i’ve done my best to get the nr1 uptime in my country and to keep it (yeah, i bought an extra netbook for it, cause it doesn’t use that much power when i leave it on 24/7 compared to an extra desktop pc), now there are cheaters, and lots of them; but how the site is closing all the profile settings and stats down it’s becoming impossible to prove that certain users are cheaters, other than having the suspicion they do (because let’s say; a new user rises from a zero to a hero in a few weeks; that’s not normal if we do it in multiple years)…; i’m nr 20 in the world, and that nr has been quite stable, it’s been lower quite a while; like 15… but then the cheaters came so i was at 20… Now all of a sudden i see i’m at 21, and it’s not that the user above me is the new one (with a few days or weeks difference); nope, that’s the same guy, the new kid on the block is ranked much much higher; so to have risen from below me to multiple weeks/months above me in a single day; there is something wrong…
now i cannot go in those profiles and check anymore, you cannot follow people anymore to see what they’re doing,; cheaters just disable everything so they can cheat without anyone having proof of it… and the admin of this site? well, i’m quite sure he hasn’t got the time either to check all the users against cheating…
So we must do something against this trend!!! otherwise this site will end up with all rankings filled with top 20 userlists that are nothing but cheaters, and the REAL users; which are playing it honestly will start deminishing littly by little because we lose trust in the website…
Also will it become harder to convince new users ("yeah you can track your stats and try to be the best in the world/your country/…, but hey, it’s rigged/full of cheaters anyways so don’t bother trying → prospect user loses his interest at this point)
therefore i suggest we (well, the forum admin actually) creates a small user group (up to 5 users) who get ‘limited elevated’ access so they can always watch other users stats and are able to find cheaters proactively. These users would still have to report detected cheaters to admin, so they cannot ban users or reset accounts or delete stats, no no no, they only get access to the stats (and off course they’re not allowed to share any of this data with anybody else/any 3rd party/company/…)
So when someone thinks an user is cheating, he can say so, our cheatguys will check it out, and if so they’ll report. They’ll also try to find cheaters themselves by regularly (at least once a month) going over the rankings to see if anything is unusual (a new nr1 that came from nothing? a user with zetabytes of datatraffic but no uptime? etc etc) to proactively keep things clean (if all is ok, that wouldn’t take more than a few minutes)
However, there are situations where a user can have a ton of download/upload, but no uptime if, for example, they turned the uptime statistic off for some reason.
For what it’s worth, I’d be willing to volunteer for an anti-cheat team should one arise.
I’d support that method as well - although I don’t care too much about the rankings. Its still not fair that cheaters obviously cheat in front of our eyes and we can’t do anything against that.
System? There’s a system? All joking aside; there’s no system. The late PinkFloyd used to take it upon himself to tend to the ‘Suspected Cheaters’ thread and weed some of them out.
Ever since the client has had many improvements to stop people auto generating stats, the amount of people being able to do it has declined rapidly. With that fact, and the fact that I’d rather spend my time on stuff like the Dashboard and other improvements, no one is tending to that bit of the project.
We have been talking about a reporting system though, which would not really leave the possibilities of doing things to us only. The inner workings of that system is being hashed out, but it’ll be here eventually. That should make things better for people who really pay attention to this topic, without creating a burden on staff.
That’s basically the only thing I can say about it, as we still don’t do time lines.
it makes me happy to read that it’s an issue that’s being taken serious and people are working on it as we speak.
I’m not expecting the final solution by tomorrow but any step in the right direction is positive and better than standing still (which is actually walking backwards, since the problem will only grow bigger).
I’ll be patient and wait to see what you guys pull out of your sleeves (that’s a dutch expression btw). I’ll be happy when the biggest cheaters get caught; ie the ones that go for the top 5 places and that conquer those in an unbelievable short period and are using obvious cheats to get there (like using 20 computers/servers that daily all have about the same data transfer (300mb/day) and 0 mouse/keyb clicks and they are all running some vmware client software or a server software) this way they get 30 years uptime in a single year (guess who i’m talking about!).
I’ve reported some people too in the past but i stopped since it’s become impossible to do it fair; ie report all cheaters an not only those who forgot to close their account completely down from public eyes (and other users’ eyes, even following isn’t allowed anymore). Actually i hope the ‘new system’ will get activated unannounced so it’s the most effective, and when the first wave of people hae been caught you announce the new anticheat system (without details of what it checks for off course) and the first results you got out of it (x bans, x accounts reset, x partial resets, …) so people are immediately warned that this time it’s serious and cheaters will get caught!
I have in the past reported several “100% no questions cheater profiles” before without anything being done to them.
I would suggest you make some kind of volunteer system where those that can see through the cheating forwards it for a final screening to you guys if you are going to for a report system.
Elaborating on this (and knowing I’m reviving a dead thread), I have been extremely busy and unable to handle the thread like I used to with PinkFloyd. If you believe you’ve seen someone who you think is cheating, please feel free to contact me by email, the forums, or the website (userid 106529), and I will be happy to take a look at them. I just don’t have the time anymore to crawl the users list like I used to and martijn needs to be able to focus on his work and the application/feature side of the project.
