Honest discussion about engine use (long post)

[rspn]

Firstly, I definitely don't think one needs to be a 'strong master' to have a rating of 500+ on this site. I have never used an engine for a game here, and have an Elo of 509 here vs a rating of only 1700-1800 on chess.com, so that inference is not quite true. I think the Elo system on this site is not yet stable enough to give an accurate impression of one's skill level purely from the ratings.

Regarding the cheating point, I agree with Ty-Guy6 and think the default has to be no using of engines / software for a game. I would imagine that as a fairly standard assumption, and cannot really imagine why it would be fun just copy-pasting moves from an engine into a game here (what is the point?). Of course, if you personally enjoy it and are upfront about it, then that should not be a problem either.

Cheers!

[postmans]

I'm not that good in chess, but rather in draughts (checkers) where I've ran into engine players on a few occasions (not always easy to spot, but certain on a few).

I was fully under the impression that using engines (or asking other players for advice while in game, https://boardgamearena.com/faq?anchor=f ... sofconduct, "Communicate with another player about the game privately" but that is multi-interpretable) is not allowed on BGA, but I might be wrong on that one.

Personally I feel that you should at least announce it before when using an engine. The game has an option for setting a description, there you could state that you want to play a centaur/engine game. Then both players on the table agree with the situation. I do like that you are open about it already.

The other thing I have some doubts on is how it affects the overall ELO leaderboard or Arena season. There is some players here competing for that (with even an overall XP leaderboard being shown in the welcome page. If we allow engine use players without engine have no chance to compete for those leaderboards. I have also been playing some time for the checkers leaderboard, under the assumption that this is supposed to be done without engines (and as such not using them, except for after game finish to learn from my games). I understand that if in chess there is wide-spread use it doesn't help to have this so much as a rule, since there will always be a subset ignoring it or hiding it. And with the slower timesettings BGA will never be able to be truly engine free (you need some 2m+2s like times for that).