Suggestions to Prevent Score Manipulation

OGS Development
1

I know that at this point, a lot of people argue that this is not necessarily cheating and can sometimes simply be a sign of an inexperienced player. However, that is not what I am talking about here.

There is a serious problem right now with players around 1-2 dan level, and even slightly above, deliberately abusing this mechanic. Of course, this kind of behavior is bannable and reversible from the offender’s perspective, but it is still extremely discouraging to play against.

The biggest problem is what happens to the result of the game. If someone cheats this way against you, the game is currently annulled rather than overturned.

The situation is basically this: you grind your way to a winning position, play the entire game correctly, and are eventually about to win. Then your opponent abuses the system, the game gets annulled, and you lose the Elo you would have gained from a clearly deserved win. In the best-case scenario, only the lost Elo may be returned later, but you have still lost your time, the reward for your win, and, most importantly, you are left frustrated.

The current mechanics and scoring system are not perfect, so I would like to suggest two changes that could help address this problem without negatively affecting normal players.

1) Actually overturn the result when this kind of cheating is confirmed

If cheating of this kind is detected, the result should be overturned rather than simply annulled.

This would genuinely solve a large part of the problem. Yes, you may still temporarily “lose” the game and the Elo associated with it, but at least you would not permanently lose the Elo and the victory you had already earned.

The current system creates an unfortunate situation where a cheater can effectively take away a win even after losing the game. If the game was legitimately won and the opponent is subsequently found to have abused the system, the honest player should not be the one who pays the price for that abuse.

Knowing that you can simply resign, report the player properly, and have the result corrected would also make these situations considerably less frustrating.

2) Make automatic scoring more resistant to deliberate stalling

The current automatic counting system is already a great idea for dealing with regular stalling. After three passes, the game can be forced into counting, which is an excellent solution.

However, it can still be circumvented by repeatedly passing without agreeing to the resulting score.

I think there could be an additional safeguard here. For example, after a certain number of disagreements with the proposed score - say, five - there could be a button allowing the player to automatically request an AI-based evaluation and use it to determine the result.

Obviously, this is not a perfect solution either. There could still be edge cases or ways to abuse the system, such as complicated ko situations where the game technically cannot be ended by passing. But it would eliminate a very large portion of the current stalling problem.

The important point is that the goal is not to punish legitimate players or interfere with normal games. It is to prevent a player from deliberately keeping a game in an unresolved state after they have effectively lost.

The first suggestion would make these situations much less frustrating because the honest player would know that, if cheating is confirmed, the result of the game can actually be restored rather than simply erased.

The second suggestion would automate the other major avenue for this kind of abuse. Random-move stalling is already being dealt with effectively, and if refusing a correct score could eventually trigger automatic AI scoring as well, there would be FAR fewer ways to deliberately drag out a game after losing.

I am not insisting that these exact mechanics are the perfect solution. There may be better ways to implement them, but I am convinced that this is the direction we should be heading in.

But at least something should be done, over the last couple of weeks, this problem seems to have become significantly worse. I have been seeing players around dan level creating accounts seemingly just to troll others in this particular way.

Whatever the exact solution is, I think the current system should be changed so that abusing these mechanics cannot effectively allow a player to invalidate a legitimate win or make the honest player lose the reward they earned from winning the game.

1 Like
2

Absolutely. We already do have that feature for multiple passes, I don’t see any harm in triggering it after several score changes. Hopefully that would be just a matter of allocating some dev time.

I would like that too, but from what I remember from previous discussions, this is somehow problematic to do (or at least was at the time). Unfortunately I do not understand the math enough to understand, so I am just relaying words of others :smiley:

2 Likes
3

Oh, that’s saddening to hear. Also, sorry for bringing up that suggestion then - I didn’t come across that particular discussion during my brief search. I really hope it isn’t the case anymore, though.

Anyway, preventing players from repeatedly declining the score after multiple passes should solve the vast majority of these situations, so I really hope that part can be implemented and that this problem can be resolved :upside_down_face:

4

I think what might contribute to the issue is the tenet of having it automatically update itself instantaneously (rather than only once a day (like on KGS) or after 20 games (like on Tygem). Instantaneous change creates a ripple effect throughout the system and I suspect that’s what makes it extra difficult to revert the outcome, perhaps?

