Hi Guys,
Not sure why but my rant about cheaters stealing rating points was removed so I will summarize it again. I know that this has been a problem for a while, that is, cheaters cheating and stealing rating points. What I think lichess should do about this is reimburse all victims of cheaters of the points that they lost so no damage is done.
Interesting title. Your rant was removed because you named and shamed cheaters, which you knew full well was against forum policy, but decided to post it regardless. You can't really play the victim when you knowingly break the rules.
As for reimbursing, the problem is that we don't know when a player started cheating. A lot of players start cheating after 200+ games. Some of them cheat only once or twice and quit cheating afterwards. Should everyone be given back their rating then? No, not really. Moreover, your rating probably isn't affected much by a single cheater. Something to consider.
A note: The Glicko rating system (the system that Lichess uses) will eventually "reimburse" your rating to its true value pretty fast (faster than the Elo system).
The original theory that the Elo rating system was based on is that players will sometimes underperform (maybe by luck, or in this case, cheaters), however, if the system is based on the expected chance of winning based on rating difference, and the player overperforms that expected rating (in this case, due to being underrated), the player's rating will eventually be back to the true rating. Same with the Glicko system.
Another thing about that post was a pretty big disrespect for how things actually are followed jumping to largely ill-informed conclusions.
We actually put in a lot of work every day to try and mitigate the cheaters on lichess and I'll explain this further. But there isn't some magic wand that we can wave to justly correct players ratings after they've played against someone who will later be marked as a cheater.
Why? Well, the abstract answer is that the ratings system can be likened to a state machine -- a *VERY* complicated state machine with thousands of integrated parts (players) -- and attempting to undo only some of the history of that state machine and accurately come to a 'corrected' current state is damn near impossible, and we aren't going to perform the impossible for every single infraction.
Every now and then we might re-calculate all ratings with cheaters removed from the process (perhaps once a year, who knows, it's not something we plan on doing and it takes lichess down for about a day). But even this isn't 100% accurate. Cheaters don't always cheat, however by doing this even the legitimate games will be erased from the rating history.
And I can't stress this enough, penny and diming ratings is an absolute waste of time. Ratings are rough figures and estimates. They're attempting to put an accurate rating on a skill that can be affected by the quality of your coffee in the morning. But that's okay because the glicko-2 rating system is designed with this kind of thing in mind.
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Now for what we're actually doing about the cheating problem.
I've personally been writing the code that automatically marks cheaters and reports suspicious players to the moderators. We had a version one of this in action since the beginning of last year, and I've just finished writing and implementing version two. This version has taken me 3 months to refine.
Most cheater are now detected in less than a handful of games and dealt with swiftly. First time cheaters and marked as engines, second time cheaters are permanently IP banned.
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And now for all the rubbish about ICC's pay to play model and proxies.
Lichess is free, period. So throwing a tantrum about us not having a pay wall is a bit of a moot point. If you want a pay wall, by all means go to ICC, but don't expect us to implement one here.
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As I've previously stated, lichess is free, and account registration is designed to be simple. If people want to use proxies to circumvent IP level bans, well there's not much we can do about that, and thinking that forcing people to sign up with an email account is going to have any greater effect is... simply wrong.
There are methods to attempt to identify individual systems/machines connected to a website and then use this information to block them out. But this too is not 100% accurate, and it raises a lot of privacy concerns.
We have considered many possible avenues to try and separate legitimate players from likely cheats. Putting new players in a pool with new players, and existing players in a pool with existing players and so on. Using achievements, or a karma based system to rank players so 'certified' players can limit their game searches to other 'certified' players. But none of these approaches have proven to be effective or moral and ethical. So there's no silver bullet yet, but we're open to suggestions.
I'll end by saying that it's impossible to be 100% cheat proof, and no matter how much you sweat over it, there'll always be cheaters. But we do the best within our ability to mitigate the issue.
Hopefully this answers some of the questions opened in the previously deleted thread.
Fabulous explanation. I respect you greatly for moderating this site >.<. I of course am late to this post and didn't get to read the rant either but more people should read the Q&A:
http://en.lichess.org/qa/53/i-lost-against-a-cheater-and-i-did-not-get-my-points-back-whyUghhhh, onto finding a checkmate in the captcha. I ahve played too much horde chess today >_>
_____THANK YOU Clarkey. For all you do behind the scenes and for making the effort to explain the processes to the rest of this wonderful, 'libertarian', open-door, community you have created.
___ In this specific case, it is your emphasis on praticality and ethics that earns my respect.... Too often we respond to an irritant with a 'solution' ultimately more bothersome than the original problem
^ +1
He's still from australia!
