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[ackack]

What's up with this guy?

Looking at the leaderboard 7 days ago, http://bggdl.square7.ch/leaderboard/leaderboard-2011-11-14.html, he's a level 20 with 488 games. Today, he's a level 50 (!!!) with 1224 games played. CouncilRoom shows 1 game in the past 10 days. I don't see any obvious candidates for nickname shifting to account for this. So what's going on?

added: Ah, I forgot the obvious hypothesis. CouncilRoom does not log games that are sufficiently short, correct? So it's very possible that somebody is dumping hundreds of games on turn 1 to this guy, which might count for TrueSkill but will not show up as CR logs.

[DStu]

When you look at the leaderboard at the other days, it seems like he went up the ladder day by day... Strange how this happend without playing, maybe CR-bug? But still strange...

[ackack]

Yeah, what originally caught my eye a few days ago was somebody showing up at level 40 having gone up +5 overnight despite already having a few hundred games in the bank. Sometimes you see accounts with very few games played up there, and that makes sense. But that scale jump was very suspcious for an account so established.

added: And clearly he's playing. The question is where are the games. Either there's dumping like I'm guessing so that CR scrubs the games out, or he's playing the actual games under a different name to hide them and then switching the account nickname back to Karumah at the end of the day.

[kn1tt3r]

Could this be some other player with a new nickname?

[ackack]

Could this be some other player with a new nickname?

I don't think they can take the Karumah name without the assistance of that original player agreeing to change.

[jonts26]

Karumah is playing a guy named Kretin over and over. It's the last player to play him thats recorded on council room. When you view Kretin's history, he has only the one game against Karumah, yet according to the leaderboard has 736 games under his belt. Additionally, if you compare yesterday's and today's leaderboards, Kretin and Karumah have both played exactly 200 games.

http://bggdl.square7.ch/leaderboard/leaderboard-2011-11-20.html

The question is, how is he doing it. I mean, I guess he could just have two instances of isotropic open with both names and just continually resign against himself but that seems pretty tedious. Maybe he created some sort of script to do it automatically. In which case, he should be using these powers for good. Like creating a big money bot or something.

[DStu]

I greped the logs from yesterday for his name

Code: [Select]

-014519-c0834b50.html
game-20111120-014529-abadd047.html
game-20111120-014539-0e7a66af.html
game-20111120-014547-28935a23.html
game-20111120-014556-08f953cb.html
game-20111120-014603-2d0573e7.html
game-20111120-014612-1a702e84.html
game-20111120-014619-83593cd8.html
game-20111120-014628-47c3d016.html
game-20111120-014637-cc6ff199.html
game-20111120-014645-ec514c3f.html
game-20111120-014654-cb95405b.html
game-20111120-014701-ec2d52fa.html
game-20111120-014709-a3391e34.html
game-20111120-014717-0ca6e476.html
game-20111120-014725-e24160f7.html
game-20111120-014734-253c38f5.html
game-20111120-014744-0404193e.html
game-20111120-014753-7f17bfd6.html
game-20111120-014801-8fcc392d.html
game-20111120-014810-757e29a2.html
Maybe CR parser was bored from this?

Code: [Select]

Game log

Turn order is Kretin and then Karumah.

(Kretin's first hand: 3 Coppers and 2 Estates.)
(Karumah's first hand: 3 Coppers and 2 Estates.)


— Kretin's turn 1 —
Kretin resigns from the game.

All but one player has resigned.
Karumah wins!
/ignore

modify: C&P of the 150 filenames somehow doesn't work, but there's not much value, they all seem to look the same (that's not exactly true, he started the day with playing 3 games solitaire)

[greatexpectations]

Karumah is playing a guy named Kretin over and over. It's the last player to play him thats recorded on council room. When you view Kretin's history, he has only the one game against Karumah, yet according to the leaderboard has 736 games under his belt. Additionally, if you compare yesterday's and today's leaderboards, Kretin and Karumah have both played exactly 200 games.

his jumps in games played every day match Kretin's jumps in games played each day too.

what actually intrigues me more is his jumps in level. his level jumped from 20 - 30 - 35 - 40 - 45 - 48 - 50. those first few seem to be too rounded to be coincidental to me, especially when the outlier of 48 was a number that *should* have been enough to get him to number one. maybe he did some research into how the rating system works as well.

[theory]

That might just be because the script plays X games per day, and now that Kretin is at the bottom of the leaderboard it's about the same gain for Karumah per game.

[greatexpectations]

That might just be because the script plays X games per day, and now that Kretin is at the bottom of the leaderboard it's about the same gain for Karumah per game.

possibly, but yesterday is the only day he played a round number.  his game totals working back to his starting point are: 200, 154, 192, 104, 48, 38. no real pattern to that set that i can see. it might be nothing, it just seemed too coincidental to me.

