Ranked Ladder Abuse Please Fix

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Oct 13, 2016 04:11

Subject: Ranked Ladder Abuse Please Fix

Bakes

Messages: 19,
Joined: Aug 02, 2016,
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Xavi,

There is clearly abuse of the ladder system going on. If you look at the leaderboard just outside of the top 100 at the score 2220, you will find an abnormally abundant amount of players at exactly that very score. If you closer you will find they all have non-real records that are like 250-5. If they really had that record they would be much higher than 2220. I suspect they are racking up bot wins to get there, perhaps ranked FFA bot games but I am unsure.

I think it is completely messed up that people can bot to near the top 100 players. I suggest we fix the possible gaming of the ladder system in the following ways:

- Do not allow bot wins to count, or cap the score which you can obtain from them at 1600.
- If possible, remove all points gained/lost from bot wins/losses from all players
- Allow only random ranked games. Do not allow custom ranked games to be created.

Others can add more suggestions to make the ladder a more competitive and representative look of the player populations skill.

Bakes

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at Oct 13, 2016 04:12

Oct 13, 2016 12:42

Subject: Re:Ranked Ladder Abuse Please Fix

medricel

Messages: 11,
Joined: Aug 30, 2016,
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Bot matches are forced unrated if your score is over 1700. Also, custom games only give half the points a regular random game would give. Is it abusable? Yeah. Is it nice for a higher-stakes game where points are on the line? I'd like to think so.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at Oct 13, 2016 12:43

Oct 14, 2016 00:19

Subject: Ranked Ladder Abuse Please Fix

Cope Crozier

Messages: 1,
Joined: Oct 13, 2016,
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Agree with Bakes. This has happened before from what I understand...?

1. A few players game the system somehow and get inflated scores
2. Players get jacked up about unrepresentative scores
3. More people start gaming the scoring system, which leads to an eventual need to reset all scores
4. A bunch of good players who worked hard to gain their legitimate high scores have conniption fits and perhaps quit

Seems wise to stay ahead of it. As Bakes points out, it's not hard to figure out who the most egregious violators are. Do the minority of players who have gamed the scoring system deserve to keep their unrepresentative score, or do the majority of players who aren't gaming the scoring system deserve to have this situation corrected? This is a great game with excellent developers/administrators and players of considerable intellect, so I'm confident the majority will want a correction made to protect the integrity of the rating score ladder before it gets out of hand.

Thanks for your consideration!

Oct 14, 2016 02:25

Subject: Re:Ranked Ladder Abuse Please Fix

lodeous

Messages: 73,
Joined: Feb 12, 2016,
Location: Utah
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This appears to be caused by the fact that players will only get random rated against bots until they verify their email. Xavi is aware of the problem and will work on a fix for it.

I am a Quaternion: one part real, three parts imaginary.

Oct 14, 2016 07:16

Subject: Re:Ranked Ladder Abuse Please Fix

Kohtar

Messages: 40,
Joined: Oct 12, 2016,
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The problem lies in the fact that new players are assumed to have the same skill as bots, which is clearly untrue. A way to correct this minor problem without distrupting anything would be to slowly increase (maybe by 1/day?) the ranking of new players until it reaches something like 2000. Of course, the active players' rating will climb in the same way, which will make the problem disappear.

Oct 14, 2016 09:05

Subject: Re:Ranked Ladder Abuse Please Fix

wookieontheweb

Messages: 485,
Joined: Jan 27, 2016,
Location: Southampton, UK
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Kohtar wrote:The problem lies in the fact that new players are assumed to have the same skill as bots, which is clearly untrue. A way to correct this minor problem without distrupting anything would be to slowly increase (maybe by 1/day?) the ranking of new players until it reaches something like 2000. Of course, the active players' rating will climb in the same way, which will make the problem disappear.

This doesn't make much sense to me, and given how rating affects which tournaments you can join and some items you can buy the statement "without disturbing anything" seems false. Also I believe there is already an automatic adjustment to ratings to reduce them over time so players that stop playing slowly drop back towards 1500.