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5

Hello,

I do appreciate your suggestion but it looks like you don’t have any idea about all the efforts OGS is putting to bring the best environment to every users and avoid toxic behaviours like cheating. There is a large team of volunteers who manage this every day at the best they could provide.

About reversing the results, it’s something the system can’t afford it’s more complicated as what it looks like. I may understand your disappointment anyway.

Automatic scoring is already here (the existence of bots requires it) in the limits we found acceptable by most of the users.

The team is already trying to improve everyday all the moderation around a game of go, and hope to satisfy most of the users. If you have any trouble or feel something unfair in one of your game, please simply report it and we will have a look on it. Reports are the first thing that we miss because without them we can’t advance.

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6

Hello Groin!

Actually, I do have a pretty good idea of how much effort OGS puts into maintaining the site and providing a good environment for its users. I see it on a daily basis, and I am genuinely very grateful for it, especially knowing that the site is largely run by volunteers. I also try to contribute where I can, within my own abilities.

Regarding my suggestion about overturning results - if it is technically impossible to do, then I simply didn’t know that. I apologize for that. It was just the first solution that came to my mind when thinking about the problem.

As for automatic scoring - yes, it already exists, but it does not cover the particular situation I was talking about.

As I see it, there are two main ways of stalling. The first is playing meaningless moves, which is already handled by automatic scoring. The second, which is still not really addressed, is repeatedly refusing to agree with the score after both players have passed.

Especially if overturning the result is impossible, I think it becomes even more important to give the honest player the tools to actually finish and win the game they have already won on the board.

My suggestion of introducing automatic agreement in situations like this should not negatively affect normal players, but could make it possible to reliably finish games where the only reason they are continuing is deliberate refusal to accept the score. Ideally, this could reduce the available stalling methods to a minimum, or even eliminate this particular one entirely.

There are currently quite a few trolls who repeatedly create alternate accounts specifically to abuse various mechanics. I am absolutely not insisting that my proposed solution is the correct one, or even that this particular solution must be implemented. What I am insisting on is that the problem itself does exist, and that there should be some improvement specifically in this area.

And I want to emphasize again that I do see the work the admins are doing every day - the quick responses to reports, the moderation, and everything else. In fact, just one day before I wrote my original post, this exact situation appeared repeatedly among the games shown on the game-viewing page, including very prominently among the first games listed.

So this wasn’t just a theoretical concern. There was literally a game where, for around 300-400 moves, an honest dan player was trying to avoid losing to this kind of blatant abuse, while a large number of people were watching.

And once again, I am genuinely grateful to the admins, because after I posted about this, KoBa responded and intervened. That is exactly what I would expect good moderation to look like, and I think the team handled that situation well.

But I also think we should have some kind of preventive measure so that situations like this don’t have to reach that point in the first place, because it surely wasnt an execptional case.

So for me, the issue isn’t really about reports. Reports are important, and I absolutely agree that they are necessary for moderation to work. My point is that a player should be able to actually win a game they have already won, rather than having the result depend entirely on whether an admin happens to intervene.

And what I am asking for is not even necessarily a completely new system - I am suggesting applying an existing automatic-scoring mechanism to a very specific situation that, in practice, should only occur when someone is deliberately abusing the scoring process.

7

As far as I’m aware, the intended solution for this situation is to use the button that actively(!) calls a moderator. As long as the engine isn’t capable of obsoleting the agreement phase in its entirety, automating this scenario feels like an improper solution.

2 Likes
8

Sadly, this wouldn’t really work in practice, because moderator responses usually take hours rather than minutes, meaning that the player can be stuck in the game for a very long time before anyone can intervene. So, in my opinion, it should be automated at least to some extent.

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9

That runs into the issue that the engine doesn’t handle the Japanese seki rules correctly at all. Then again, that only really matters when there’s an endgame seki and it actually changes the result, which should be rare enough. So maybe a good compromise would be to have some automation and rely on moderation when that yields the wrong result.

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10

As a moderator, i would love to help with incorrectly scored games and reverse the winner. Unfortunately, the only thing i can currently do is to annull since there is no button to reverse the outcome. When a game ends, it’s kinda like “sealed” and theres no way of resuming it or changing the outcome, and i have no idea how much work would be required to change the system.

And yeah, usually the mods are unable to do anything while the game is still in progress :<
There are too many games happening and too few moderators to actively keep an eye on the ongoing games or oncoming reports (we’re all just unpaid volunteers with tons of other commitments).

