It is an odd decision, but I don't see it entirely for the reasons outlayed before. Well, kinda, as it's not like there's a lot of parts to this lol. I'm not interested in the victim portrayal so will try to not be very angry, although honestly at this point an incel reddit could claim our team name for copyright infringement and I'd be like yeah this is that year.
I'm a TL, so I am very used to throwing the word precedent around on smogon to win my arguments in tiering, and it works probably more than it should. But tiering's use of precedent is largely locked to a fundamental idea: the banning of pokemons over anything else except under very unusual circumstances that need to be community approved first. It's easy to understand if you are familiar with smogon procedures, and removing it has a real chance of breaking the actual system. That's fine, it needs to be preserved. But precedent in the case of TDs refers to a various set of circumstances that they and we can act on if they are deemed to be against the idea of making community tours a good and competitive environment. One of the arguments heard in PMs and in this thread here is that it would create a precedent... But even so, which one? Timing out from full, with two disconnections from the server in a turn, allows a recreate? If so, very specific ruling, that can easily be adjusted after. And if there's more issues with timer, nothing stops us from reworking the approach. One of the TDs in PMs talked with Kink about how if the recreate succeeded, the TD team would have stressed that this isn't creating a precedent. Now they did use the caveat that this wasn't the official position, which, fair enough... but once it was decided by someone qualified to play the game, why not just go with that and allow the game? The circumstances surrounding it, with an apparent bug and the screw up that happened after, are already unusual, the chances of it happening multiple times in that fashion aren't that high, otherwise we'd be here all week with games recreated with people on opposite teams, but it doesn't happen.
And this is where I agree with Kink and others, this ruling isn't even about the precedent. It reinforces first the decision of the host team to play the game, and then is about how the recreate was mishandled. It doesn't even reject the initial call to recreate the game, it just says that because of the mishandling, it was no longer possible to play that specific game. Merritt then says: " At this point, alternative options such as forcing a rematch with different teams require a higher threshold of proof that the simulator was glitching." Well, no, not really, the alternative options only required the proof that the recreate was no longer possible because it was screwed up, which we have. What is said in the decision doesn't officially remove the original call, but it creates a barrier that is completely on us to prove, a full day after the game, which wasn't there at all before this was messed with. And I am really, really, really not trying to be mean here, because mistakes happen and boy do I make some here too, but I don't see how those aren't the facts to get from this. I understand attempting to stick to the original call if it was made by the host team since we need to trust the host team to make decisions for themselves, especially if a TD is on it to give it the proper smogon authority. However, reversing it still has the same result here, and it being reversed because of a following fuckup is stunning to me, and stunning that if you want to care about precedents that much, this doesn't worry more people.