More rating points stolen. Sick of it.

Here's another 21 rating points stolen from me by a confirmed engine cheat with a not-so-subtle handle.

http://en.lichess.org/C1qJsZOh

This was the tourney.

http://en.lichess.org/tournament/HCoBULSL

I'd like those rating points back, please.

Enough of the hand wringing about it being too difficult. The clown only played one tourney (which he ruined for everyone else by cheating) so how hard can it be to refund the stolen rating points?

I encourage anyone who loses points to a cheat or sandbagger (which include multiple account abusers gaming their ratings) to add a link to the game in question to this thread so that the userbase as well as the mods and developers get a sense of just how widespread such cheating is...and maybe they'll finally do something about it. (Like give us all our points back).

And enough with the reasoning that "Don't worry, your rating will go back to where it should be over time" etc. Nonsense. This clown STOLE from me and everyone else in our tourney as surely as if he had his hands in our very pockets. How would you feel if someone pickpocketed your wallet, you went to the police and their answer was, "Relax! Get back to work and earn some more. Over time we're sure that you'll be back to where you were financially speaking."

A ridiculous and inadequate response, correct?

1. Your rating is nothing more than your relative (key word) strength in relationship to the rest of the players in the pool being rating (in this case lichess.org players in a given time control block or variant).

2. As has been stated multiple times in hundreds of lichess.org forum threads, the Glicko-2 system already handles this! It's why we use it! Truly, if you don't understand HOW the Glicko-2 ratings work and why it is a FACT that you will regain rating points you lost to cheaters in a relative short period of time (usually less than 10 games) then I recommend you go to the Q&A response by Clarkey on the subject and learn how the rating system works here.

3. Clarkey has been working hard on increasing the ability for lichess.org and its mods to hunt down and close down cheater and sandbagger accounts. There will never be a way to shut down 100% of cheaters, but these efforts minimize their effects even more than they have been.

4. There's absolutely no way to regularly restore points for every cheat victory. It isn't a matter of being "too hard" it's a matter of being virtually impossible. To restore your points for one cheat means going back and altering the ratings of every person you then played against after, and every person they played against after you, and so on. You're basically asking lichess staff to dedicate a ridiculous amount of time, all for your 20 rating points that will likely be back after playing just 2 or 3 games. As was said, it takes the server down for hours to do this.

5. What you are encouraging players to do is violate the forum rules. Great idea (not).

6. Points can't be used to purchase anything so your theft anlogy is ridiculous.

7. Posting about this every day isn't going to change any of these other 6 points, ever.

Thanks for your reply. Here are my thoughts:

1. My rating is my rating. It belongs to me. I earned it. Given that there are no cubit-style prizes on Lichess then my rating is the only thing I'm playing for on this site (other than the sheer pleasure of play, obviously). In my view, no moderator, developer or fellow player has the right to adversely affect my rating with impunity (other than by beating me fair and square, obviously).

So I can get my rating back by playing more games? I SHOULDN'T HAVE to play more games to get my rating back up. I'm an honest player and the system should be protecting me.

2. See 1.

3. I know how hard Clarkey and the rest of you are working. It's the best free chess website in the world. But there are too many cheats. It has gotten out of control recently. Worse than ever.

4. Point taken. Guess we'll all just have to live with it, right? See 7.

5. I was encouraging players to state any dissatisfaction they are feeling with the current system. I see nothing wrong with that.

6. You might want to look up the meaning (and spelling) of the word 'analogy'. I was making an ethical point, not a 'purchasing point'.

7. You know what? I fear you're right. I've just closed my runawayscared account and I'm about to close this one too.

Thanks to all at Lichess for over two years of an overall great website and 10,000+ games of fighting chess. But the cheaters, sandbaggers and multiple account abusers had the final say.

I'll maybe check back in a year from now and see if things have improved.

if everyone loses to cheaters, then the rating is still a good reflection of your skill. All people have losses to them.

#3 I sympathize with you, I really do. But what more do you want to be done? No other website or chess server that I'm aware of gives you points back because of a cheater. In fact, the main reason you are even aware of the fact is because unlike virtually every other chess server in the world, lichess.org is actually making the effort to weed out cheaters, and making it transparent rather than simply closing down accounts. On most servers, if you lost to a cheater you'd never know it. Which is better, feeling you got cheated but never knowing for sure, or knowing you got cheated and they were caught and punished for it?

Furthermore, I understand what an analogy is. However, unlike your silly Chesscube cubits, rating points are not some sort of reward system like experience points or a way to monetize content and make you feel you are "earning" something by playing lots of games so you don't have to actually buy them. Ratings are a relative measuring stick. A better analogy would be that you lost the largest pecker contest because someone was using a prosthetic.

clarkey answered all the points excellently in a recent thread. Also i never realised people were so points conscience. You loose some u gain some, lets not loose perspective this is a chess website not a glicko point collection website

Firstly, Clarkey has written an exceptional cheat detection engine which uses multiple inputs to detect cheaters - not just whether their play is perfect. It is so good, it can detect cheaters automatically, but only once their games have been analysed. So if you think a player is cheater, analyse their games - and if he is cheating, the system will automatically ban him.

Secondly, you do not "own" your rating points (ownership doesn't exist). You do not own anything, you can, however, claim that those rating points are "proper to you" as you "worked" to get them. You can argue that your "proper title" to the "estate of time" in the rating points is the best. You would be wrong, however, as lichess.org ultimately allows the conveyance of those points, and indeed is essentially the tenure of those points.

Think of it this way - you are tenant on land, which lichess.org ultimately owns.

I am getting rather tired of these threads, so I am going to amend the ToS to reflect that lichess.org has the absolute authority to amend, alter or restrict rating points negatively or positively so that when these threads reappear the userbase can point to the ToS.

This can be positive, as once in the past, points lost from cheating were restored server-wide. Maybe it'll happen again in the future, but only if an absolutely major update occurs simultaneously.

And now, closed, before this descends further into "BUT MY TITLE IS SOVEREIGN OVER LICHESS.ORG" or "LOSING 21 RATING POINTS IS EXACTLY LIKE LOSING THE ENTIRE CONTENTS OF MY WALLET".