How to report suspected malpractice/cheating

[le Killerchimp]

Hi all,

As the title says, how do I report this? The contact at bottom of the page just seems to have FAQs.

[Ranior]

You can go to a player's profile and on their profile in the upper right should be a button for "report this player". One of the options in the menu will be for cheating, you can follow through to submit a report that way.

Beware that you should be very confident about submitting a report for cheating, bothering the mods with spurious reports can get you punished.

[le Killerchimp]

Thank you.

[Silene]

You can go to a player's profile and on their profile in the upper right should be a button for "report this player". One of the options in the menu will be for cheating, you can follow through to submit a report that way.

Actually no there isn't. Have you tried that? For cheating, you can only choose "using multiple accounts for boosting elo" and "helping another player to win the game" - while the latter can't be reported, you only get a note to give a red thumb.
While "boosting elo using multiple accounts" is one way of cheating, you cannot report any other way of cheating. Maybe those reports would be too difficult to handle, so it's not possible to make them in the first place.

[Ranior]

You can just use the closest thing and then submit the report anyhow. It's quite trivial and easy to do so and as long as you're submitting good information you'll be fine.

Again you want to be extra careful though--from hanging around here long enough and seeing some players complaints about the luck in Can't Stop, or kingmaking moves in some games....the mods could get a lot of false reports easily if these players would submit things claiming their opponents were cheating.

Much of the reason I don't think there is a default form for other forms of cheating is precisely because it is so exceeding rare compared to those who would be crying foul over things. Honestly outside of the two forms of cheating you listed, I'm not even sure what else needs to be covered. (And the kingmaking form of cheating is really only an issue for multi-accounters, otherwise in multiplayer games kingmaking is just part of the legal options to players. I know BGA's terms of service have some stipulations about it, but kingmaking is really tough to identify where it gets egregious vs where it is just part of playing)

[Silene]

Honestly outside of the two forms of cheating you listed, I'm not even sure what else needs to be covered.

The 2 forms I can think of are a) exploiting a bug systematically, b) sharing secret information in a team game (see tichu)

I totally agree with the problems you see about too many false reports. But nevertheless I think these cases should be covored in the report-system. I think it would be helpful, to also cover things like "this player must be cheating because he's too lucky"-complaints as well, to lead it to a response that explains about fair RNG and confirmation bias and giving them the information that there is absolutely no use in filling a report for this. This could prevent them from filling out a report with the "next best thing" as you are proposing what should be done.

If you cover a) and b), you can better prompt for the relevant information such as collection of table numbers where it happened and asking for specific details on the tables that proves the cheating. Without that specific prompt for information, you'd leave the option open for people to just fill in something unspecific that is hard to check.