Cheating in rated games and balance.

So if someone gets branded does our score get refunded?

Only reason I ask is seems lately (last three weeks) a ton of people have joined and are cheating heavily in their games (~22 games). These people have been reported, but its happening often enough now that i've taken to not playing against people who look like they are a throwaway account.

I understand the whole being branded thing but it really is discouraging when your hard earned rating drops by over 100 points (1900-1800) because all of a sudden people in their 1300's are pulling a 7 centipawn loss in a 60 move scotch game with no positional understanding.

By throwaway account I mean something along the lines of asdfgb1234 or some iteration of the above, you can tell a lot of thought was put into their name.

How do u know an opponent is cheating? By losing? :)

...get over it. It happens to all of us.

Your rating will go back up if you win a few games.

#3

"...get over it. It happens to all of us."

resignation!

The world is not perfect. There are scumbags everywhere. Cheaters only get their rush if they thing they have one over on us. They lose if we don't let it affect us.

I agree but its still resignation unless we have a better defense mechanism to let them stay out. Welcome to our fast pace world.

It's called realism.

I'm not complaining about it, I think it's ok. Just about.

I know,.. i know.

I'll just rehash the stock response to this question (that comes up at least once every couple weeks, you should really try doing a search before creating a new topic)...

Rating is not "refunded" when a cheater is flagged. If you are "refunded" then every opponent you played has to be "refunded" and every opponent they've played and so on. The rating system is like an ecosystem. You can't just give one person some points back and think the balance has suddenly been restored. If you play a few more games your rating will go back up if that's where it should actually be at. Glicko-2 is a self-correcting system when it has enough input. So just keep playing.

In the past there have been one or two instances where when the entire site was undergoing a huge upgrade, there was a rebalance done for all the ratings for all users to correct for games against flagged cheaters. In the end, no one noticed because it didn't really change much of anything, so it likely won't be done again. As I said Glicko-2 is a self-correcting rating system, thereby just play a few games and your rating will be accurate again despite the cheaters.