CATAN CHEATERS

[lenaleme]

I haven't noticed kingmaking so far. Maybe there is but i wouldn't care less.

I my self prefer to block with the robber the players who have the most points or they are competing with me on the same thing, reaching a location or having the goal of the longest route and so on. Another reason would be because i want a specific material that i thing someone would have. There are lot of strategical reasons for a decision like that, that has to do with me bringing a good score or landing in a better position on, maybe second instead of third. I was wrongly accused on the chat for kingmaking and that was very unpleasant. I have no idea who the person I was supposed to be helping was and even if she/he was a friend i would play the same way. I don't want to play with people like that, the whole big deal and complaining in the chat was very unpleasant and my goal at the end was just for the game to be over. That happened in a game not the arena with a team of 4.

I play to have fun most of all and a good atmosphere is the most important to me.

[MsEnidster]

I agree with previous: "I believe you are underplaying how rampant this problem is. I have only played the game 22 times on this website, and have encountered cheaters for about a third of those games. And I have personally witnessed even more cheaters as a spectator. So yes, at least from my own point of view, it is most definitely a huge issue on BGA. And this type of burden should not be placed on the players for them to resolve on their own. Would it not be better if BGA decided to create harsher penalties for cheating? And let's be frank here, the type of cheating we are taking about is not subtle. It is so in your face and blatantly obvious, it is like adding salt to the wound.

Considering that we are probably talking about hundreds of cheaters (in games of more than 3000 at a time), blocking them one at a time is not an efficient way to deal with the problem. Adding to that, whenever you red thumb a cheater, they are still open to doing this to other players. There is actually nothing in place currently to penalize them for this type of behavior. Until harsher penalties are introduced to deal with this type of problem, I can only see it getting worse in the future."


Also using a thumbs down is not the answer because you can only "thumbs down" once for every four or five thumbs ups you give. So you can't even elminate both players playing as a team.

[Bamb0ozles]

Only active for three weeks, and have encountered my first game against kingmaking players. One is * and *.

* robbed me as much as possible throughout the whole game. One time, he actually placed the robber on my hay tile even though I don't have any resources. It is interesting to note that * was so ahead of us in the game.

2nd, even though with a good source of ore and hay, he didn't bother to upgrade to cities. This is because he wanted to help the other player in removing knights in the dev cards, so the other player would get victory points card.

3rd, it was clear that he didn't have any strategy to win. Didn't expand as much as possible, didn't capitalize on cities too.

*moderator edit: please do not use the Forums to call out players. If you have evidence of cheating, you should report them using the proper channels.

[Jay]

I played a lot here last year and did not encounter what i considered to be cheaters. I did notice that there are always furious arguments about who should be robbing who, with suggestions that the person who made the wrong choice is either a cheater or an *.

The way I see it, there's a lot of ways to decide who to screw over when you are making a choice to help yourself: (robber is the best of many examples)

After considering which play helps your own position, some possible criteria for who you screw over are:

• The player with the best chance to win (everyone's natural instinct, leads to long games. Justified if you only care about finishing first, not about ELO)

• The player with the most points (idiot's version of 'who has the best chance to win)

• The player who is competing with you for land/road/army

• The player that is closest to you in rank/potential finish (good for ELO, but prepare to be yelled at)

If you are ruthless, you can also consider the player struggling the most
as an objectively legit target. This is because robbing from someone who has few resources or is struggling to find, say, an early brick to settle can have huge impact on their chance to win, whereas robbing from anyone else is no more than a nuisance. Everyone is your opponent so it can be justified to get bang for the buck by crippling one and turning a 4 player game into a 3 player game. Again, prepare to be yelled at and accused of every crime if you do this. (I ONLY do this to players i know that agree with me this is fair, but you do you)

More strategically debatable criteria that people still use:

• Targeting the person who complains the most or is an *

• Targeting the person who last robbed you

• Targeting the person who is taking the longest turns

• Targeting the person who someone else just announced is clearly the biggest threat for <reasons>

And the very last criteria would be:

• Targeting the person you don't know to help the person you do know with no benefit to yourself.

That's kingmaking and cheating, everything else is just part of a social/strategic table talking game. The way OP describes his game does sound like cheating, but I've never encountered that.

To rely on BGA to police cheating would require a pretty high standard of proof. I queue with friends family and we don't collude or casually * random opponents, but I'm sure we've robbed them on some occasions for reasons other than the trivial "duh, he's in the lead". I don't see an easy way for an admin to figure out whose a cheat.

