Request for a Minimum Account Age setting in Arena Tournaments

Hello there!

I would like to require a person has had their lichess account for over a certain amount of time in order to be eligible to join an arena tournament. I see there are options for number of rated games played, but nothing for account age.

The reasoning for this is that I have had some players in the arenas I host take advantage of cheat engines and then are summarily banned after the tournament. They then create new accounts and repeat the same thing. It would be nice to pre-emptively block this somehow if possible.

Thank you.

Indeed i've seen GM Hansen from Twitch channel raise that concern, I believe, in Chess.com, but they still don't seem to have done anything about that. Lichess could be the pioneer in that field.

Hey @Quaglon

Nice suggestion.

I let you know how I handled the same problem: I created a lichess team and I create the arenas restricted to that team. That way I can control who can enter the arenas by manually deciding who I accept on the team (for example I don't accept requests to join from fresh accounts). It's only slightly cumbersome as it's manual, but it's also flexible as I might have other reasons other than age to determine an account is suspicious.

Of course some cheaters or bullies can still trick me as I accept mostly anyone who doesn't look suspicious, but if anyone misbehaves I can always kick that account out of the team and then they cannot play any more arenas.

Then during the streams (as I imagine you host these arenas while streaming) I have chat commands (!squad and !arena) to link to the team and the arena so people can easily request to join. If manually checking and accepting requests is too much, you can also add more team leaders to the team and they can review and accept requests for you.

#3

That's right but if teams have their settings to allow players in manually then many don't join which is not good for leaders..

I support #1 and waiting for the mods :)

I like this idea! An account should be at least 12 months old and have at least 200 rated games played without fairplay warnings to enter that arena.

Thanks for the replies everyone! I think I'll just host fewer arenas in the future and hope some extra options are added for trying to weed out potential cheaters.

Hi Quaglon,

I also like your suggestion very much. I feel like the minimum rated games setting is the best weapon we have at the moment for minimising the risk of having a cheater show up. The reason for this is that rated games are automatically checked by the server (as I understand it) so those guys are more likely to have been caught already if they were misbehaving.

#8

100 Rated games might take up to a maximum of 2 days for a new user who can cheat anyway. So, I deny that.

Also, we're talking about the age of a certain user which will allow it to play in an arena/swiss.