MikeC_81 wrote: ↑Fri Jul 31, 2020 1:35 pm
Our brains offer us the marvelous power of inference and logical deduction Pete. The best predictor of future action is past action and vice versa. It is unlikely that dkalenda started cheating recently. The power of inference and logical deduction allows us to see that the excessive download counts that run up to 225 before being flagged means that tolerances are massively high. Ian's statement about their system's inability to catch spike rate cheating allows us to infer the mechanics by which they are looking at. Ian's statement about it being a manpower issue allows us to infer that they don't look through the data on a game by game level to determine spike usage so they must have some overall upload vs download metric that has to be tripped. The fact that it took 225 downloads in a single game to trip the system is exceptionally telling.
Yes, I think it more likely than not that dkalenda started cheating before this season, but I cannot prove it. If Slitherine could tell me if he had been warned before then I would feel rather more certain about it. But either they cannot tell me this because they do not know, or they wish to keep certain things confidential. I am fine with that, actually. They are in the games business, I am just a punter.
But again you are making assumptions. How do you know it was the 225 excess downloads that triggered the system? Perhaps it was the 5, or the 18, or the 99? Or maybe it was all of them together? So your argument in the paragraph above is very weak. You have no evidence for "knowing" that 225 is the tripping point.
You just don't get it. Such a system must continue to use some sort of threshold that is hard coded. They have repeatedly said they don't have manpower to look into and investigate particular cases. This system must also protect those with "weak" internet connections. These three facts state that there will be tolerance in the system for a systemic cheater as long as they are disciplined. Again, this is not something I cooked up on the spot. I knew how to cheat and how to likely get away with it on a continuous level from the first time I booted MP in this game. My only error was the assumptions that the tolerances were very low and that Slitherine would peak in. They have publicly indicated that they don't have the manpower to peak in (Ian's words) and we know how far a player has to go before they get caught (225, 99, etc etc). I was willing to live with a potential cheater getting 1 or 2 turns reloading on me. I am not willing to live with a system that allows for a cheater to get dozens of turns on me in a game.
Yes, I do get it.
But I get it differently to you. I don't think we are going to find out the detail of exactly how the system was working before. The technical side of it might not be too bad actually, as it did flag up dkalenda, but it seems to be the human component of the process where the problem really was. Obviously Slitherine cannot employ people to observe what happens on the server all day, so the technological upgrade has to take up that deficit so that whatever system we have in future it is a substantial improvement on what we have now. I am not expecting perfection though, and I accept there will still be some grey areas, but I imagine it should be possible to differentiate between a player who has an isolated excess download and players who are either "judiciously" save-scumming on a more regular basis, or not even trying to be discreet at all.
This is the most confusing and nonsensical stance of all. What better way to generate paranoia than to let players know reloads happen but not know when it happened within a game? What if the reload happened when it was a turn with no RNG sequences but RNG produced crazy results in favour of the reloader in a turn that they didn't have to reload? With a turn by turn notification, suspicion would only be raised when both a technical anomoaly results in a player having to reload *AND* crazy RNG happens.
It is not nonsensical at all. I have to say though that if a player is feeling "paranoid" about being cheated during multi-player then it really is better that they stop playing in this tournament. Paranoid players will certainly not be welcome in the FOG2DL in future because, as far as I am concerned, players entering the FOG2DL are overwhelmingly honest and I am not going to tolerate anyone being subjected to false accusations. I would rather stop the tournament altogether than let this happen on a regular basis.
But if a player experiences a situation where his opponent has been flagged for excess downloads then I agree they should be given the full picture after the game has finished. It just will not happen in-game because some players reading in the chat box that their opponent has made an excess download in the last turn will automatically assume they are being cheated. I can guarantee it. From a tournament organisers' point of view I just ask myself, "What range of behaviours is such a system likely to produce?" and the answer is not a very pleasant one in a minority of cases. I cannot think of anything more likely to cause someone to withdraw from a tournament when they have had to put up with some paranoid silly-arse incorrectly accusing them of cheating without any real evidence.
So, if the excess reload count is shown at the end of a game and it has a discrepancy then the player with the possible grievance could take it up then. If it is a FOG2DL game they could contact me in the first instance. I would talk to the other player and then pass it up to Richard. Richard could then liaise with Slitherine in exactly the same way we dealt with dkalenda this time. Unless, of course, Slitherine have a better system for dealing with it in future. I was given the following details of the 99 excess re-loads match during the course of the investigation into dkalenda . . .
Excess downloads per turn were as follows:
Turn 4 (his Turn 2): 2
Turn 6 (his turn 3): 2
Turn 8 (his turn 4): 13
Turn 10 (his turn 5): 11
Turn 12 (his turn 6): 13
Turn 14 (his turn 7): 22
Turn 16 (his turn 8 ): 36 !!
So this sort of information is already generated by the system and could be made available to both players during the course of the investigation (provided Slitherine agree that it should be). If we do it along these sort of lines then you will avoid most in-game bust-ups, but the system will still be accountable to the playing community. A player who is shown, say, to have excess downloads in each of their first 3 matches is not going to survive in the tournament. Which, of course, is the whole point of the system.
You know this how? How do you know I haven't been cheating. I had an insane 8-1 run with Zealots one time. How do you know Pantherboy hasn't been cheating? Or Nosyrat? Blind faith?
These are the wrong questions. They are the questions of a paranoiac. The correct questions are - "How do you know pantherboy is a cheat? Or Nosy_Rat? Or MikeC_81? Because if you don't have any hard evidence to show me, stop wasting my time." The assumption in your question is that the player could be a cheat, in mine the assumption is that they are innocent.