely produces for a human.
• Tempo. Kill-to-kill timing across a whole session compared with the fleet distribution.
• Steam account age and bans. Public Steam data: account age, VAC and game bans, level, and the bans of the friends list.
• Co-joiners. Who arrives on a server alongside the account, session after session.

Odds are shown as they are. A player on the wrong end of one signal is not a cheater; a player on the wrong end of several at once, across many sessions, gets a human look and a decision.

The sanctions ladder

1. WarningA message from a Community Manager, logged against the account. Most cases end here.
2. Match banRemoved from the current league match. The side plays on without them and a drop-in can fill the seat.
3. Season banOut of the league for the rest of the season. The team keeps its place and its points.
4. Fleet banBanned from every AE server, league and public alike, and the ban follows the account across restarts and re-joins.

The record is public

The referee log on every match page is public: every side switch reversed, every kick, every drop-in, with the time and the account. If you want to know why something happened in a match, it is written down.

Black marks are permanent. A no-show mark stays on the account and on the team for good. Two personal marks in a season close sign-up for that season. Captains can see them on the draft board, which is the point.