Dominionologist, Goko's mysterious #2 ranked player, is a cheat. But he's really a much finer class of cheat than we've ever had before. I had to run some fancy-pants queries on the drunkensailor database to figure out what he's been doing. I don't think I could have spotted it just by looking at his log search record.
Here's his scam:
- Create a guest account and establish its rating.
- Lose a bunch of games to your main account.
- Repeat.
And here's the evidence (see attached files):
- 30 of Dominionologists 450 pro games were played against four "superstar" guests.
- These guests had all established very high ratings, mostly by clobbering mid-range players but also by winning a handful of games against hotshots like jog and Mic Q.
- Dominiologist won every single one of those 30 games.
This is really much more sophisticated than what ooksoo did or what ottocar does. It's only possible because Dominiologist is already a fairly strong player and because of some formula-defying nonsense of Goko's rating system (he's only #64 on Isotropish). He also puts in a lot of extra effort to make it look good:
- Over 90% of his games are real matches against real opponents, so the sham games don't stand out.
- His guests behave plausibly. He interleaves the games he plays as a guest with those he plays as himself and with the sham games they play against each other. He spaces the guest's games out over days to make the pattern less obvious.
- He actually plays out the sham games. Now admittedly, some of them aren't exactly inspired, like this one where he and guest6443 both piledrive Ill-Gotten Gains and... um... Villages. But it's still a damn sight less obvious than resigning to himself on Turn 1.
So kudos to Dominionologist for going the extra mile. In these dark days when Goko no longer even pretends to care, it's nice to see that someone at least is putting in a little effort.
This is still happening. Leck, the #1 ranked Casual player, uses fake accounts to acquire a high ranking.
While not so well hidden or sophisticated as Dominionologist's, Leck's efforts are just as effective, allowing him to get a rating of 9023 points.
Leck uses four fake accounts for free wins: kaito, Habanero, whiteman and SID.
Here is the proof; around 120 games that end on first turn in Leck's favor:
http://goo.gl/NCpav6Adios,
TheNark
