Wondering if there are any ideas lying around to improve the sandbagging situation on OGS?
Issue to me appears to be the portion of legitimate players at some ranks is so low that its destroying the rating point competitive rank relationship away. Meanwhile I can constantly run into 8k players (at 5k) who play instantly with barely any to zero 5 point mistakes. They are clearly about 2k or higher in any other rating system. Also frequently on new accounts, maybe I should just avoid those more strictly, to be fair.
Some ideas might be to put more restrictions for possible games on new accounts (till their rating variance goes down). Idea being to make players value their account, not abandon them and make a new one.
Could also boost this variance factor for players who admin suspects of sandbagging. This would drive the behavior sooner to an appropriate rank.
Refunding recent rating for games of accounts closed (or which admins close) may also be an idea, making at least other players feel like cheating isnāt paying off when it happens (if players feel like others cheat some will be more likely to start themselves, Iāve seen this destroy multiple chess sites before).
At present nobody I know of takes OGS ranks as very good match for ability, or seriously as far as I can see.
Itās unclear what this means. Barely any or no mistakes larger than 5 points? That sounds more like a botter than a sandbagger, unless the sandbagger is very strong.
Possible in some cases they are loosely following AI I think. Would say they just look more like much stronger players than they are ranked though. Often looking at their rating graphs they can be up and down 4 stones in a few months. Were 3k but currently 7k.
Maybe their real rank is 7k, and they rise to 3k when botting. Only way to know is to see if they have a lot of deliberately lost games (e.g., games that were won and then resigned or timed out). If you find some, you can report them for sandbagging.
Fine as far as it goes, but if they get banned for sandbagging may as well have just deleted their rating points recently garnered from the overall pool. The presence of so many such players (or new accounts they create) is a major factor in deflating the OGS ranks overall.
Why not both. I of course reported the latest iteration of this, especially when they resign all completely winning positions against DDK players and seem only to beat SDK players (or the SDKs know its time to resign). But its a very new account and a very repetitive story on OGS.
If a player appears to deliberately lose a game, and it is reported, and is is deemed to be a deliberate loss, then the game is annulled and it does not affect ratings.
I havenāt seen that applied (and I reported the account, not the games they lost), but if that is applied then quite a few DDKs lose a few rating points I guess. Overall thats also going to be depressing the rating pool.
Should be apparent from the example I gave (an actual player I have reported for sandbagging). They win most or almost all games against SDK players, and they always resign (while completely winning) against DDK players as far as I have looked at their history. Now if you completely reverse their history it is almost as if they didnāt play those games. On the other hand if you only reverse the games they lost, their rating points just vanish from the rating pool, including the points donated to slightly over-rated DDK players.
This would be fine in isolation, even if itās just all the various streamers ranking up a few new accounts every now and then, but with bans and subsequent new accounts with a very short life time till closing, the deflation really compounds.
There is also the issue that antisocial trolling behavior drives legitimate players away from the server to some extent, which increases the rate you run into these kinds of match ups.
If the sandbaggerās lost games against DDKs are annulled and only wins against (say) 5 kyus remain in their history, then their rating will go up, like to 2k or something. So the 5k who lost against them wonāt lose many rating points.
Possibly, if that is happening and ratings are re-calculated for games since any annulled games. I didnāt see this happening with in the OGS system at any point, and you potentially kind of have to go back and systematically identify the actually unreasonable resignation games, because most players wonāt report an opponent who suddenly resigns to their benefit, and doesnāt explain that in any way. I think it makes more sense to refund rating points when accounts are closed by mods for terms of service violation, which when you notify players about refunds shows this kind of thing is actively being moderated for.
In that case it would be the re-adjustment after the annulled game is taken into account, but a message to say a rating changed due to opponents violating terms of service in a game. I occasionally get these on my lichess.org and chess.com accounts.
There are a number of misapprehensions in this thread, and I am going to address them summarily rather than itemize them. Everyone who has responded to you so far is a community moderator (as distinct from a full moderator). We vote on reports in certain categories, and Thrown Games (a subdivision of Sandbagging) is a category recently added to our tasks.
Every day we adjudicate Thrown Game reports, resolving them usually in less than a day. Many are valid, and the game gets annulled and the sandbagger gets warned. Some are completely invalid, and some are āabandonment for causeā because the opponent was engaging in some violation (such as stalling). In the latter circumstance, the game is annulled, but no warning is issued.
Reporters of violations, be it Sandbagging, Thrown Games, Botting, or other categories, do get a message about the outcome when a report has been resolved.
Games older than 100 games cannot be adjudicated because the ripple effects throughout the system cause technical problems in the server.
The fact that a new account is strong is not necessarily evidence of sandbagging or botting. Some new accounts are experienced players who need to rank up.
The player Iāve reported is what they are and not worth further time. Not sure they fit neatly into a simple category, have played plenty, clearly violating TOS, maybe botting, resign a lot of games where completely winning, very new in time account, play a lot of games, has a number on the end maybe indicating multiple versions of the same account exist.
Iād be more interested in if any of the ideas I suggested or others are worth looking into though.
I feel sad if this is really your experience on OGS and hope it will only get better.
Anyway one of the first main reason if that is so a fact and very first way that we can try to make the service better is that players donāt like to report.
So please use the report feature for the wellness of the whole community, we care to keep OGS as the most enjoyable place to come and play.
Iāve never reported a sandbagger ever, but itās a choice - nothing to do with likes. My reasoning is twofold:
in the extreme case that the mods were to deem the account a sandbagger and ban them, they just create a new account and rocket up to whatever rank they choose within days. Now I donāt know who they are; if I know who they are I can block them. Fool me once, shame on you - fool me twice shame on me.
Itās just creating futile work for the mods - see point 1.
How is this logic wrong?
I believe the most effort-efficient technique to mitigate sandbagging would be some form of bulk stats analysis. Maybe they already do this for all I know.