Too many cheats on this site!

If you’re playing on a mobile, it is almost impossible to use the tool correctly. At least that was my experience a couple years ago when I played heavily from my mobile.

Correct, we are a volunteer team and unfortunately we do not have total 24/7 coverage… sometimes real life is just more important… but every report gets looked at as soon as a mod is available.

reporting each case of abuse exactly once is the best way to keep the site an amazing place for everybody (except trolls) :wink:

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I explained in my original text why in that instance i raised 3: I wanted the moderator to catch the guy red-handed within the confines of a fast clocked game.

Guys, I understand all that. You are volunteers and we are certainly glad you do this. But then which is it: you don’t have the time but then we should raise a report for every incident??? And since you are volunteers how can you then say: oh, only the mods are allowed to handle this. Surely a bit of cooperative effort from everyone is better!?

more reports make our job easier. one of the time sinks is that we have to look at a lot of a player’s history to see if the behaviour is repeat or once off since we can’t assume that they’ll be reported as we’d like. Even if it sounds counter intuitve, more unique reports (not copies) actually makes less work for us overall.

Also, we have enough total time… we just can’t guarantee a response time of 5s at any given hour of any given day. Sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn’t, but the report always gets addressed.

Lynch mobs only make more work for us. We have access to information that normal users do not, which allows us to make a more informed decision. Also, players being allowed to publically accuse other players for anything they want with little to no presented evidence is an insanely dangerous precedent to set.

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If someone creates multiple reports for one incident, I don’t bother to work on them until they’re several days old.

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See also: FAQ - My opponent is cheating/escaping/being annoying!

Basically it is all there.

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I’ll stop you there:

  1. “Lynch mobs”?
  2. accuse… “for anything”?
    Aren’t you over-dramatizing and generalizing a very specific situation???

As for reporting: fine! From now on I’ll simply follow your instruction and report every single cheat I come across. (I do see the point about maintaining accurate reporting but again: overkill? Common sense?)

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It seems almost everything has been said already, but let me also chime in with a little reminder.

Given the current world situation we have much more new registrations than we used to as people are trying to find new hobbies to fill time. That by turn means that some of those new players are not (yet) serious about Go and they can mess around. BUT, many of those new players are just misinformed or honestly do not know what is happening.

Bots (that most new players start on) do not require the stone removal phase so suddenly when playing a human people do not know what is happening and why the game is not ending so they “click around”, a good portion of our new accounts are probably kids, and there are other common scenarios where I believe there is not really a bad intention.

What I am saying is, whoever encounters such a case, try not to let it ruin your day. If you have the patience, try asking politely whther there is some problem with the scoring, if not, just report - if I am online I will try explaining for you - and just move on. After all it is just a game. Your rank will grow either way, and once you are out of the completely beginning ranks, score cheating becomes very rare in my experience. It is unfortunate, but I am afraid unavoidable. Some people just mess around, don’t let them get to you :slight_smile: We will do our best to minimaze the problem.

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that’s how precedent works… you think “it’s ok this one time” and then someone somewhere way down the road has to draw some arbitrary line… much easier to never open the gate

again, we have context you don’t… so far better we decide whether they need a warning or a ban than arbitrary users decide whether they need nothing at all or a targeted forum thread

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That part of my comment you highlighted was attached to the act or reporting every cheating incident so your reply misses the target

every cheating incident happens outside of our control, and we both agree that some of them are worthy of being banned, right?

So, is it better that you make that decision by choosing which incidents to report and which not to?
or is it better for us to make that decision by getting all the reports and making a fully informed decision based on their whole history and their interactions with our team?

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What are some of the types of cheating I should be watching out for?

People can cheat by changing the dead stones to remove opponents’ stones that are alive or keeping their own dead stones alive, cheat by playing ranked games against themselves using multiple accounts to get their rank up, or fake their rank and rank lower than they actually are on purpose. These are the ways to be reported that I would consider cheating, even though one can be reported for doing other things such as trolling people or stalling games.

I would probably watch out the most from score cheating because it can be harder to see among multiple games. It is a bigger deal if it is someone who is ranked around 10k then if they are a beginner. I know that I have made this mistake once that I left a dead stone alive that was dead and in my opponents territory. I wouldn’t do that now, but I know some people would, especially beginners in go who don’t completely understand the scoring.

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@XI_ye, I have played many servers, pretty much all of them, for quite a while now, and I can guarantee you, OGS is the one where every complaint to a mod is answered quickly and dealt with in a fair and efficient manner. Other server mods will not respond as quickly or not at all.

Reminds me of the PandaGo app: when your opponent loses but wouldn’t resign and instead fill up the board with nonsense moves, you can click on the “report a problem” link in the app, and it will automatically make you lose the game! It is insane. That bug - if it is a bug - has been there for years. Nobody cares.

And the number of dumb folks on servers like Tygem, Fox or Panda is many times higher than here. Sure, there are a few, and my block list is growing slowly but surely. But on Tygem… Jesus. I’d say one out of three is a “winner” who will try to annoy the f*** out of you if he’s losing, not quit, fill the board, try to use the score estimator to make you angry or trick you into accepting a faulty score (their estimator isn’t the best either). Not sure if they only behave like that to Westerners or if they are really that bad, but well, probably a lot of teenagers who can’t deal with losing a game.

So, all I’m saying is: relax, it’s not bad here at all. Report the losers if you encounter them and stay calm :slight_smile:

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@BHydden: I just want to take the opportunity to thank you and the mod team for your, in my opinion, remarkable work. In my experience, all complaints here are addressed quickly and fairly. I’ve had a few - much less here than on other servers - and they were all resolved instantly.

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Thanks for your feedback :heart: always nice to hear!

That said ;-), I think the disconnect timeout is too high. It’s a shame but some players seem to abuse that. And quite a few just have horrible connections and will disconnect after almost every move. Those games are no fun and it is unfair to the player with the good connection. I don’t mean to discriminate people from poor countries and such, but they simply cannot play live go if they don’t have a reliably connection. They can still play correspondance. 5 minutes or so is just way to long in my opinion. Or maybe give them 5min the first time and then less, I don’t know. Or just end the game after the 3rd disconnect, as some servers do.

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If they leave after every turn, they’re almost certainly playing multiple games at once and alternating turns between them.

Thanks for your kind feedback about our efforts - I know every mod appreciates your words.

In respect of players who disconnect all the time: it’s as we’ve said: report it.

I tell every “escaper” that is reported that this is the thing the community hates the most, and if they continue doing it they will be - and they are - banned.

These folk also get told that they need to remain connected to live games with the tab open. If they can’t achieve that, they should play correspondence with fast settings, which overcomes this problem.

Personally, I have no hesitation banning players who won’t comply with this after a few requests. I think that the experience reported by user5555:

is the concensus, and the guide for moderation.

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