Hi, Merry Christmas for those who care about it. Merry Day for the rest.
In another thread I've read the thousands discussion of "exposing" cheaters et cetera.
I think I found a pretty good solution, not to exposing, but to deal with cheating:
> Silently mark cheaters and in the future, only match them up against others that are marked as cheaters too.
This way, they eat their own deed and can have fun not learning anything TOGETHER and they can waste each others time TOGETHER. If that isn't in the spirit of christmas, then what is.
Its what they do already. They no longer label the users who cheat.
This is a descent solution, but I have noticed it doesn't seem to be making as big an impact as expected. I'm concerned users who have had their accounts ravaged by cheaters (low ELO as a result) getting paired early on the climb toward correction, are labeled as cheaters, when they may not be.
I have had some success with creating custom games and ensuring I'm playing people with ELO no greater than 50 points from mine, but this only temporarily kept my rating from tanking.
My solution is similar in nature but the key difference is a little more sophisticated. Build a system around an evaluation strategy sophisticated enough to ELIMINATE bot usage in average player brackets.
Rough Idea for Evaluation Strategy which would happen every game:
Evaluate against a separately weighted score (NOT ELO) and compare it to five things:
1) How strong did they play in comparison to engines benchmark scores in the weighted system?
2) What is the opponent ELO vs what they played at? (estimated for the game),
3) What did the opponent scores look like in comparison to the engine bench marks?
4) Is this pattern a trend across the users game history?
5) Finally, If all of these things are evaluated in the seperate weight system, and the user appears to be playing in a "heavy-weight" class, MOVE his rating into an engine suggested ELO.
If the user proves to be playing at 2000+ rating but is only playing 1400s, move the user to the high ELO bracket ABOVE the benchmark engine ELO immediately. If he is still cheating in those brackets it will be noticed more quickly by those that actually care, and they will only play each other at that level.
However if the user isn't cheating by some error at this level the user rating will lose points rapidly at lower levels.
Keep it up you guys, I have faith in you! You'll solve the cheating problem one of these days
Unfortunately, completely preventing cheating is impossible. All that can be done is to catch those who are not very smart.
Detecting suspect behavior is a field in itself, and I can assure you that people in this field already thought about most of the ideas you may come up with, and either these ideas are implemented already, or they have some hidden drawback.
The problem of most heuristics is false positives:
Every player has the right to play a very good game from times to times.
Being incorrectly flagged as a cheater for having played a good game is absolutely unacceptable. Imagine a user who played a very good game, who is super proud of it, and gets banned because of this. If this kind of thing happens, your userbase will just go find another website.
The most common drawbacks of simple heuristics we may come up with are 1- Too many false positives and 2-Not enough detection.
This is a very complex problem.
Lichess tournament rapid cheater..so they can have their own tournament and testing tech ability to the fullest
Lichess has two internal pools - one for regular players and the other for cheaters. Many lichess cheaters are pooled together silently. In chess detection, banning a player isn't the solution because creating a new account is too easy.
I was marked incorrectly, in the bundesliga while playing for my team. I appealed. They answered that the anti-cheating algorithm, marked and banned me with enough evidence.
If only just had watched and analysed my games they would have immediatley concluded it's false positive. They just trust the algorithm. In my case, makes no sense. Nobody would cheat in the league to lose matches.
I have enough of it, and won't play here anymore.
The solution to me is to make an additional forum for teams. Teams that are currently having tournaments with 10 or more people are allowed to post there. As you play the same players you get to know who is and who is not a cheater. You create a whitelist of players. If they are online, you get paired up with them more often so long as you are not on their blacklist.
Right now, I don't see teams. If I go to a search list like at
lichess.org/team/all I am inundated with all wacky kooky crazy time controls which I don't want to play. Then, there are the variants which I don't play. I would just like a consistent rapid group which plays regularly every day (morning, afternoon, and evening). And this is not an invitation for you to private message me if you are reading this and invite me to your inactive team. If I join it, I expect a rapid tournament being set up at least for that day. If you invite and then I get some weird racer game or something of the sort I will simply unjoin that team and it won't matter if you play rapid later. So save us both the time and grief.
Is there a rapid team out there who will organize rapid events 1500-2000 Lichess rating range?