Hrqls: I'm not sure that players should feel obliged to play anyone but those they choose.

The meaning of "rating" is the relative difference in success (as opposed to skill) between a player and her/his opponents. If two people only play each other then their ratings will completely accurately reflect this difference between them. It wouldn't be possible, however, for those ratings to be meaningfully compared with any other rating within the ranks of that game type. The same applies but to a diluted degree if a player restricts themselves to a small group of opponents who may pr may not play more widely themselves. That's the issue that I think Fencer is looking at and it's a fair one from the game pool/rankings perspective.

But I still feel that a player's choice of opponents ought to be governed solely by personal criteria.

Fencer: The idea is good, but I am against it. An example: In Loop Chess I am currently playing 8 games against Noger, and my opponent and i are playing in every loop chess tournament here. so we will soon reach the amount 10 or more simultaneously played games against each other.
But it is obviously when somebody got a high rating without playing against more players ...

It is highly needed to improve the rating system in another case. How can it be that people are reaching a rating of 2300 and more with only a few amount of games?!

rod03801: Yeah, <AOL>me too</AOL>. Even in games with a large pool of players, like Hyper Backgammon, I play some people over and over again. Even with almost all the games I play being tournament games. I've played some players more than a dozen times (out of almost 700 games HB games). It would be quite strange that the more games you play against someone, the less it counts for BKR. After playing 14 times against someone, it no longer matters whether I win or lose? My BKR stays the same?

Besides, it won't solve the "problem". Someone willing to cheat to inflate his/her rating could as easily create another account, and drain BKR from that person. Which is more efficient in the current system anyway - after several loses, the BKR has dropped and less BKR can be gained.

I've been involved in on-line games since the early 1990s, and many years ago, I've come to the conclusion that implementing rules/procedures against cheating with multiple accounts aren't worth the trouble. New automated rules (like the proposed rating chance) will hurt legitimate players, while cheaters will work around them.

Ask yourself, how often does cheating happen visibly (if someone cheats to bring his rating from 400th position to 200th position, do we really care?). I don't get the impression it happens that often, and the few cases can probably dealt with manually.

Fencer ,those who have fake accounts should be the ones that get punished not everyone else here on bk . there is always someone looking at peoples profiles here so most of them with dual nicks wont get away with it , a good idea would be to have a board or somewhere where people who find out duplicate nicks can get it noted instead of the main board .

playBunny: *nod* thats what i think of cheats as well .. what i said was meant for encouraging players to play various opponents (which was the side effect of fencers idea)

I agree with Pedro...

In a game like anti-reversi, the pool of players isn't very large at all, and I end up playing the same people many times. (Especially since I prefer playing people in the top 10) I don't like the idea of my games against these people not counting for much.

Hrqls: To assign any penalties you'd have to detect the situation first. Having made such a detection I think a human judge should be notified to decide whether cheating is occurring - and the penalty should be death. (Er, that's of the account, not the cheat, lol). Automated penalties, unless very complex, are prone to being found arbitrary and unfair, and may cause more general distress than relief of the problem that they address.

If it was up to me, I would leave it the way it is now. Cheaters will always find a way. They can create as many nicks as they want. Like I said, I would leave the BKR formula unchanged and adhere to the current rules set in the User Agreement, i.e. ban those who were 'proven' to be cheating.

playBunny & Walter Montego: would it better if penetalties were given no just to repeated games between the same players .. but if (for example) more than 50% of all the games of a certain player are with the same opponent ?

Fencer: Quote: "I'll improve the BKR formula by adding some penalties for repeated games between the same players". He he, shouldn't that be "change" the formula? I'm not sure about that word "improve". ;-)

I echo Walter's words. Some people's style of playing is to play all and sundry, perhaps playing mostly tournaments, or just inviting a wide range of people to games. Others' style is to find a few partners who are a pleasure to play and chat with - and then stick with them by and large. These people would be penalised by this proposed formula change.

We were discussing this issue on the backgammon board. "The simple pattern seems to be a pair who play together with a very unbalanced win/lose ratio brought about by a suspicious amount of resigning and with one or both having high ratings. As more nicks are brought into the scam, detection would become increasingly difficult but a significant level of resignations would still be a good indicator. It would ease the server burden if checking were restricted to the top X% of players."

