Agreed that it feels fairly pointless to target Sandbaggers since they’re always done on side accounts people don’t care about anyways and can reopen at any time. Long term, your rank will just average out to what it’s supposed to be.
Also, people’s playing strength is extremely volatile online. Like, it’s really easy to tilt-queue a ton of games and play a couple stones below your rank and OGS ranks adjusts really quickly to people’s level of play
Alt-account sandbaggers victimize the people they beat by fraudulently misrepresenting their rank. Rank-manipulation sandbaggers victimize the people they beat by fraudulently misrepresenting their rank, and victimize the people they deliberately lose to by fraudulently inflating their rank. in other words, the former damage the ranking system in one direction, and the latter damage it in two directions.
The value of reports, particularly for thrown games, is that the bogus games can be annulled and the sandbagger’s account can be searched so other, unreported, thrown games can be annulled too.
I’d also add to this that if the work was futile the mods would eventually abandon the work. If the mods feel like putting in the effort and would like to see things reported, I don’t think others need to feel bad about creating work, so long as it is done in good faith.
That exactly why I encourage to report.
You don’t manage in a daily way with all misbehave and bad conducts on a server. Moderators do. They have more experience and some way to deal with each case that you may underestimate.
And they think that although you may try to manage it by yourself you have better things to enjoy.
You understimate how useful it is for the quality of the server to report. It’s a crucial first step.
Without knowing what is happening how can the moderation find any solution?
First: This topic buggs me too. First wasn’t going to write here because I think I have said anything I have said about this before here. I just play less here and this topic is by far number one on the List of things that are the reason for that. The sadest thing is that I start thinking: If everybody does it: I don’t care about my rank, I care about having nice games. Maybe I should lose some games too. I don’t want to think that way, but I’m not too sure other people don’t act on such a feeling.
But I have written 4 reports for like the last 20 games I played. And these were clear cut, I could have sent in more. I don’t think I overreport. If moderators think so they at least don’t tell me and for sandbagging I don’t remember a result below a warning for the person I reported.
The report takes time too. I don’t report unless I have seen a number of games where it happened. All this sucks, I think we are in agreement here. Where I disagree with you is that these reports {edit} have a use. They {/edit} seem to be the only way for OGS right now to know how much this is happening. I don’t know if there is an analysis in the background, but if it is it does not seem to work.
For now my the cases of sandbagging opponents in my games just today frustated me enough to spend my time somewhere else.
Sandbagging is not part of our semi-automated report treatment process (on which humans still participate for a part). Regular smaller discourtesies are like escaping, score cheating, etc …
Sandbagging is treated at the highest level with some other crucial misbehaviours. But this use more resources so players have to be patient. Sorry if you feel you didn’t get the care you expected.
Report is a starting point. Ofc we’ll go doing some researches after we got warned and be using our tools.
I still encourage everyone to report if you think you are harassed by some sandbagging behavior. If you don’t nothing will happen be for you or for the other players this player will encounter. And there is no guaranty we confirm your judgement of course but we will surely take it in account.
I never heard between all the go servers I visited of something different, be kgs, fox, etc… I never heard of a safer place either but sure go try.
Happy gaming.
You get me wrong. I’m not mad/sad/whatever at the people managing OGS. You owe me nothing. Literally. Don’t feel like you do. It will eat you up. You’re wonderfull people. I’m glad you do what you do.
Save is not my main criterion for a Go-server. And me eating pizza sometimes does not mean I have a problem with my falafel guy. And sometimes I even do things beside Go.
Sunny today? Let’s take that goban to the park!
This sounds weird. Sandbagging is certainly a reality but it shouldn’t apply to 20% of your opponents (especially if you could have sent in more).
I mean no disrespect but intuitively I admit this makes me question the validity of your assessment. Although it’s also possible that you were just terribly unlucky over the past 20 games (or that OGS is terribly wrong in assessing sandbagging?).
I mean the most viable solution would be to put a stronger focus on player verification/identification. Like have players register with a phone number or a trusted mail account. One could also try to check the IP and block players that are using VPN services as well as block IPs of people with several offenses in the past.
Of course this approach comes with downsides too. Setting up hurdles for using the platform might make some players go elsewhere. Requiring phone numbers and IP addresses might bother some people too. It’s a trade-off at the end off the day.
Pretty sure that player verification would be way more efficient.
What is “alt-account sandbagging” supposed to be?
Huh?
I assume: be 5k, make a 22k account, play until account reaches 10k, delete account, repeat
I created an account not to long ago and I’m pretty sure I didn’t set the rank myself. Though I remember there was such a feature at some point.
Anyways creating alt accounts is fine afaik? So it can’t be considered “sand-bagging”.
Many years (>5?) ago you could precisely choose your rank at account creation time. Then that was changed so that everyone started around 6k. Then about a year ago (?) it was changed so you choose from 3 wordy ranges of beginner, intermediate, advanced which start you off at something like 25k,12k,3k respectively.
I mean I haven’t been affected by sandbagging too much (I think).
But I’m always a big fan of transparency and clarity. I cannot find a definition of what “sandbagging” is on OGS. Neither in the ToS nor anywhere else. I can also not find any site/document that explicitely states that “sandbagging” is against the rules.
If someone, who even is a community moderator, starts talking about “alt-account sandbagging” then I’d think that would be an established term? Or is this just his personal view?
Would probably be easier for mods to check for sandbagging if there is a back end marker on games when the final AI score contradicts the result. AI reviews seem to be dynamic so maybe just recorded for any previous AI review completed. Player I reported would fail this for most of the games they lost.
I appreciate the effort mods put into this, but think its worth considering how labor intensive some of these review processes seem. Some blanket rules like nulling last (n = 200) games when a player gets pulled makes this effort more effective in my opinion.
As i understand it, sandbagging is intentionally losing games (usually to lower a player’s rank). If your not doing that its probably fair use.
Alt sandbagging is simply using alts for sandbagging.
If someone, who even is a community moderator, starts talking about “alt-account sandbagging” then I’d think that would be an established term? Or is this just his personal view?
I’m not sure what you mean by “established”, but it is clear and commonly understood, yes.
Several years ago I was playing chess on lichess and the way they handled cheaters and probably sandbagging was to “shadowban” (not sure what the exact term is), but the effect was that if you were shadowbanned then you could only play against other players that were shadowbanned.
Example of account that I played against before it was shadowbanned:
Cloudstrife42069 : Activity • lichess.org
If you hover over the past 20 opponents then you see:
I guess the main advantage to this approach is that it takes a while for the cheaters/sandbaggers to realize what’s happening before creating a new account and doing the same (or just giving up completely in the best case scenario).
These three statements are contradictory to each other, they cannot all be true. So no, the term “alt-account sandbagger” is demonstrably not “clear and commonly undetstood”. It’s also not defined (in written form) or declared to be an offense anywhere.
