Board Game Arena

In Arena, recently I studied the game record of the top-ranked player. I found that Arena can easily be ranked first through cheating. The principle is as follows:

Register a new account. This way, you can join a turn-based game simultaneously with your main account and the new one. Since there are few players in turn-based games, there is a high probability that both your accounts will be placed at the same table and be visible. Thus, you only need to wait for the third player, and then you can ensure that your main account becomes the winner. By studying the opponents of his main account, you find that a new account has played 30 games, and 20 of them were lost to the same ID. This is evidence of cheating.

What exactly is new about this? If you have proof of a player's cheating, report it through the proper channel.

zhutu1 wrote: ↑20 February 2025, 17:16 In Arena, recently I studied the game record of the top-ranked player. I found that Arena can easily be ranked first through cheating. The principle is as follows:

Register a new account. This way, you can join a turn-based game simultaneously with your main account and the new one. Since there are few players in turn-based games, there is a high probability that both your accounts will be placed at the same table and be visible. Thus, you only need to wait for the third player, and then you can ensure that your main account becomes the winner. By studying the opponents of his main account, you find that a new account has played 30 games, and 20 of them were lost to the same ID. This is evidence of cheating.

You might be talking about a player that recently lost 280 Elo points (down to 100 Elo without playing a game) which could only have happened because of moderation. Karma stayed at a perfect 100, though, and also the exzellent AES (Arena score) remained untouched. Thus they seem to have been caught cheating outside Arena. If you have proof or convincingly strong evidence of cheating within Arena please report it to the moderators (and definitely not here on the forum) - they might be interested!

euklid314 wrote: ↑20 February 2025, 21:08

zhutu1 wrote: ↑20 February 2025, 17:16 In Arena, recently I studied the game record of the top-ranked player. I found that Arena can easily be ranked first through cheating. The principle is as follows:

Register a new account. This way, you can join a turn-based game simultaneously with your main account and the new one. Since there are few players in turn-based games, there is a high probability that both your accounts will be placed at the same table and be visible. Thus, you only need to wait for the third player, and then you can ensure that your main account becomes the winner. By studying the opponents of his main account, you find that a new account has played 30 games, and 20 of them were lost to the same ID. This is evidence of cheating.

You might be talking about a player that recently lost 280 Elo points (down to 100 Elo without playing a game) which could only have happened because of moderation. Karma stayed at a perfect 100, though, and also the exzellent AES (Arena score) remained untouched. Thus they seem to have been caught cheating outside Arena. If you have proof or convincingly strong evidence of cheating within Arena please report it to the moderators (and definitely not here on the forum) - they might be interested!

karma has not been untouched, (you can see the -30 in the reputation section), but they just launched many many chess games in a row and instantly resigned.. And I don't think they really cared about the elo, only the arena ranking which was not changed. So I guess they got happy with the sanction which wasn't really one

It's absolutely outrageous that the player has not been banned, if this does not get resolved, I will certainly not be renewing my membership.
I would expect BGA to want their ranking to be clean and do what's necessary, to ensure that it is...

I’d like to offer a counterpoint. This Sunday, I spent the entire day trying to join turn-based games. Each time, it took a while to find a match, and when a game finally started, it was with the same player. That’s not what I’m looking for—I want variety—but the reality is that there simply aren’t enough premium players starting turn-based games.

It’s entirely possible that some people are exploiting the system for their benefit, but we shouldn’t assume that every player who primarily plays turn-based games and frequently faces the same opponents is cheating. Under the reasoning in this thread, any player who wins too often must be cheating, which feels more like a witch hunt than a fair assessment.

I understand the concern, but I think we need to be careful before jumping to conclusions

We are talking about a very specific Player here though