I think detection is a better system for the site, though it's obviously a lot more work for you to program. One solution would be to keep an eye on resignations, as these seem key to the cheating method (perhaps in conjunction with the number of moves made). These could then be brought to the attention of a special moderator who would look into the matter. To avoid detection the cheats would have to stop resigning the games and play them through to a conclusion. They could still fix the outcome, of course, but it would be a lot more work.

Fencer: As long as my regular opponents continue you to play me, I won't have a problem with it. When the ones that want to raise their rating are no longer able to get any points playing me even if they win the game stop playing me, then I'll have a problem with it. I can just imagine what the guy that has played the best Chess player in world twenty times and lost all twenty of them would say if he was told that the next game wouldn't change his rating even if he somehow managed to win the game! He would just play the game for fun and bragging rights, right? If Bobby Fischer was dead he'd be spinning in his grave.

Let's look at Dark Chess's established ratings list. There's only 9 players over 2000. That's right, this ain't Backgammon. It was only a few months ago that I was almost 200 points ahead of the second place player. I can only play 9 players so many times. Some of these 9 don't play very many games or even play on this site any more. If you change it so the games won't count after a certain number have been played between us and if I play and win just half the games against any one of them the ratings will stay the same. When I use to win almost every game, it'd make this argument even stronger. Then we'll eventually reach the point where the games will no longer count in the ratings no matter who wins each game. At that time the rating list will become frozen. Is that what you want the ratings to reflect? Dark Chess takes a few moves more to play than Backgammon and usually takes longer for each person to make his moves as there's a lot less automatic and forced moves in a game of Dark Chess. If you put this scheme into effect in Backgammon and the trend to some of the tournaments now is to have a narrow range of rating points to be able to enter the tournament, which I assume is because of how many people play Backgammon as compared to Dark Chess, all the higher rated Backgammon players will eventually have played each other enough times that their games will no longer count for rating either. That'll go over real well. I've noticed how much more dynamic the rating list is in Backgammon. Myself is a good example. I was in the top ten just a couple of weeks ago, now I'm out of the top twenty. I've been playing Backgammon enough so that I've made some freinds with a few of the players that are rated similairly to me. There's plenty of other top rated players that have played thousands of games. I bet they've played a good portion of the top rated players more than 14 times. You make that change and a lot of games will no longer count in the ratings. Then just the new players will be the only ones able to climb up and down the rating list. Not much fun it that, is there?

I and a lot of others have come up with many ideas about changing the ratings to reflect current players and playing strength. I've never heard anyone suggest not counting the games between players. What's the point of even having the ratings if the games don't count? The way it's set up now gives a lower rated player more points if they win against a higher rated player and they lose less if they lose to a higher rated player. When anyone is playing someone close in rating points the win value of rating points is equal. This seems like a fair system to me even if it has some flaws as it is done here. It could also be modified in a few ways to accomodate the nature of playing the games on a turn based site as compared to playing it live. When one plays live, he plays one game at a time. On this site, it's possible to play hundreds of game at a time. This does affect one's current rating. I have seen how people try to time their wins and losses so that they may climb up the ratings list. Eventually their games catch up with them and it evens out. My suggestion is to leave the counting of the games as it is now, and work on a better numerical value for when changes do occur. Plus all those time rating things a few people would like added.

I still fail to see how making the games not count having any effect on the cheaters. Wouldn't they just open another account and carry on as before? In the Backgammon discussion board there's been some discussion about how to catch people using multiple accounts. The concensus seems to be that it'd be a hard thing to do and some methods create as many problems as they attempt to solve. Some people legitimately share computers, others have different computers but the same network access, ISP connection, or wireless hub.

could a link be added to forums in subgroups (chess,checkers,...,other board games) on which you can click to go back just 1 step instead of going back to the main list of forums ?
(like the link i added to the jarmo forum)

Walter Montego: If you just want to play the games, why don't you like this idea? It should not affect you. And, from my point of view, it would make the rating more accurate because who wants to get a higher BKR, will be forced to play with more different opponents. Which is exactly what the rating should be based on.

