Board Game Arena

Hi! Starting a new thread because the Important Forum Moderation Notice thread https://boardgamearena.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=41797 is locked.

If you have enough evidence that players are cheating, the proper way to address this is to create a Moderation Report against them with significant evidence. (a single table or questionable move is not enough)

What counts as significant evidence? I am really curious what would be considered sufficient by BGA mods. Can you give some examples for significant evidence please?

This is a silly question. Firstly, you are asking other players, not the mods, by posting on the forums. Secondly, it means what it says. If you have spent any time on the forums you know players routinely accuse others of 'cheating' 'rigging the dice' and 'using an AI' falsely based on ludicrously flimsy evidence. All that statement is doing is telling those sorts of people not to waste the mods time.

From what I have gathered from past discussions, it needs to be a pretty obvious pattern over many games and any accusation that boils down to "the dice/card randomizer is not random" will not be investigated.
As far as I know, there is no official statement about the kinds of cheating that have been moderated in the past, but the most frequent form of cheating must be king-making by a big margin since basically everything else is technically not possible (unless it's a bug, in which case a bug report makes more sense). So for king-making you need evidence (screenshots, timestamps) of the player losing on purpose to the same player in several matches in a way that cannot be explained by incompetence (i.e. skipping turns instead of just playing bad moves).

RobertBr wrote: ↑17 March 2025, 12:39 This is a silly question. Firstly, you are asking other players, not the mods, by posting on the forums.

I am asking the admins. I see nothing that would keep them from answering.

RobertBr wrote: ↑17 March 2025, 12:39 Secondly, it means what it says. If you have spent any time on the forums you know players routinely accuse others of 'cheating' 'rigging the dice' and 'using an AI' falsely based on ludicrously flimsy evidence. All that statement is doing is telling those sorts of people not to waste the mods time.

I get that the main purpose is to stop wasting the mods time with cases with practically zero evidence, but if they maintain the 'report cheating' feature, there has to be some scenarios where it's justified, right? Well, what are those?

Hervor wrote: ↑17 March 2025, 13:31 As far as I know, there is no official statement about the kinds of cheating that have been moderated in the past, but the most frequent form of cheating must be king-making by a big margin since basically everything else is technically not possible

There are a lot of other behaviours that are forbidden apart from king-making. For example, playing with two accounts in the same competitive setting (ELO rankings, Arena, tournaments). This includes not just directly playing against against a player's own account to gain rating, but for any form of advantage. Two examples would be the following:
- sandbagging: creating a new account and playing against other rivals to decrease their rating;
- climbing the rankings with multiple accounts and whenever one reaches a high rank, switch to another one.
I am sure there are other forms of cheating, but these came to mind. What would count as significane evidence for either of the above?

If they were publish what is sufficient evidence, cheaters would immediately know how to avoid it.

Just one example of my reports that led to moderation - thus was judged as sufficient evidence.

Two players that played 3-player Catan games and played almost exclusively as a team. I gave at least 10 games where this was very obvious and I listed all the dubious moves that I found.
These players traded in a way that one player would have the ressources for a settlement then in a later turn the other could build a city. In the approx. 30 games I looked at
they never (!) ever traded with the 3rd player. They put the robber only onto themselves when the games were already decided. Since one of the two accounts was the main account, the second account sometimes artificially avoided to get the 10th victory point.

Also the initial settlements where highly questionable. They tried to block in the 3rd player completely. And they did not care if the one player had only wood and ore, and the other the other ressources - because they knew they could share their ressources at any time.

Of 30 games the team finished approx. 27 in 1st and 2nd position. My report was 2 A4 pages of questionable moves (with game number and move number).

euklid314 wrote: ↑17 March 2025, 18:19 Just one example of my reports that led to moderation - thus was judged as sufficient evidence.

Two players that played 3-player Catan games and played almost exclusively as a team. I gave at least 10 games where this was very obvious and I listed all the dubious moves that I found.
These players traded in a way that one player would have the ressources for a settlement then in a later turn the other could build a city. In the approx. 30 games I looked at
they never (!) ever traded with the 3rd player. They put the robber only onto themselves when the games were already decided. Since one of the two accounts was the main account, the second account sometimes artificially avoided to get the 10th victory point.

Also the initial settlements where highly questionable. They tried to block in the 3rd player completely. And they did not care if the one player had only wood and ore, and the other the other ressources - because they knew they could share their ressources at any time.

Of 30 games the team finished approx. 27 in 1st and 2nd position. My report was 2 A4 pages of questionable moves (with game number and move number).

Wow that's some pretty obvious cheating. good job documenting all that and reporting it. Catan is mainstream and easy to understand cheating so that's very obvious.

euklid314 wrote: ↑17 March 2025, 18:19 Just one example of my reports that led to moderation - thus was judged as sufficient evidence.

Two players that played 3-player Catan games and played almost exclusively as a team. I gave at least 10 games where this was very obvious and I listed all the dubious moves that I found.
These players traded in a way that one player would have the ressources for a settlement then in a later turn the other could build a city. In the approx. 30 games I looked at
they never (!) ever traded with the 3rd player. They put the robber only onto themselves when the games were already decided. Since one of the two accounts was the main account, the second account sometimes artificially avoided to get the 10th victory point.

Also the initial settlements where highly questionable. They tried to block in the 3rd player completely. And they did not care if the one player had only wood and ore, and the other the other ressources - because they knew they could share their ressources at any time.

Of 30 games the team finished approx. 27 in 1st and 2nd position. My report was 2 A4 pages of questionable moves (with game number and move number).

What was the moderation?

h_illes wrote: ↑17 March 2025, 14:04 There are a lot of other behaviours that are forbidden apart from king-making. For example, playing with two accounts in the same competitive setting (ELO rankings, Arena, tournaments). This includes not just directly playing against against a player's own account to gain rating, but for any form of advantage. Two examples would be the following:
- sandbagging: creating a new account and playing against other rivals to decrease their rating;
- climbing the rankings with multiple accounts and whenever one reaches a high rank, switch to another one.
I am sure there are other forms of cheating, but these came to mind. What would count as significane evidence for either of the above?

Creating multiple accounts is against the rules, but probably very difficult to prove if the player doesn't use two or more accounts in the same game, since there is basically no observable difference between a high level player just deciding to stop playing and a different person (that happens to be good at the game) starting to climb the ranks/competing against different high level players and a high level player stopping to use their main account and starting a new one. I guess the only way to actually prove this is by comparing the IP and even if you could do that, there are VPNs for the cheater to use to avoid this pitfall.
Also, I can easily construct scenarios where this behaviour from two accounts with the same IP is totally legitimate. Say that there are several members of that household that play this particular game IRL a lot so are all good at the game, one of them just joined BGA recently and the original BGA user is just busy at the moment and can't play for a couple of weeks.

If I suspected someone of engaging in these behaviours I would try to prove that the player in question is doing this in several games. If the second account plays the exact same games as the primary account and begins playing right after the (suspected) main account reached the top or is never playing against the main account, that is an observable pattern, which at least (in my opinion) shouldn't get you in trouble for reporting without significant evidence. The same pattern over several Arena seasons might work too.