Moving forward, new flash gaming tournament structure

Hoc Poeng on Sunday, May 30, 2010 9:10PM

It’s been a constant battle trying to maintain the integrity of Ningin’s flash game competition against cheaters. In the end, I know it’s going to be a losing fight for many obvious reasons. As long as we reward awesome and unique prizes like autographed collectibles, we’re going to keep drawing cheaters into our community. I’ve realized this for awhile now but hoped that it wouldn’t be too big of an issue. Well hope as a strategy didn’t work out and I’ve been thinking about how to re-structure the current WG/2PM Decathlon and all other future flash gaming contests in the future. I don’t think there’s ever going to be a perfect solution, but doing nothing means no more Decathlons or any prize associated with our games. Anyway, I’m going to get into detail about a lot of stuff here including a completely new structure for giving away prizes from Ningin games. It’s going to be a good read for all Ningin users!

First I’m going to talk about the history of cheating on Ningin. It’ll help you understand all the changes I’m making to our flash contests.

The cheating started with the very first Decathlon, the DBSK Decathlon. Sadly, I didn’t realize that cheating was even a possibility in flash games until the Super Junior Decathlon. Even more sad, two of the three winners cheated their way to their DBSK prizes. They’ve since been banned.

The Super Junior Decathlon brought dozens of cheaters. Their cheating was so obvious and flagrant, it made them easy to spot and ban. The funny thing is that if there was only one or two cheaters, I might have never noticed. But because there were so many, it forced them to submit ridiculous or mathematically impossible scores. They were using this hack that allowed you to tamper with the scores of the game. I banned a bunch after Day 1 of the Suju Decathlon. Banned more on Day 2 and I think the last of the hacker cheaters were removed on Day 3.

The data I got from these hackers helped me create scripts to detect future cheaters in the Suju Decathlon. At first I thought my methods were too sensitive as a bunch of Ningin users kept getting flagged as cheating. So while there were a bunch of accounts (including high level Ningin accounts) suspicious to me, I didn’t want to ban people without concrete proof.

That’s something I want to emphasize here. I don’t ban/disqualify people, high or low level accounts, without concrete/undeniable proof that they cheated. It’s sad that so many people reached that threshold.

Anyway, I started recording IP addresses and PM’ing people whenever they received high or anomalous scores asking them how they got their high score. That’s when I found out two new forms of cheating: game bug abuse and having multiple people play one account.

The game bug problem is relatively easy to fix compared to the multiple people/one account problem. Some of you might have noticed that I removed about 25 games from the Tournament list because of bugs that I found or those reported by users. By the way, you guys have been great in reporting game bugs. Please keep it up as it’s really helping me!

The biggest problem and current #1 way to cheat is multiple users playing one account. And it’s not just low-level users doing this which is why I’m very, very disappointed. One of the players I caught yesterday was someone that I also caught in the Suju Decathlon. She was a high level user so I was being nice and disqualified her from the Suju Decathlon, but didn’t ban her. But I guess cheaters will always think it’s ok to cheat if you let them go. She’s banned now. Some people might think it’s not a big deal if a brother and sister play together or two friends work together. The problem is that a lot of people don’t do this and there’s very valuable prizes at stake so sharing your account gives you an unnatural advantage. So I take sharing of accounts to be a very serious cheating offense. Cheating is cheating, there is no such thing as serious cheating and less-serious cheating.

So now that you guys understand the dilemma I’m facing, here’s my new flash gaming tournament structure:

- All physical prizes will have some element of randomness now. In an ideal world, it would be great to have a system that rewards the best gamers. While that system would make the best players try their best, it also gives incentives to cheaters to cheat even harder. We’ll still give out pins to the top 20 scores of each day of the Decathlon. Adding an element of randomness makes it so that even if you cheat all day long, it doesn’t mean you’ll win.

What is this element of randomness? Well the math is pretty complicated so I’m not going to get into it nor do you really need to know that level of detail. The method of choosing a random winner is designed to encourage two things: submitting a lot of high scores, and submitting a lot of scores in general. We’ll use this to figure out the daily winners and probably future types of tournaments too.

- All the Decathlon prizes move into the random pool. All of them. In total that’s 12 items (and thus 12 random winners) - 9 Decathlon prizes, 2 original random prizes, and 1 poster from Day 2 that was added due to cheating. Again, you have to play at least once everyday to be eligible and you can only select things based on your level. Since the standings don’t mean anything anymore, I’m not going to update it moving forward.

- Your first IP address is the only one that will count. This means, the first computer of the day that use you to login into Ningin and play games with will be the only computer you can use throughout each day of the Decathlon. All other scores submitted from other computers or different IP addresses will not count towards the scores we use for giving out prizes. They will still get recorded and they’ll be used for determining the top 20 and pins. I understand that this may inconvenience some of you (especially those that play on public computers or on dial-up accounts), but it’s a very important method for preventing account sharing.

You might say that this doesn’t prevent siblings from using the same computer, but we actually have a method for detecting that too. I admit it’s not fool-proof, but two accounts were caught using this method! However, even if people do this and don’t get caught, having the prizes be random negates a lot of the need to do that.

So that’s all the big stuff. I’m sure most of you will like this since it gives everyone - even the not so great gamers - a chance of winning. It also does a lot to prevent cheating. Most importantly, you guys can just have fun and not worry about cheaters. Second most importantly, I can also not worry about everyone being a cheater.

Even though I’m making all these changes to the Decathlon, I’m thinking this WG/2PM Decathlon will be the last one for awhile or possibly ever. The main problem is that if you cheat on Day 1, it carries over all the way to Day 10. So the cheating effect is compounded. In it’s place, we’re thinking of doing shorter 1-2 day events and possibly making tournaments based on EXP.

If you read this far, thanks =)

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