Fencer: I do not like this idea Fencer, even though I would personally benefit from it. In Dark Chess there's not a lot of long time players in it as compared to more popular games, such as Backgammon. I have long series of games with a few of my opponents here. With a few exceptions I am rated a lot more than they are. When I lose a game as I did to reza today I lose 14 or so points. Had I won that game, I would only have gain 1 rating point. We've played 12 games against each other. Yes, his first win after 11 defeats, but if you do as you've proposed I would then gain 0 points from winning the game. Not much difference, right? But look what happens to him, he gets 0 also instead of the prize of 14 for winning against the top rated player. And what about when I play grenv? It doesn't seem fair to both of us to get no rating points for winning a game that either of us should have earned, but are denied them because we've had a long series of games against each other. This is the wrong approach to solving this "problem" which is mainly created by people attribtuing some sort of value to a more or less meaningless number. Why are you guys so worked up about people cheating the system? If you catch them doing it, throw them off the site. As for what to do about their inflated rating, can't you just toggle the games to act as if they were created as unrated ones? Just how prevelant is this cheating problem? As far as I know, I've never played anyone involved with this kind of scheme. Even if I did, they have to win their games when they play me. I rarely resign a game and almost always turn down a draw offer unless a draw is what it's going to be.

If the ratings are this much trouble, I'd like to not have a rating. Could you do that? I just want to play the games. Keeping track of my wins and losses is more than enough for me. I think the ratings are near useless and are making lots more trouble than any slight benefit they might bring.

Also, just because I win every game doesn't mean I'm cheating or trying to get more ratings points. It could actually mean that I'm the better player. So I win 20 games in a row. How does that make me a cheater? I'm not following this line of reasoning at all. Am I supposed to lose on purpose so that I can keep a veneer of respectability about my record? Oh, that's right, losing on purpose is against the user agreement. What can I do?

I'll improve the BKR formula by adding some penalties for repeated games between the same players.
For example, if you finished four or more games of the same type with the same player, the BKR change will be reduced by 10%. After 14 games, there would be no more BKR changes with this opponent.
And after a year, the counter would be reset.

grenv: I suppose this could be a rare exception to the "no deletion" rule we so painstakingly discussed earlier, as it shouldn't be a problem removing all offending games between two obviously cheating users. This way, wrongfully attained high ratings wouldn't stay there and become a "posthumous taunt" by the cheaters...

reza: That was the tipping point for me as well. Fencer should delete both accounts in my opinion. But then it's just an opinion.

Pedro Martínez: Uhhuh! Clever point!
Hadn't noticed that before.

reza: :) I was just trying to point out the similarities of the amirh and babareza accounts...:)

Pedro Martínez: And your point is?

(yes, hi sfamily name is babareza while my name is Reza! Reza is a common name here in my country.

Note that babareza's profile says his name is Amir Hossein Babareza

grenv: LOl! well, he DID break the rating record. The name babareza sound very familiar to me. He is Iranian after all and I'm sure I've heard or read about him somewhere. His profile says he's a mathematician (mathematist as he says!) and since I'm into math a lot, makes sense that I've probably heard his name before.

I she still playing or ha she quit it after that rating?

reza: not only that, Amirh played very slowly in games where I was winning and quickly if he got the upper hand. When I queried him about it he said "I'm trying to break the rating record"


hmmmmm.

grenv: Considering the fact that all their games are hidden and private, I'd agree that they're the same person. Perhaps fencer who has access to all games can judge better.

eagle eye: of course. i can not quickly find an english description of the sonneborn-berger system. here is one in german: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wertungszahlen_im_Schach#Wertung_nach_Sonneborn-Berger

by the way: very nice to hide morphy4ever in general here. but you should not be too worried ... i saved all statements here :-)

eagle eye: Yes, draw games are worth .5 points for each player.

BIG BAD WOLF: will the draw games included in
Sonneborn-Berger points calculation?

playBunny: First danofool and now morphfool4ever?

I second: Calling moderator, come in moderator. He/she can start with your "fool"

Can we delete these two as well? they are clearly the same person and cheating to achieve a 2697 rating in Atomic chess.

http://brainking.com/en/ArchivedGameList?u=10202&op=10983&tp=28

A subject from a few days ago I think.

When setting up a new tournament, how about having 3 options at the top.

All Games Tournament

One Game Tournament (include drop down list to pick 1 tournament)

Multi-Game Tournament [Choose all game types at bottom of page]

It works find how it is now, but does seem to mess others up.

Walter Montego: As I waded though all the other nonsense, (sorry, my opinion only), I caught this idea. I like that Walter!!! I think its a great idea.