So yeah, i think the best idea would be to just force an automatic scoring in case players disagree with the result, even if that might have some negative consequences with beginners who pass before the game is over ://

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11

In terms of my understanding, this kind of situation is very, very rare, and my suggestion is to implement automatic AI counting after a certain number of disagreements.

If we’re talking about two honest players, they have plenty of ways to resolve the situation. They can do something like what you suggested - mutually agree to pause the game and call for moderation - or simply play it out.

Also, when it comes to beginners and some very difficult seki situations (for example, death under ko rules, which many high-level players don’t fully understand either), I think it will always be complicated for beginner players to deal with them.

In the worst-case scenario, annulling the game is still an option, but I don’t really see how this would interfere with honest players. I mean, if two people can’t resolve the situation after 5+ attempts and still keep passing, I honestly don’t see why they wouldn’t just let the game be automatically counted.

At the same time, this could get rid of a ton of problems immediately, while situations where the automatic count is actually wrong should be rare enough to be handled through moderation.

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12

@anoek you’re probably the only one who can answer this: Would it be possible to have that auto-score thingy kick in, if players disagree the score for, say, 3 times? Or would there be any issues for doing that?

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I don’t see how exactly, they would have to both pass simultaneously and both decline the count multiple times. It would be very weird for that to actually happen, but I think its even for the best if for them automatic counting will be enforced
on a side note, luv u KoBa, thanks for managing this type of reports so often

1 Like
14

Technically, I believe that both players actually lose if they can’t agree to the count. That would be another solution; it’d be pretty unfair towards the honest player so I’m not necessarily convinced that it’d be a good way to go about it on a webserver, but it’d also penalise the dishonest player who does it repeatedly much more harshly than their victims who only run into it occasionally.

15

That actually happens a lot; players pass before all the borders are closes, and the scoring system can’t really handle that very well.

It also happens with some “special case” situations, like with one-eye-vs-no-eye-sekis, bent-4-in-corners, and with groups that look alive but could actually be killed if the opponent just throws a stone in the vital placement

16

I don’t think this would really be a solution either. I think it would be quite difficult to enforce, and it still has the same fundamental problems: the winning player doesn’t actually get the win or the rating points they earned, and they are still left frustrated by the situation. It would also make it easier for trolls to simply throw the game away.

And if two honest players simply couldn’t agree on the count because of their different ranks or levels of understanding, it would be pretty awful to penalise both of them for that.

Also, I don’t think the people who actually care about penalties are the ones who tend to do this in the first place. I mean, I’ve never really seen someone with 50+ games on OGS repeatedly doing this kind of thing. In my experience, it’s usually an alt account doing it against an honest player.

So your last suggestion could potentially lead to a situation where the honest player isn’t just getting trolled - they could also end up being penalised more severely because of something their opponent deliberately did.

I think the better solution would be to focus on preventing the abuse itself, rather than trying to make the consequences harsher for both players

17

I can see that happening, yeah, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen both players do this multiple times and still not agree on any score, anyways if we are talking about this level, majority of games will be counted correctly due to majority of times advantage of this games being very huge

I can also see these kinds of situations happening, but in any case, beginner players probably won’t handle them very well, and in the vast majority of cases it will be a miscount or a misplay anyway. Also, these kinds of situations are already counted correctly by AI most of the time, so I don’t really think they are much of a problem

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18

Yeah, i think so too.

With open borders, players can always resume the game and play the needed moves instead arguing over the scoring.

And with the other edge-cases i mentioned, chances are that the AI scoring could be better at resolving those situations much better on average than the players who encounter and disagree with the status of the stones in question.

2 Likes
19

I’m inclined to agree; that’s why I expressed caution for the idea. It would disincentivise abuse due to no longer benefitting the culprit, so it would be a potential approach to handling the issue, but at the same time it would penalise their victims more harshly whenever it does happen.

Quite honestly, the inability to adjust past games sounds like an architectural bug to me. Fixing that would be the cleanest solution of them all.

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20

we can only dream

Well, no, sadly most of them aren’t doing this to gain Elo. In the end, the game will probably be annulled for them anyway, so from their perspective it’s basically the same result. I think most of the time they do this simply to frustrate their opponent - basically just trolling.

If both players end up losing the result, that doesn’t really discourage them. If anything, it just increases the “benefit” they get from doing it, since frustrating their opponent is the whole point.