DO SOMETHING WITH CHEATERS
Arnaud Guérin
Dear Geoguessr Team
I am quite fed up with reporting cheaters; Where does these reports go? How are they treated?
Because right now, I've reported about 20 of them and I did not see anything change or Elo refunded. You need to do somehing about it, about them, especially because it's quite easy.
Step 1: require ID verification at sign up
Step 2: if someone is proven guilty, ban the account AND ban the ID, so the moron CAN NOT just create a new account and do it all over again.
Step 3: there is no step 3, it's just two effing steps!!
Pardon my french, but today is the day I've had enough with people winning because they just do a google search on round 8 or 9, and also with you because from the outside, nothing seems to be done. You've got an awesome game but it is ruined by cheaters. And frankly, if I keep matchmaking with cheaters in about 1 of 5 games, I'll just stop playing.
I remember this quote: "If you're not saying anything or actively fighting against something wrong, then you're complacent with it"
Are you complacent with cheaters?
PS: I don't understand why you complexified the ranking with leagues. Just an Elo rating would be enough, chess.com well understood it.
Canadagraphs
okay, lemme try and give some insight into this. SOME of it, you wont like.
You say you hare reported 20 people, and no refunds? I assume you are Gold or lower then, since Masters & Champions get dealt with most of the time right away. Unfortunately, that is a hiccup in their system about how lower ranked players rarely get their complaints dealt with (unless they are smart enough to post them on reddit/discord, and get multiple reports on it, then it gets pushed up the list). No system is perfect. Theirs definitely isnt, and even their mods/devs will acknowledge it could be better.
To your Step 1 - Fuuuuuuuuuuck NO! Society as a whole has a substantial distrust of adding their info online. I wouldnt do it, and MINE is already on several databases because of business reasons. That would kill comp, and push it back to places like Plonk it discord
To your Step 2. They already do ban lots of accounts. As for the making new accounts..... remember when I said SOME of it you wont like....welllll, Geoguessr ENCOURAGES banned players to create new accounts, because you know, money. Their investors love money. They arent going to ban IDs, again, because no one would ever give it to them. They cant ban the credit cards used either, because they dont have that info. MAYBE the third party Paddle COULD do that, but I think there are certain countries where that would be against the law for them to have that info, so I doubt even they do.
I see by this next paragraph you ARE in silver or bronze, as you think 1 in 5 people cheat. (it isnt that bad, but it is bad from all reports I have noticed....and annoyingly eventually become problems for Gold/Master/Champion players to report), so I can understand your frustration. BUT, you also sometimes might be over reacting, and not realizing you are just playing an Alt.
I would say to some extent they ARE complacent with cheaters. I do not think it is smart of them to advertise "you can sign up with a new account" (although if they didnt do that, it would legit cost them prob 50-100k a year in profits)
Canadagraphs
Part 2 (character cap reached)
To your PS - It is far from a perfect system. They used to get shit on all the time for the old system where someone could speed run cheat their way to rank 1 in 1-2 days. So they tried cutting it into tiers. This way, is mildly annoying to the ADHD peeps, but the rest dont generally have an issue with having to wait a week to move up a division, and etc etc, meaning it will take somewhere between 2 & 4 weeks before you have a public Elo, making it a lot easier for people to sniff you out as a cheater before you end up on the leaderboards. Without the tiered system (which I definitely have some issues with still), someone could make an account & speedrun their way to #1 in a day or 2, and before anyone even really knows who they are, they are 1st. No system is perfect, and because of that, we have a system that frustrates 1% of the players, to protect the other 99% from someone gaming the system.
Stutri2du
I review every round of duels I think are sus!....sometines, I can tell immediately from the players mechanics that they are just better than me! or in one round just lucky....It is usually fairly easy to identify when the movement/ mechanics of assessing the info/pin placement/micro adjusting off 5k/ weird pauses etc indicate cheating. To be honest, I have found that GG have acted pretty well when I have reported players, often getting back to me within a few days with action reports in my notifications. Also when no action is taken (I assume as I don't get a notification), I accept that it's probably been reviewed and there is insufficient evidence/not guilty verdict which is fair.... If that player continues to generate reports, I'm sure they will investigate further. Anti-cheating software and specific gate-keeping algorithms are obviously the only way to go forward for them, as I think cheating is prevalent!....You can see it from the GG daily challenges!.... There should be a 1000 pros out there better at 5king than Blinky!! especially those in Silver/Gold (not all alts!) :) Amazing in B.R. Distance, that no one knows basic car Meta, or don't know they are in the Southern hemisphere, but they can pinpoint a small hamlet in Finland because of a nice road sign! :)
Dani
Stutri2du I take your point but in team duels it is so rife because cheaters aren't getting filtered out at lower leagues like they are in solo duels. It completely spoils the game when easily 1 in 10 games are scriptors. You basically have to stop playing at that point as the chances of queuing them again are high. I've reported so many teams and yes Geoguessr do take swift action but it affects things like our ELO, and win rate in addition to just being so annoying. I don't want to have to review such a high proportion of games or be playing games that I know my team will lose just because the other team are scripting. Having to review the odd one or two games fair enough, but at least 10% is crazy. The win rate also particular bothers me as the more that goes down, the less random other players will want to play with me. They need to do something about team duels as they are just allowing scriptors to bypass the checks they've put in place for solo duels.
Stutri2du
Dani just to reassure a bit, the last 2 duels I reported were team duels and all but 1 player got banned....(obvious scripting)..... But they were team duels, not solo (sometimes it's easy to work out the one scripting as they will pin the 5k or do it the other way drop their pin in a good region guess then ping the 5k for their partner. But agree 100%, it is completely ruining the game!
Tpebop
0: I agree with your frustration, but you're not offering a viable solution.
1: I am not giving my ID to GeoGuessr. They already have my credit card info, they know who I am. But what if it's a parent paying for a couple of their children's accounts? I'm not seeing how this is a good solution.
- Calm down.
- If you're a web programmer, you can do this yourself. If you're not a programmer, there are a bunch of scripts you can install with the click of a button. Generally, it's really obvious in the replay files if someone is cheating. The problem is getting them reviewed.
- They have an anti-cheat program in place, but sadly the lower tiers do get left behind a lot of the time. I've dealt with this myself and I agree with you, it's super frustrating. I think they can revise how they do the cheater reviews. But it's really not simple. I can go into technical detail if you want.