WhiteTower: Right :-)

Fencer: ... with the specific mention of what needs to be done instead of member deletion still left to be translated and added to the User Agreement/Privacy Policy ;)

In other words, no membership delete button will be provided. Thanks everybody for their contribution and I end this discussion now.

Walter Montego: It applies only within the borders of the Czech Republic, in accordance with the principle of territorial force of legal regulations.

Walter Montego:
Section 5, Paragraph 1. Letter e:
The controller shall be obliged to preserve personal data only for a period of time that is necessary for the purpose of their processing. After expiry of this period, personal data may be preserved only for statistical, scientific and archival purposes. When using personal data for these purposes, it is necessary to respect the right to protection of private and personal life of the data subject from unauthorised interference.

Section 5, Paragraph 4:
Without the consent of the data subject, the personal data may be preserved for statistical or scientific purposes. When using personal data for these purposes, it is necessary to make personal data anonymous as soon as possible. However, it is necessary to provide the required level of security according to Paragraph 13.

Pedro Martínez: Would you be so kind as to elaborate as to the meaning of this section?

Section 5, Paragraph 1, Letter e and Section 5, Paragraph 4.

Does it refute what she's said or strengthen it? I've never heard of this law. Does it only apply to Czech residents?

Left in disgust: Fencer is required by law (under the Czech Republich Personal Data Protection Act of April 4, 2000) to provide a method to delete the account. If a database holds personal information including published words (anything written in public on a site like this is recognised as 'published') they may only hold that information with the consent of the author. I have withdrawn my consent. Therefore, my account must be deleted. This is pretty standard in International laws regarding Data Protection

I recommend to read the Act thoroughly before stating such things. Especially its Section 5, Paragraph 1, Letter e and Section 5, Paragraph 4.

morphy4ever: Very well. I shall wait for the master.
Have a good one.

morphy4ever: it is not here the place to discuss about walter or danoschek, but i am requesting moderating in terms of openness. The way for that is self-organizing. if user X does not like user Y, he will set him on hide and done. and if more people do this the hidden people will recognize it ... look at the wikipedia. open content - open source. the community is handling this tool in a collaboratively way.

morphy4ever: I find your writing very similiar to danoschek's! The use of "pertnent chat-inflators started clubbering the board" being one example. Another is how your sign off your post. danoschek had the ~*~ and his short nick, you are ending with a quick note or pleasantry and the name Martin. A third is your reference to the hide function when challenged. The fourth is circumstancial, but I find it rather amazing that for one who has not been around here to suddenly be so cognizant of previous issues here. The fifth is your reference to the Backgammon board. I couldn't find any posts there with your name on them. What's with you talking about it? Let alone criticizing the moderator of that board on this discussion board by calling someone a buttkisser and disparaging the webmaster?

morphy4ever monitoring mods 13. July 2005, 13:50:38

If you're not danoschek, my sincerest apologies for accusing you of it, but I'd certainly like an explanation for your recent behavior. Or do you have me on hide dano-er, ah Martin?

Walter Montego:
You say danoschek is banned? I'm not sure how you got this information, but if it's true

Danoschek is banned. And my opinion about this is: this is an echo of the ugliest ages of censorships. yes, way to democracy takes more than 15 years?!

in the ages of collaborative working in wikis and other tools the way for controlling is self-organizing.

morphy4ever: Perhaps you could direct me to these problems you've had in your seventeen games or whatever board it is that you've had problems with, Martin? Or send me a message with the details? No sense cluttering up this board with it.

morphy4ever: I've never heard of you. You don't have any games going and you've only played 17 since joining this site in the spring of 2004? Just how many problems could you have in 17 finished games if you're not even using the site? You're not making any sense at all. Why are you here giving me a hard time and carrying on like that? Thanking me for the conversation. That's a good one. I think I'll get in the line that's forming to have you removed for being disruptive.

You say danoschek is banned? I'm not sure how you got this information, but if it's true I wholeheartily agree with the decision and the action of having him banned. In my opinion, he purposely posts to confuse or to belittle people on every board that he types on that I've read. His tactic of putting you on hide in every discussion board without so much as a reason and yet he'll still unhide you and then post in response makes little sense. He also has me on his blocked user list and yet he had continues to send me annoying messages. To do this he must unblock me, send the message, and then block me. I finally had to make him my only blocked user on this site. That Dark Chess tournament that he entered awhile back really showed his true character. A four person tournament that he joined as the fourth person just before the tournament started against two people he has on blocked user! Why would he go out of his way to play a game he'd never played before against people he doesn't like?

