A lot a people agree that Lichess is way too lax about new players policy. Yet, nothing seems to be done to *prevent* it, because, you know, it's "freedom".
Good job however to ban a lot of cheaters *afterwards*. Too bad it's kind of useless, as they will immediately come back with a brand new account, literally 10 seconds later.
Verifying emails would be a good start IMO, but there will always be some genius to say that "it's too invasive, and nobody would subscribe anymore".
I don't play tournament that often anymore, because I'm just tired of 3 days old accounts with meaningless ratings. Not to mention the higher risk of cheating, which is the point of this thread afterall.
Lichess is still a great chess website (and my favorite!), but that just makes it even more frustrating.
Oh well.. not much we can do about it I guess.
Cheating will be allways there. Why not use cheaters to help the site be 99% clean of cheating? The idea is that a cheater can catch more cheaters when he's draw or lose by another cheater. Lichess only need to protect the innocents, simply by marking the cheaters and the innocents don't lose elo only the cheater can. (Ok maybe I also lose a lillte of my time and a little of my confidence, if I play with a cheater, but personanly this don't affect me so much today).
Think that's a simply and effiency idea, easy to apply and with biggest results.
Also good would be new accounts with less that 30 games (or whetever number of games from statistics need lichess to assume that a user is cheating) would be an unrated player without the right to participate on tourney. I think the big goal of a cheater is to a achieve a big elo and If he can't succed this then simply he will go to another site.
What if cheaters that ID themselves get placed in their own rating group. That way it might attract some to "cheat responsibly!?" A human+engine duo is actually a pretty neat way to play. But if it was controlled it could work.
#23. I don't think that's a good idea. The reason is that we want tο discourage cheaters and not to encourage to find who has the better engine or settings; It's another think, to accept to live necessarily with them, from invite them to be ther super engine or cop or whethever.
In Counter Strike, an overwatch system is implemented, where experienced players get to review a cheater's games, and decide if they should be banned or not, based on the demos they receive.
Of course, this system may seem heavily flawed, but at the same time, it is admittedly genius. Engaging the game's audience in getting rid of what plagues the community is a genius idea. It has worked surprisingly well ever since it's launch in 2013. It reduces the workload of the ordinary detectors.
I can see where and how this system can go wrong, but it may be worth a shot on lichess. A player with say, at least 5000 games on this site can get assigned a suspicious player and he can look into his games, and accordingly decide whether he ought to be banned or not. There could even be a 'not sure' option where the case can go onto the normal lichess detectors.
Just a thought.
#25 I don't find any reason that a experience player would like to do that, (but if he would like to do this he already do that in CIA forum here at lichess). I think that lichess makes a good job at catching cheaters. From around 7000 games (over a period of two years) that I played here at lichess, I have only played around 20 games against cheaters, that's 0.02% (!!) chance to play against an engine (ok maybe that's too small percent because I don't take part at tournaments so often). From 7 users that I blocked, because I was thinking they are using engine or abusing the chat or playing for the flag, 4 was banned (for using engine like gunt, path77 etc) that's almost 100% at detecting cheaters, and I think that the key point to that is the ask for computer analysis option that lichess has. On others sites (for example cc) every day the chance to play against engine was around 20-30% !!! (that's the reason that I don't play anymore at that site). So for me lichess and fidearena are the best sites to play chess without to fear that you play against an engine.
The only think that remains is the unrated player charecteristic of new accounts or maybe (I don't need that this is needed) to create 5 random stockfish-bots accounts (site maintained) that would play against suspicious for cheating users.
emails are already verified nowadays (yeah, they weren't verified before).
a few months ago i even had a friend have to make two accounts because he got stuck in verification limbo (never received the email the first time and couldn't ask for a resend or for it to be delivered to another address)
Having just competed in a tournament with an obvious cheater, I have to wonder why the admins are choosing the convenience of new accounts over loyal users? Why should I play a thirty minute tournament here if they can't stop losers from ruining it for everyone?
Link me to the games you suspect this user cheated.