Board Game Arena

Fiora_Laurent wrote: ↑26 December 2020, 11:37

CaKtus wrote: ↑25 December 2020, 17:41 When you start with zero elo and high skill, you will inflict a few bad beats to some unlucky players but your ranking will improve very fast (all the more you have a K factor of 60) and it will balance fast. Doing it with 5 accounts is obviously cheating.

In your opinion:
If somebody did it once, it is not cheating.
But if somebody did the same thing multiple times , it is obviously cheating.

Yes I know their difference.
For me, I have to beat some unlucky players once if I want to join BGA. But the extra 4 times are not necessary except for some strange reasons just like mine.

But what can I do？Only create one account?
Yes it can solve any problem indeed. But why can't I create more accounts?
First of all, the behavior of "create multiple accounts" is not prohibited on BGA, So I did it. It is the authority that BGA gives me.
Then the behavior of "raise ELO of any accounts you have" is also not prohibited on BGA.
Since I already have multiple accounts, naturally I also want to do it. It is also the authority that BGA gives me.
But the second behavior is called "cheating" by you. I think I am so innocent, Why I did nothing illegal with the rules but still be called "a cheater"?
I think you should blame BGA who estabished the rules but not me.

Legal page (https://boardgamearena.com/legal): "The Player agrees to hold only one account on BGA, unless otherwise approved by BGA. We reserve the right to terminate any multiple accounts attributable to the same person."

This is prohibiting having extra simultaneous accounts, even 1, for any reason.

The problem is solved.

As far as I can tell the thing you did wrong was not to ask permission to have all those accounts. But in your defence, the rules on this could be a lot clearer.

You also used only the positive vague sources, in your favour. You didn't even look in the legal page before coming out as so offended.
Yes, you should have definitely asked BGA before coming up with those 4 accounts.
Also... i said the rules are vague. You say that you are 100% innocent, which you are not.

Giordano Bruno 1974 wrote: ↑26 December 2020, 23:53

Ze Monstah wrote: ↑27 December 2020, 01:05

https://boardgamearena.com/report?id=36522&player=89184187 wrote:Dec 12th 2020 21:55 • • Give a simple warning (no penalty):
Potential cheating using multiple account - Investigation in progress

However, according to BGA TOS :extract "some players are using multiple accounts, but these accounts are not playing together (which is acceptable)"

Should these 4 players be the same, they are not playing together in the games they engage. In other words, it wouldbe acceptable.

Yes... As I already said, in my opinion, the various sources on the site, regarding the MULTIPLE ACCOUNTS, are vague, with the information (again, in my opinion), being contradictory: Legal Page versus The Others.

I missed out on the top 5 ELO badge in a game because of a combination of players doing multiple accounts for boosting and others parking their multiple accounts at the top. It‘s quite annoying and I wish BGA did something about the latter.

You have to remember this is a game site meant to be for fun and relies on having a good community. If the element of fun is to ruin it for others, you need to look at yourself and think a little bit if there is something wrong. Also, it‘s just an online game and the badges are virtual, so who cares. Get over it. Good for you for having 5x the same meaningless accolade, and if you think you‘re that good at the game, why can‘t you get #1?

Actually it looks like they hve recently removed this account from the leaderboard https://boardgamearena.com/player?id=10 ... n=prestige, with this ELO this account should currently be 3rd in Carcassonne. Not sure what happened there and why the OP‘s accounts are still there, if there seems to be this precedent of not showing up in the rankings for multiple accounts.

I also agree this is in poor taste, and I wish BGA had slightly stricter penalties around multi-accounting, even if those accounts aren't ever playing each other.

I think this gets particularly concerning in arena mode. While I don't think anyone is actually doing this, I do think it would be possible to use multiple accounts to help one reach the top of a leaderboard without ever playing yourself, at least for multiplayer games. The "scam" would be fairly simple. I would use my main account in Terra Mystica where I'm a very strong player to get near the top of the learderboard and compete. I would then have an alt account where I don't care about my ranking, and would attempt to get in to games against the other players near the top of the leaderboard by queueing at the same time as them, etc. I then could spend my entire game attempting to cause the highly ranked player to lose by digging their hexes, etc, etc. Even if I lose the game, if I can force the highly rated player to take a 3rd place, they'll lose a good amount of ranking, making it easier for my main account to achieve a high enough ranking to win the arena season.

This is admittedly not a huge exploit, as it would still require a good amount of skill to pull off as well as a lot of time. But it could be done. Even if players don't plan to do this, I think having multiple accounts competing in arena can lead to ethical oddities about how to play some of these games since you could be tempted to engage in dubious behavior like this. As such I'd prefer BGA not allow players to compete with multiple accounts in a single arena season.

I feel this case is similar--while the rules are vague and I don't think what this person is doing is currently officially against the rules, I think it should be. Trying to compete in the rankings with multiple accounts for the same game leads to lame things going on that doesn't improve the experience on the site for players.

Ranior wrote: ↑27 December 2020, 14:34 While I don't think anyone is actually doing this...

It has and still is being done.