11-04-2021, 09:08 AMsköldpaddor Wrote: this is a serious question and not me being sassy, but has the non-offending party in an illegal trade ever been punished for it? Is there any precedent for that at all? I don't understand why people are suddenly expecting TOR to have babysat another GM to make sure both halves of a trade were legal. Has that ever been a thing? Hasn't the onus always been on individual teams to make sure the asset they personally are moving is able to be moved?

Like sure, it would be nice for a GM to be like "hey we might want to rethink this because your half of this trade seems illegal and you could get slapped for it" but as far as I know there is no precedent for that and no grounds in the rulebook for punishing someone for not doing it. Like, as a GM I'm going to mind my own house - if I see something egregious I'm going to call it out but I don't think it's my mandated responsibility to make sure other people know how to do their jobs.

I've seen people compare this to illegally double-trading a draft pick, where the onus is on the team trading away the pick to make sure they actually have it, and not on the team receiving the pick to triple-check the status of the pick they receive. However I would argue that this case here is different. We are not talking about a draft pick with a possible hidden history, but an actual player with an actual contract. Everyone can double-check that with ease - ESPECIALLY if your argument is that you specifically paid this kind of price because of the retention. Why is the onus on a team trading away a retained player to know the rules, but not on the team that takes that player on with the explicitely stated intention of benefitting from said retention?