Cheating at Letter Tycoon and other word games

[dschingis27]

If it is so easy to become a guru, then the rules for becoming a guru need to be improved.

I also do not think that a majority of gurus need to get involved. BGA could restrict cheat reporting to Arena games and make it possible only for Premium players (this will make false accusations from multiple accounts a lot harder) to limit the number of cheat reports coming in. Then it could be possible to have enough people volunteering for cheat policing in each game (at least for the mid- to high-popular games). This can still be a minority of gurus. And if cheaters are gurus themselves, it should usually become obvious to the other gurus after a while.

Maybe this is not the optimal solution. But it is something that could be applied to all games and would certainly improve the current situation of effectively no cheat policing.

I also want to point out that having a dedicated group of volunteer experts caring for the integrity of a competition is the usual way how niche competitions are done. Take speedrunning for instance. They are making use of technical tools but still there need to be dedicated experts of the games doing the job. Maybe BGA should look at or contact speedrunning communities and see how they manage their leaderboards. I'd say there is something to be learned and there are quite some similaritiers between competetive speedruning and competetive online boardgaming:
** There is usually only a small but dedicated group of people actively competing each other.
** There are very popular games and categories and very niche ones.
** There is not really money to be earned, people participate for fun and honor.
** It is an ever-growing field of games and growing popularity.

If speedrunning communities can largely manage to keep their competition clean, why shouldn't boardgaming communities also be able to?

[N_Faker]

Multiple reports for cheating is a non-issue. The vast majority are useless anyway.

[ufm]

https://mcspeedrun.com/dream.pdf

I don't expect this level of expertise on Guru system, honestly.
To reach this kind of status BGA has to invite real experts of the scene, like FIDE masters or WESPA top players.

In fact, I hear majority of kingmaking reports from BGA are bogus.
Even community-driven kingmaking detection which doesn't need any deep knowledge about the game is faulty, so...

[N_Faker]

https://mcspeedrun.com/dream.pdf

Is that a report on the validity of a minecraft speedrun?

In fact, I hear majority of kingmaking reports from BGA are bogus.

They weren't bogus. They by and large only pertained to single games or actions which is, by far, too little to establish guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

[dschingis27]

https://mcspeedrun.com/dream.pdf

I don't expect this level of expertise on Guru system, honestly.

This level of expertise would not be necessary. And the case you linked is absoulutely not a usual case of how cheating in speedrunning is investigated. It's an absolute edge case where the moderators put in extreme scrutiny because the runner in question is a very famous youtuber and they wanted to be very sure to prove the case. Most cheating in speedrunning is about spliced runs or taking unusual routes or tricks, modding the game on your local machine, etc. Often this can be detected easily by experts. Same is true for boardgame cheaters imho and my idea is not that gurus need to prove their decision each time, but that they should simply decide and if enough experts agree in their decision, I'll take it as fact that someone cheated.

My idea is that there need to be a trusted, competent group of people acting in good faith for each game and I believe that there is such a group for most games.

[ufm]

In fact, I hear majority of kingmaking reports from BGA are bogus.

They weren't bogus. They by and large only pertained to single games or actions which is, by far, too little to establish guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

Well, so that means they are bogus.

This level of expertise would not be necessary. And the case you linked is absoulutely not a usual case of how cheating in speedrunning is investigated. It's an absolute edge case where the moderators put in extreme scrutiny because the runner in question is a very famous youtuber and they wanted to be very sure to prove the case. Most cheating in speedrunning is about spliced runs or taking unusual routes or tricks, modding the game on your local machine, etc. Often this can be detected easily by experts. Same is true for boardgame cheaters imho and my idea is not that gurus need to prove their decision each time, but that they should simply decide and if enough experts agree in their decision, I'll take it as fact that someone cheated.

My idea is that there need to be a trusted, competent group of people acting in good faith for each game and I believe that there is such a group for most games.

I don't know, there may be dedicated players on BGA to go to great lengths, but maybe not.
Searching through the game records to determine whether a player is cheater or not is very exhausting and time-consuming.
Speedrun community is obviously much larger than BGA player pool of a specific game and there will be more players willing to commit, you know.

[N_Faker]

In fact, I hear majority of kingmaking reports from BGA are bogus.

They weren't bogus. They by and large only pertained to single games or actions which is, by far, too little to establish guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

Well, so that means they are bogus.

Do you not know what bogus means?

[ufm]

They weren't bogus. They by and large only pertained to single games or actions which is, by far, too little to establish guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

Well, so that means they are bogus.

Do you not know what bogus means?

Not genuine? I'll change the wording as 'insufficient evidence' then.
For me, reporting someone as a kingmaker only for a single action or game seems not so plausible in general.

[N_Faker]

Well, so that means they are bogus.

Do you not know what bogus means?

Not genuine? I'll change the wording as 'not enough evidence' then.
For me, reporting someone as a kingmaker only for a single action or game seems not so plausible in general.

Not genuine/false, yes.
Not with how the BGA report system is set up, no. If BGA had report filing options for putting them on hold for not having enough evidence it may have been useful. Though it may have generated more work than it would be worth.
I can somewhat recall an instance in which scattered kingmaking reports were useful, someone was deliberately conceding to lower ELO users just to then win against higher ELO users to manipulate ELO with their multi account to seemingly maintain their rank with their main account.

[ufm]

Do you not know what bogus means?

Not genuine? I'll change the wording as 'not enough evidence' then.
For me, reporting someone as a kingmaker only for a single action or game seems not so plausible in general.

Not genuine/false, yes.
Not with how the BGA report system is set up, no. If BGA had report filing options for putting them on hold for not having enough evidence it may have been useful. Though it may have generated more work than it would be worth.
I can somewhat recall an instance in which scattered kingmaking reports were useful, someone was deliberately conceding to lower ELO users just to then win against higher ELO users to manipulate ELO with their multi account to seemingly maintain their rank with their main account.

Oh, right, completely forgot that case. I stand corrected.