Cheating at Letter Tycoon and other word games

[Romain672]

Hum follow up now that I think to it.
Let's suppose they do it, and change the dictionnary:
- you as players will have a limited amount of words, and sometimes could ask for a specific word, but that will be not accepted
- and 'cheaters' will have access to less words, but will still be able to have an edge to others players.

I feel like it's not a good solution. That would just made things worst.

[twenty9oh7]

But there are indeed obvious and blatant solver users who cannot go unnoticed.
Most of them got caught soon and lost interest thereafter (eg. ElerCant, Athos83, etc.).
However currently one rotten apple is spoiling the whole barrel: surikkat.

These players are the exact reason I stopped playing Letter Tycoon

[ufm]

But there are indeed obvious and blatant solver users who cannot go unnoticed.
Most of them got caught soon and lost interest thereafter (eg. ElerCant, Athos83, etc.).
However currently one rotten apple is spoiling the whole barrel: surikkat.

These players are the exact reason I stopped playing Letter Tycoon

And now more cheaters have emerged. I can spot at least 4 in Arena mode.
Alas, recent BGA Q&A session revealed admins indeed do not care about enforcing fair play ToS.

[Marianne1]

Hello Moderators.

Is there anything that can be done about what is currently occurring in Season 6 of Letter Tycoon? https://boardgamearena.com/halloffame?g ... 3&season=6 Please review the play of the current top few players. Their sort of play makes it impossible for those who are not using cheat mechanic sites to advance. I've given them red thumbs but they continue to play against unsuspecting players who don't know about their reputation. I don't know how they are permitted to continue to play on this site. Please note that during a recent tourney on Mind Sports Olympiad, one of the "cheaters" was disqualified and had their medals removed.

The link above will show you, if you click on their names and their games played, that the words that they have submitted are obsolete and created using a word-generating application or something. I pride myself on playing fairly and without the help of technical aids. What the others are doing is not fair. One of them is currently playing in a Letter Tycoon tournament and the tournament organizer doesn't know what can be done as the player continues to unfairly participate in games. As paying members, we would like some support in this area please. Thank you.

[JackHH]

Hello Moderators.

Is there anything that can be done about what is currently occurring in Season 6 of Letter Tycoon? https://boardgamearena.com/halloffame?g ... 3&season=6 Please review the play of the current top few players. Their sort of play makes it impossible for those who are not using cheat mechanic sites to advance. I've given them red thumbs but they continue to play against unsuspecting players who don't know about their reputation. I don't know how they are permitted to continue to play on this site. Please note that during a recent tourney on Mind Sports Olympiad, one of the "cheaters" was disqualified and had their medals removed.

The link above will show you, if you click on their names and their games played, that the words that they have submitted are obsolete and created using a word-generating application or something. I pride myself on playing fairly and without the help of technical aids. What the others are doing is not fair. One of them is currently playing in a Letter Tycoon tournament and the tournament organizer doesn't know what can be done as the player continues to unfairly participate in games. As paying members, we would like some support in this area please. Thank you.

(I am not a moderator)

I'm sorry your experience of the game is being ruined by other users that you perceive to be cheating. Having experienced this myself in a similar game (hardback), I have a lot of empathy with you. While I would agree that some of the aforementioned users are 95% + likely to be cheating, there is no evidence to make this beyond all reasonable doubt (99.99%+).

From the perspective of somebody's job it is to run this site and make decisions that make sense business-wise, I can imagine them saying things along the following lines:

- The large number of games the website supports means they don't have strong systems in place to detect cheats, so there's no evidence they can look at other than our anecdotal game data.
- Why should they believe people like us over the accused?
- If they decide to act based on the word of mouth of a few disgruntled users it sets a very dangerous precedent for the rest of the site. You can imagine scenarios where small groups conspire to accuse a rival of cheating in the hope of getting them banned.
- Board game arena is a jack of all trades gaming platform. Good at many games, but perfect at non. For example take Chess - You can play chess on here, but take a quick look at the chess sub-forum on here and you will see it's rife with complaints and accusations of cheating. People who take their chess seriously and want to avoid cheats will go to a more reputable chess site to play competitive games. Unfortunately for games like Letter Tycoon and Hardback where BGA is the only place to play them, we have no option of another place to go which has high integrity cheat proof systems.
- At least there is the red thumb/reputation system which can be used to an extent to help with this. It's quite good that there is a mechanic that you can use to avoid players who you suspect of cheating.

[ufm]

With recently updated FAQ, I think something is in order...

[Een]

From the perspective of somebody's job it is to run this site and make decisions that make sense business-wise, I can imagine them saying things along the following lines:

- The large number of games the website supports means they don't have strong systems in place to detect cheats, so there's no evidence they can look at other than our anecdotal game data.
- Why should they believe people like us over the accused?
- If they decide to act based on the word of mouth of a few disgruntled users it sets a very dangerous precedent for the rest of the site. You can imagine scenarios where small groups conspire to accuse a rival of cheating in the hope of getting them banned.
- Board game arena is a jack of all trades gaming platform. Good at many games, but perfect at non. For example take Chess - You can play chess on here, but take a quick look at the chess sub-forum on here and you will see it's rife with complaints and accusations of cheating. People who take their chess seriously and want to avoid cheats will go to a more reputable chess site to play competitive games. Unfortunately for games like Letter Tycoon and Hardback where BGA is the only place to play them, we have no option of another place to go which has high integrity cheat proof systems.
- At least there is the red thumb/reputation system which can be used to an extent to help with this. It's quite good that there is a mechanic that you can use to avoid players who you suspect of cheating.

Thanks JackHH for summing up pretty well the situation.

From a practical standpoint, online there is no way to decide if the person behind the computer is a genius at the game or using a solver.

If BGA was focusing on just one game, it might be possible to implement some tools to assess a probability of cheating using an engine/solver, but this would be a huge investment and would not bring any certainty; clever engine users could use engines and still escape detection (which would be a skill in itself, but not the game skill that's expected in a classic competition).

Since BGA is a general purpose website bringing many games online, there is just no practical way to get into that. Thus, unless a better solution emerges from the community (we are always listening, even if we can't answer everything), what we can do at the moment is remove the incentive to cheat: rankings and competitive modes have been disabled for games in this situation.

[wontaketoomuchtime]

With recently updated FAQ, I think something is in order...

can you explain how they cheat in a more layman way?

I read the whole thread, it seems they spell uncommon long words, and win many games. Can't they be expert in word games? Are there engines for them to spell word for letter tycoon? I don't know the game, but I think there is more element (board game aspect) than just spelling, and there are engines on websites, that are made to help cheating in letter tycoon & hardback?

[wontaketoomuchtime]

Just find out you red thumbed me too @ufm, am I one of the cheater you mention? How I cheat?

[ufm]

Are there engines for them to spell word for letter tycoon?

Exactly.

Just find out you red thumbed me too, am I one of the cheater you mention? How I cheat?

I couldn't remember why I redthumbed you so checked the record. I played a Kabaleo game against you 3 years ago and that was all.
Dunno what happened back then, but maybe I wasn't in a good mood? Removed red thumb.