Android 9. Samsung Galaxy A50

Oct 14, 2016 15:00

Subject: Re:Ranked Ladder Abuse Please Fix

japhib

Messages: 47,
Joined: Jul 13, 2016,
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Kohtar wrote:
The problem lies in the fact that new players are assumed to have the same skill as bots, which is clearly untrue. A way to correct this minor problem without distrupting anything would be to slowly increase (maybe by 1/day?) the ranking of new players until it reaches something like 2000. Of course, the active players' rating will climb in the same way, which will make the problem disappear.

If what you're saying is that people's scores should be time-limited, that is, they should just rise over time by virtue of their being members, well, that would just throw off matchmaking completely. One of the nice things about Uniwar is that anyone can start playing multiplayer at any time and their score will quickly rise to match the level of their skill so that they will be placed against people with similar skill. If you introduce something super artificial like this, that people's ranks automagically rise over time without even winning, matchmaking would be just about pointless.

I see from your profile that you are one of those players that has played less than 100 games and already risen to score 2168. Bravo, that's quite impressive! (Assuming you're not one of the aforementioned cheaters (kappa)) I just want to point out that if time-ripening (if you will) to 2000 was such a big part of a person's score, you would right now be matched with players that had been playing for a long time, rather than players of a similar skill level. And there are a lot of players that have played hundreds or even thousands of games but are still at <1700 score. So it really is a good thing that you are not matched with them.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at Oct 14, 2016 15:09

Oct 14, 2016 20:09

Subject: Re:Ranked Ladder Abuse Please Fix

Kohtar

Messages: 40,
Joined: Oct 12, 2016,
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I think you misunderstood what I suggested. I suggested to rise progressively the starting score of new players, not to change the score of current players. Currently, most people only play human vs. human, so the 1500 score corresponds to the average skill of beginners. If beginners start at 1600 instead of 1500, people currently at 1600 will win more often and will end up rising their rating to 1700, and this will propagate to the upper spheres. If this is done slowly enough, everyone will still have good matchups during the transition phase. In the end, the offenders will have a score only slightly superior to a beginner's score.

Another completely equivalent way to do this is to apply a kind of decay to all current scores AND to the bot's scores. The players fighting against bots would suffer from the whole decay (they wouldn't be able to progress) while other players would more or less maintain their position (due to the same effect as the previous one).

I also thought of another option to countract this: whenever someone drops below 1500, some of his random matches are against bots. This would ensure that players at 1500 level are indeed barely better than bots. But good players would take much longer to reach a level where they would have interesting games, unless the gains and losses of level are greatly increased for new players.

Oct 16, 2016 09:43

Subject: Re:Ranked Ladder Abuse Please Fix

plumplucker

Messages: 6,
Joined: Oct 11, 2016,
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Why so complicated? Just ban the offenders or reset their scores! And make rated games vs bots impossible obviously.

Oct 20, 2016 10:03

Subject: Re:Ranked Ladder Abuse Please Fix

plumplucker

Messages: 6,
Joined: Oct 11, 2016,
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I've recently been getting some random ranked games against some of these fake players. Which is weird, why would they start playing vs real people now? But I'm not complaining, easy points for me

Still I'd like to see something done about this - these players are obscuring the ranked ladder!
regards

Oct 20, 2016 17:56

Subject: Re:Ranked Ladder Abuse Please Fix

xavi

Messages: 554,
Joined: Jun 12, 2009,
Location: California
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I confirm that there was a flaw allowing players with unverified emails to keep getting RANDOM RATED games Vs BOTS. That is how they got their score inflated. All points LOST or EARNED vs Bots will be adjusted.

-= The UniWar Team =-

Oct 29, 2016 23:09

Subject: Re:Ranked Ladder Abuse Please Fix

Bakes

Messages: 19,
Joined: Aug 02, 2016,
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Thank you, Xavi.

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