This is why I posted my request earlier about having a tournament accept alternates to sign up. One benefit is in the case with someone dropping out or not being elgible to play in the tournament is that another person will automatically take his place. Another is that the tournament creator can remove a disruptive player from his tournament and still have people ready to fill the space made by such a removal. I know when I check out a tournament and I see that the maximum number of people have filled the slots, I'd still like to sign up in the chance that a space might open up for me. The way it is set up now, I won't normally go back to check the tournament as I have no ready way to know a space might be available. I'd also have it so the tournament creator could change the maximum number of people allowed in the tournament. This would be helpful if a lot of people signed up as alternates and the tournament creator decided he just might want to expand the size of the tournament because of popular demand. It might already be set up this way, it's been a long time since I created my own tournament as far as being able to change the number of contestants allowed to enter. It'd certainly help the tournament creator to know if there were more people wanting to play in his tournament just by having a list of alternates handy.

morphy4ever: A little bit strange to have problems with the site,if you have played only 10 chess- and 3 pentegames...
Anyhow it should be possible to have a member delete button without losing the played games for the other players.

morphy4ever: What is this link you put in your earlier post. It doesn't explain itself at all when I went there. Legalese of some sort. Is there a list of sites somewhere to be found there? What is the purpose of the site?

What does this mean? "That's irrelevant. We are not obligated to patch either the lacking standards here or your thoughts" Patch? Whose lacking standards? I've had my problems with this site on occasion, but I can certainly just stop using it if I thought it was a bad site. If you have a problem here, why don't you stop coming to this site? What's irrelevant about what I posted? My played games may not be important to you, but they are to me. I don't want you deleting them or causing them to be deleted. I've paid for my membership and I like to be able to review any game that is played publicly on this site. This site is set up so you can edit everything that you've written. If you're so worried about things that you've written, don't write on this site and delete things that you are worried about. Sounds simple to me, now what's your's and baudrillard's problem? Why should someone else have to clean up after you when you can take care of it yourself?

baudrillard: I read the posts made in response to you wanting to delete your account. As was pointed out, you can't just have your played games removed without disrupting the contents of the games, tournaments, charts, and tables of all your opponents that you played in or with. I don't want you messing with my account, so I'm not giving you permission to leave in a manner like that. I notice that you are still using your account and the original handle. Why haven't you edited your account and changed your handle as a few people suggested in their replies? Doing that would make it so there'd be no connection with you and this site, wouldn't it? Since only you would be able to access the account, that should be all you need to do. If you also want to make it so you can't come back to your account, I bet Fencer could change the password and not tell you what it is and then you'd cease to have access to it.

In regards to this consent that you speak of, nothing stops you from deleting everything that you have written here unless you are banned from a discussion board that you have posted on. Just go to each board and scroll to every post you've made, and delete them. I'm against you doing this because it really messes up the discussion on occasion, but there's nothing to stop you from doing it. I know if I was the site owner, I'd just laugh at you, because I wouldn't do it for every single person that wanted off the site. It'd be a whole different scenario if you couldn't edit your own writing like on a lot of other sites. Then you would have to exercize this law you've quoted, but here you're free to do it yourself. Just changing your handle automatically changes it everywhere that it appears on the site. In your games, in the discussion boards, and in your sent and received messages. That alone should be enough. Then edit your profile page by deleting everything on it except the new handle. If for some reason you are banned from a discussion board, have Fencer delete your posts or remove the ban so you can delete them yourself.

Bye

baudrillard: Fencer is required by law (under the Czech Republich Personal Data Protection Act of April 4, 2000) to provide a method to delete the account. If a database holds personal information including published words (anything written in public on a site like this is recognised as 'published') they may only hold that information with the consent of the author. I have withdrawn my consent. Therefore, my account must be deleted. This is pretty standard in International laws regarding Data Protection.

Well Fencer, that is easy to solve. Make a form for "leaving", pointing out at it that all personal and public data will be anonymized or deleted and rename the account. Let the ID be ... this ID is necessary, I understand.

By the way: WHY do you want to leave?

baudrillard: apropos banned: it would be nice to explain why people are banned ... this is more and highly needed since the inofficial feature "general ban from all boards" is used.