Why do i trust this organizer? If I do, I don’t participate. Simple as that. I don’t want to solve a problem that I can’t solve or needs large amount of effort.
Regardless, I’ve maybe played over 1000 games here and never feel cheated. Why do I trust others opinion, which could be more of feelings, lack of maturity of handling loss etc? Now see that I start accusing people who accuse other cheating, we turn ourselves from go fans to politicians. That’s when this small community becomes contaminated and not fun any more.
Looks at the forum topics: sandbaggers, cheaters, people who refuse to resign … Is it really that bad?
I’m not suggesting you trust or believe anybody, do and believe whatever you want.
I’m relaying what I’ve read or heard, and another thing I keep hearing is that people are using bots on Fox and Tygem for instance, and it’s an issue there, but you don’t have to believe that.
No-ones suggesting you need to be the person to solving the problem either. However the EGF does require certain things for online tournaments to be counted toward the ratings especially if one wants it worth 0.25, 0.5 or 0.75 the amount of points.
I would assume it requires a certain amount of assurance that fair play is adhered to, and so some kind of anti cheating measures need to be in place.
I’m not suggesting we all start accusing each other of cheating, and I can’t say I 100% think I’ve been cheated against either. I would say I’m losing due to my own mistakes, or I just can’t play at a high enough level as my opponent which makes sense I believe. However you are correct that there will be some who would rather believe it isn’t their fault they lost a game.
I don’t think one should just blanket not accept that some people are cheating though or that it could be on the rise just because one doesn’t feel the effects of it directly…
I don’t think that’s really the case though. No-one forces anyone to play in rated tournaments which might use anti-cheating measures (which can be expensive for example with webcams or camera stands, storage etc).
I don’t think online go play will just suddenly die out either if OGS implemented some hidden (not visible to the ordinary user) anti-cheat detection either. It probably is necessary at some point though to stop the rating system from feeling effects of such an exploit. Go isn’t the first to deal with this problem, and it is happening in chess, online and in over the board tournaments it seems.
I’m not aware of ever encountering an AI cheater in my online games either.
But perhaps that is because I don’t play on servers that have many cheaters. And even on servers that are said to have many cheaters it seems to be mostly an issue in the higher echelons (like 3+ stones above my level).
Cheating does affect me indirectly though. I’m an EGF dan player, so to participate in a ranked online EGF event during the pandemic I would have to set up a camera to record myself while playing. That puts me off sufficiently to not participate (and I don’t think I’m alone in this).
If highly accurate automatic cheating detection was available, then I hope such nuisance precautions would not be required anymore.
Don’t worry. The pandemic will be over and we will go back to play in person games. One can still cheat in person games. The worst case is we create new account to sandbag and use AI.
If you can’t beat them, join them. We will still have fun.
After joining Fox as a 14k and now at 5k after playing over 60 games, I kind of enjoy sandbagging myself.
