Marianne1 wrote: ↑13 September 2021, 02:43
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.