A player never plays trains - is this a multi-account cheat?

[Nekojin]

I had a game recently where a player did literally nothing but draw train cars all game. They never played any routes, never drew new destinations, and ended up with a negative score. When prodded about this, they said that they were "testing something."

I can see a couple of reasons to want to do something like this, but not with strangers in a ranked game. If someone wanted to examine card draw patterns or something like that, they could do that in a Friendly game. If they wanted to observe route choices, they could be a spectator. I wondered if they were somehow tanking the match to give one of the other players more benefit on winning, but their own ELO score is low enough that the benefit would be fairly small, and aside from throwing the match, they weren't doing anything to benefit one specific player.

Is this worth reporting? Or is weird behavior like this something that should just be thumbs-downed, and move on?

Edit: Looking at his history, it looks like he played another game where he did nothing but draw Destination cards, and ended up with below -600 in score.

[gmrsmrt]

In a two players game this doesn't make any sense.
In a multi player game it might actually support somebody else. You can have a look to it's game history and if he plays frequently
with the same player you might actually report it pointing out that the two player play frequently together and one of them is playing apparent nonsense.

[Nekojin]

Looking at the two games where he did something obviously weird, there's no other matching players besides them. There's a half-dozen other TTR games that he's played in recently that ended with one of the other players being disqualified, so there's no way to tell whether they were doing it on those games or not... but again, no other matching players besides them.

I'm at a loss here. I don't know why someone would try this.

(They've all been four-player games, BTW)

[gmrsmrt]

red thumb and move on

[euklid314]

Some players want to experiment ("can I reach -700",...) and dont care at all about their fellow players gaming experience.

Or they might be attention seeking, i.e, they try to provoke a heated discussion in chat (or here on the forum) about their moves.

Thus there are many possible explanations outside of ELO, team play, BGA meta game,... It does not seem reportable since this player seems to have done it just for (their own) fun. Red thumbing seems the right way to react...

[Kaladry]

That is odd behaviour but they may have had some odd interest to test limits of the game?

I had a game where someone kept drawing and drawing until we ran out of train cards and they were forced to play. I honestly didn't care because I was still getting the colors/routes I needed so it didn't affect my game at all. I nearly finished all my destination tickets by the time they were forced to play.