My advice to avoid this type of play would be:

• Never whine in game for any reason, even if you are really mad

• Never leave for any reason, even if you are really mad.

• Finish your turns as quickly as you can.

• Get good. (You don't need to be that good)

• Don't thumbs down anyone unless they d/c or blatantly cheat in a way that couldn't be anything else.

• Queue with filters that will weed out people who haven't done the above

Enjoy!

*moderator edit: please stick to family-friendly language

[zc1mk2]

there is also sometimes the cases of;
- playing the robber on a person who is most likely to have a resource you need
- not playing the robber on someone who has a handful of Dev cards and will most likely move it straight back to you

[Sbo02]

Here is a good example:

*

I think it's pretty rare, but this is a very clear case. Especially if you look at the game logs.

*moderator edit: please do not use the Forums to call out players or specific matches. If you have evidence of cheating, you should report them using the proper channels.

[Naryst]

I just ended a Catan game where two people were cheating/kingmaking. This makes the game a complete waste of time for the other players. I have seen numerous posts from others making the exact same complaint. Until BGA steps in and does something, this game is not even worth anybody's time. There are just way too many cheaters who are playing as a team. As far as I'm concerned, Catan is COMPLETELY UNPLAYBABLE ON BGA.

Please BGA, if you care enough about having Catan on your website, then please make the necessary changes to discourage this type of behavior. I understand all games can have cheaters, but for whatever reason Catan games are FILLED WITH THEM. There needs to be harsher penatlies for those who play as a team. Otherwise, the problem will never be rectified. Simply reporting them after the game is not enough to deter this kind of behavior.

BGA has strict rules to not name the players, so I will not do so. However, if you look at the timestamp of this message, and match it up with my game history, you can easily find the game I am talking about. And if you do a search on the players' profiles, you can see that they have a history of playing together.

I am posting this message to get BGA's attention that something needs to be done about this problem.

* and * from Germany are a team.

*moderator edit: please do not use the Forums to call out players. If you have evidence of cheating, you should report them using the proper channels.

[Traveler57]

I have played a lot of games on this site and have never engaged in Kingmaking. I always play to win myself as I 'm sure everyone else does and never play with anyone else as a team. I just won a game and my Reputation dropped from 100% to 60% afterward. I thought it was a friendly game with mature people. It is so frustrating to get reported for this and you have no way of defending yourself. It seems like people that lose a game have the option of being bitter and falsely accusing someone of Kingmaking, thus ruining someone's reputation. I don't really know how BGA could fix this. I would guess the moderators don't really have the time to sit down and review a game to see what actually happened.

[MamaLlama5712]

I had Tboard spectating on one of our games just the other day and thought it was odd as I don't recall ever playing them. After reading these posts they must think we're cheaters though LOL!

I play all the time with my best friend and daughter-in-law, we love play arena and competing against each other when we can (count down timer to get in at the same time--it works about half the time). I watch a lot of my daughter's games and she's a good player as she usually kicks my tail in it. When we manage to get into a game together and play against another person why is that cheating? I'm sure as heck not going to let my daughter win, because I love it when I can beat her at the game! I'm playing the game to win for myself, I favor no one.

So my point is sometimes people will play together a lot because yeah, they do know each other, but that doesn't just automatically equal cheating. Use the thumbs down so you're not matched with those people. I've had to thumbs down a TON of people but I find "king making" or "team play" to be a rare issue. I mostly see people making their own rules about the robber and complaining...while in arena of all places. Usually that person will then intentionally run down the clock. Such as life I guess. I have bigger problems in life to solve so I give them a thumbs down move on.

Peace!

[MakHop]

I've taken the bad karma slap on a couple of occasions and left a game because it was so obvious that two people were working together to increase one of their overall board game arena score. I've also down thumbed several players. More than cheaters, I think board game arena is set to favor certain players. I think their alga rhythms on dice rolls is skewed somehow - I can't explain why, but it seems the higher boa score you have, the dice seem to naturally fall where those players place their settlements/cities. I'm going to conduct an experiment and try to place my initial settlement on the opposite side of the same tiles that a higher ranked player puts theirs and watch the dice rolls. Am I just crazy or does anyone else notice this? If all three or four players are around 100 on their overall score, the dice seem more fair. If anyone is playing with a score of upper 100s or 200s, the dice fall more frequently where they play their settlements/cities. Anyway... maybe - maybe not. But I'm going to watch it more closely for a while to see.