[ackack]

I think what impresses me most about this is that despite resigning ~700 games in a row, Kretin is not the lowest ranked player on the server. (Probably a clear winner if you sort by mean instead of by level, though.)

[rrenaud]

At least this is an area where paying for a service an improve the results.  It's clear that you do really need a manual referee clearing out this kind of shenanigans.

[Jorbles]

That might just be because the script plays X games per day, and now that Kretin is at the bottom of the leaderboard it's about the same gain for Karumah per game.

possibly, but yesterday is the only day he played a round number.  his game totals working back to his starting point are: 200, 154, 192, 104, 48, 38. no real pattern to that set that i can see. it might be nothing, it just seemed too coincidental to me.

He's probably just doing something like turning a bot script on and then turning a bot script off, which would account for the lack of patterns in his game totals.

[rspeer]

I think what impresses me most about this is that despite resigning ~700 games in a row, Kretin is not the lowest ranked player on the server. (Probably a clear winner if you sort by mean instead of by level, though.)

If it were like the CouncilRoom openings list, players whose skill range is strictly negative would be sorted by the top of their range instead of the bottom, in which case Kretin is certainly the lowest ranked. Not that that actually matters, though, because the only players with strictly negative skills would be Kretin and one other, and I'm now curious what silly shenanigans the other guy is pulling.

A strictly negative skill range is kind of like scoring 10% on a true-or-false test. It takes deliberate effort to perform that badly.

[DG]

I'm not too concerned that someone has found a way to beat the rankings. There are plenty of ways to do it and plenty of idiots who are proud of their false achievements. He even could have done it much better if he'd put some more thought into it.

I'd be more concerned that someone has set up some bot or script that can repeatedly play games on the server. Nobody wants to see the server flooded with phoney bot players. We can only hope that this guy has really wasted his time by setting up all these matches manually.

[Jorbles]

Is it possible for the code to be changed for something like if someone has forfeited over half their games and if they have played more than X games then any games they play will be excluded from the rankings? Or can administrators just manually bump people who are clearly gaming the rankings from the leaderboard on a case by case basis?

[painted_cow]

I also think, that it isnt too hard, to figure such players out in the leaderboard. Everyone who cares identifies such persons as soon as they got like +5 levels above level 35 or something like that. A quick check in his/her councilroom date often reveals what is going on. Imo it would be easy to erase such persons from the leaderboard. Then all their "work" was for nothing, or they can try to start over. :-)

[Tables]

For those who care, under the new rankings, Kretin is... well, the leaderboard speaks for itself. Not only is he dead bottom, but he's about level -29 to the next closest player's level -15.

[olneyce]

He's back!

[Asklepios]

What I don't understand is what the point is.

You don't get a feeling of skill and achievement, as you know you cheated.

You don't get the respect of your peers, because you never play your peers.

You don't get the satisfaction of having fooled the other players, because... well, because of threads like this.

So what's he doing it for?

[Young Nick]

His skill is over 67.5. Sweet Jesus, if he doesn't get kicked off the leaderboard soon, he will eclipse 50 in rank.

[GendoIkari]

What I don't understand is what the point is.

You don't get a feeling of skill and achievement, as you know you cheated.

You don't get the respect of your peers, because you never play your peers.

You don't get the satisfaction of having fooled the other players, because... well, because of threads like this.

So what's he doing it for?

Trolls gonna troll.

[Jorbles]

What I don't understand is what the point is.

You don't get a feeling of skill and achievement, as you know you cheated.

You don't get the respect of your peers, because you never play your peers.

You don't get the satisfaction of having fooled the other players, because... well, because of threads like this.

So what's he doing it for?

It might just be the satisfaction of gaming a system. He doesn't pop on the forums to troll or anything.

[Toskk]

Hmm.. why would Karumah be continuing to accumulate points, though? I mean, does a win against a level -27 really mean anything? Most rating systems have a point where a win against a vastly inferior opponent is effectively worthless..

[mischiefmaker]

You don't get a feeling of skill and achievement, as you know you cheated.

You don't get the respect of your peers, because you never play your peers.

You don't get the satisfaction of having fooled the other players, because... well, because of threads like this.

You might get the feeling of skill and achievement -- either because you feel accomplished in having successfully gamed the system, or because you don't care that you cheated to get the #1 spot. Some people like seeing their name in lights and they don't care how they got there.

You might get the respect of many people and the satisfaction of having fooled them as well, because the number of people who play on isotropic and check/care about the leaderboard is likely to be a superset of the people who post here, and not everyone who posts here checks every thread.

You might also not consider it cheating at all -- different people draw the line in different places.