The only way to address these situations is to report the players.
Have you done that?
Obvious case of sandbagging.
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justbefair wrote:
The only way to address these situations is to report the players.
Have you done that?
Nope, didn't think about the fact I could report someone I didn't play against.
But will remember it for the next occasion.
Thanks.
You can still do it now, don't you?
Jul 26, 2022
0
#5
Poisson_Rouge wrote:
justbefair wrote:
The only way to address these situations is to report the players.
Have you done that?
Nope, didn't think about the fact I could report someone I didn't play against.
But will remember it for the next occasion.
Thanks.
Screenshot looks more like an Arena and in arenas, players only play other members close to their rating for the most part. It's very common for lower rated players to win the event and was designed so that anyone has a chance to place, regardless of rating.
I understand that lower rated players play shorter games (more blunders), which allows them to complete for the top. This is absolutely fine.
However, I constantly see players with new accounts competing for the top spots in tournaments. Especially in the Saturday weekly tournament, more often than not, the top players are either sandbagging or just create a new account to start with a very low rating, giving them an unfair advantage.
A suggestion might be to only let users participate in tournaments when they have played more than 20-25 games (established rating). This will not completely solve the problem of sandbagging, but at the very least they will have to invest more time when they want to join a tournament.
Btw I always report sandbagging when I see it, but I hardly ever see someone banned for this behaviour. Especially during the weekly live tournament it would be helpful if there was a mod available to quickly ban these players.
NervesofButter wrote:
ZoWatGewonnen wrote:
I understand that lower rated players play shorter games (more blunders), which allows them to complete for the top. This is absolutely fine.
However, I constantly see players with new accounts competing for the top spots in tournaments. Especially in the Saturday weekly tournament, more often than not, the top players are either sandbagging or just create a new account to start with a very low rating, giving them an unfair advantage.
A suggestion might be to only let users participate in tournaments when they have played more than 20-25 games (established rating). This will not completely solve the problem of sandbagging, but at the very least they will have to invest more time when they want to join a tournament.
Btw I always report sandbagging when I see it, but I hardly ever see someone banned for this behaviour. Especially during the weekly live tournament it would be helpful if there was a mod available to quickly ban these players.
This just makes it easier to sandbag. Now people just need to sandbag for 20-25 games.
Its online chess. IT will always be rampant with cheating and nothing will be done about it. So either accept it or dont play online.
With this kind of reasoning, Chess.com would have never done anything against cheaters and it would have ruin this site.
No solution is perfect is not a reason to not try to find a solution.
NervesofButter wrote:
Obviously something needs to be done. But what good does reporting and closing the accounts do when all someone has to do is open another account? So the site comes out with there monthly report about how many accounts where closed do to cheating. But how many of those closed accounts opened another account? Cheating is not going to ruin this chess site or any others. Look how many years yahoo chess was around and that place was loaded with cheating.
You will always have 3 types of people regarding this:
Those that will not come back due to cheating.
Those that simply don't care either way.
Those that understand cheating is part of online play and will continue to play.
There is only one true solution and that will never be tried.
"But what good does reporting and closing the accounts do when all someone has to do is open another account?"
"Cheating is not going to ruin this chess site or any others."
I start to play on chess.com around 2010. (Not the same account now.)
At that time cheating was more frequent than now.
It was discouraging to see the number of time you would face a troll using an engine or a bot.
There were rated players that were known to reach their level only with cheating and these guys were only there to demean others people efforts.
I stopped playing on chess.com at some point. For that reason and also for all the racist comments that were rampant during the games or in the forum.
CHEATING DID RUIN THIS SITE AT SOME POINT (at least for me, I would bet I wasn't alone, already saw similar comments as mine here and there in some forums of chess.com).
I came back after a couple of years and saw the difference.
First chess.com has applied a couple of measures that seems to make a difference.
I don't encounter as many bots as in the past.
Chess.com give the option to signal after your game if you feel/think your opponent was cheating. Sometimes I receive a message telling the suspected cheater have been warned or more.
Even without that option, I already see the difference; there is just not as many cheaters as there were like in 2010.
Also the numbers of times I received slurs, racists comments has clearly decreased.
These days, you have the option to report the racist player and block him.
May be this was already implement years ago.
But after let say a few dozen games, the numbers of players I encounter that are racist has really decreased. From time to time, I will face an id*** using an username like [enter the name of the last pandemic + "is" + enter the name of some country you hate (but seriously why would you hate a country, how moronic is that way of thinking?) ], but it is less and less frequent.
So, like I said cheating (and racism) did ruin this site at some point.
But thank to Chess.com efforts (options to report cheaters, racists, closing accounts of these people), playing has become more enjoyable here now.
I just played a 3 min blitz tournament that ended with 3 winners having their elo around 1000 (see pic below).
This is an obvious case of sandbagging especially when you see the immediate runners up are above 2100.
This is not really encouraging for those that do not try to artificially decrease their rating just to get low rated players during the tournaments.
I think that kind of behavior should be strongly punished (eg: having their accounts banned, whether temporary or permanent) by Chess.com.
Hope this problem will be addressed as seriously as it should.