Does chess.com still allow RATED live game with the Computer?

"We find that having the rating tends to encourage people to cheat and use engines to play against the computer - which isn’t allowed in rated play. "

^If true^ this is a real joke. Seriously, how hard would it be to set up an engine to detect if it is being played by another engine? After all, what do we use to analyze games to detect cheaters? uh... COMPUTERS!  An engine should be able to easily detect if someone is using an another engine against it. The possible top replies (i.e. computer moves), would always already be known from it's regular analysis, so it would be just a matter of keeping some statistics on those and a few other things. Stockfish is open source isn't it?

Yeah, only a few thousand more against 1000 level opposition and you might have inflated your rating enough to be rated higher than me! Too bad for you! 

This is the real reason. It makes sense from a maths / ratings purity perspective, and I don't just mean people like macer playing tons of games against the easy one.

Honestly I desagree with Erick, because people cheat and use engines to play against humans too!! So, if that was the explanation... should we make human games unrated too??

That's not logic. 

They want humans to play computers, and interaction, rather than isolation. Also, if someone is using a computer, than the human would notice, but the engine wouldn't...

Erik's "explanation" is weak. Chess.com relies on people to report the cheating, otherwise it probably would never come to light and get investigated as such. When people cheat against engines, the engines won't report it because they obviously haven't been programmed to detect it... which is RIDICULOUS considering they are open source programs and programming them to detect cheating would take a little bit of effort, but could be done. So rather than spend a little effort to make cheating against an engine easily detectable, they just ban all rated play against engines! Nice! ... and LAZY!!!!

It seems that about one out of every 10 rated games I play against people on here are against CHEATERS! I'm so sick of this and it is really deflating my motivation to continue here. At least playing against the Computers I knew they weren't cheating.

Playing rated games against the computer bots tends to inflate the human player ratings. I initially played my first Live games against some of the bots and got a 1700+ Rapid rating, which went down to a more accurate level when I started playing real people.

I mainly played the bots, initially to get a feel for the interface and have played a few times since to test things out. While the inflation individual users get probably evens out in the long run, it does skew the system some, especially when members that have boosted ratings from the bots start playing real people. A 1700 gaining their rating against people, playing a 1700 with a boosted rating (which may or may not be accurate) would probably have preferred to play someone closer to their own strength.

That all said, what does it really matter if it is rated? You can still tell how well you do against the bots and can gauge your level based on that alone. They still have a skill level and approximate rating so you know how they should stack up against your current rating.

It is nice to see where the engines (at different levels) rate against humans. If you can beat an engine at a certain rating, you know (with some margin of error), where you might rate against human players. This way you can play the computer (having the confidence of knowing that it isn't cheating), and you can gauge your strength against an opponent of relatively constant strength. THIS IS WHY IT MATTERS. Humans don't play at consistently strength levels, they get better, they make blunders, it is all over the map!.. Computers (at a set level), stay about the same.

And you can still do that without the game being rated.

Yes you can, but you would have no idea how your progress measures against the rating pool at large if the computer is not also rated as well.

You do. The Easy computer is 1200 +/- 100 and has been for a while (it was a little over 1300 when I first played it). Just based on that if you are winning about 50% of your games, you are playing at about that strength. If you are winning 60%, you are around 70 points higher. The Elo tables can be used to gauge your likely strength.

That discounts the fact that players can have very lopsided victories against the bots but if they play clean human players rated around the same rating as the bot-gained rating, their results would very likely be worse. It's kind of easy to see that on some players that do play the bots exclusively; they don't perform as well against players their current rating.

But rating is just a way to try and find opponents that are similarly skilled (or weaker/stronger, whatever level you are targeting). Inflated ratings often short-circuit that mechanism, giving unmatched strengths. If you are playing against a small pool, such as one particular opponent, the rating you get isn't really meaningful in comparison a larger pool. Claude Bloodgood is a very illustrative example of that.

"The Easy computer is 1200 +/- 100 and has been for a while (it was a little over 1300 when I first played it)."

^^^

That is absolutely meaningless unless the computers are playing rated games in the rating pool at large against human opponents.

How is it meaningless? If the computer has been at that range for years, it isn't suddenly going to get a lot worse or better. Even if the site modifies the code being used, they can look at recent results and if the bot performs better than expected, they can manually change the listed rating to match its results.

Players that almost exclusively have played rated games against the bots also don't have accurate ratings against the rating pool at large; selectively choosing opponents make the resultant ratings less statistically sound anyway.

But a number of people that have exclusively played the bots, have done so to boost their ratings. I'm not going to claim all players that do are using them for that reason but is done enough that the ratings gained that way are not really that accurate.

Want to know what REALLY "short-circuits" things? CHEATERS!!!..

This site appears to be full of cheaters. I have found that there seems to be a highly disproportionate number of cheaters, especially around the 1100 to 1400 rating levels. I seem to have better results playing people rated 1600 or better than I do playing people between approximately 1100 to 1400/1500!! O_o   This is VERY frustrating and makes NO SENSE at all -- that is until you go back and look at the games and see that Joe Blow @ 1150 is making all the right moves with no inaccuracies mistakes or blunders!

At least playing rated games against the computer was sort of a guarantee that your opponent wasn't cheating! Now they take that away. 

Well, if you want to have that discussion, you should take it to the appropriate club before the topic gets locked.

I'm 4/4 against @Computer2-MEDIUM in Rapid. That would put me at least 400 points higher rated that the last time I played it at 1268; meaning I would be over 1600. When I play 1700 rated players in Rapid here, I lose most of those games. My results against the computer do not give a realistic gauge on how I will compete with real players.

If they still allowed rated play, I could probably get my rating back up to 1700, or close to it, by exclusively playing the bots. That easily shows how broken that system was.

 Why do people care what others play..I would play other players more if I had a real internet service here ,but I dont.. It runs 1-3 megs most of the time..I like short games, fast chess so I play computer. chess. and even tho it isn't very accurate it gives a little more incentive when the play is rated..What is the problem?

Let me add, I paid to be a member just for this.

The problem (for them), it seems to me, is that they apparently have a greater desire to perpetuate an illusion of protecting the integrity of their rating system, than providing user enjoyment. While trying to winnow out a few few bad apples using the feature to try and cheat, they apparently have lost sight of any possible value or enjoyment that legitimate users like you and I get out of playing rated games against the ComputerLEVs. Apparently this RATED vs ComputerLEV feature had been in place for many years without any problems, but now its suddenly a problem for them. Like you, I also considered it an added incentive to play RATED against the computer as well. I still enjoy playing the computer more than humans (even without the rated games), but it sure does suck that they took that away. Not only that, the way they did it was pretty low ball and unprofessional as well. What a way to run a site! .smh.. . Oh well, they won't be getting me as a subscriber now because of this dumb site management "BLUNDER".

Sorry for you though stevew44. I would ask for a refund if I were you.

If you don't like chess.com you can leave... Also, Chess.com cannot make everyone happy. I side against having rated games against computers... Why do you care that much for your rating also? Do you play for fun? Or for the rating?