Ranks and ranked games

[Artis]

Cheating with fog/shroud would be nearly impossible to prevent unless you are going to disallow observers for all ranked games.

Players should have the option to disable observers even without ranking games.

People have found ways to win at Halo, World of Warcraft, and the list continues ad infinitum.

Win at a game you say?
Reducing cheating in turn based games is much easier then real time games. Take the Kiseido Go Server for example, you can:
* mess with the clock (a result of lag-compensating clocks)
* escape (but eventualy you loose the game)
* use computer assistance
Wesnoth isn't really all that different, so if there are no lag-compensating clocks and timeouts are sensible all cheaters can go is improve the AI and thus improve single player Wesnoth

Now if someone is willing (and able) to write the needed code and server load are very different questions.

[Darth Fool]

Cheating with fog/shroud would be nearly impossible to prevent unless you are going to disallow observers for all ranked games.

Players should have the option to disable observers even without ranking games.

People have found ways to win at Halo, World of Warcraft, and the list continues ad infinitum.

Win at a game you say?
Reducing cheating in turn based games is much easier then real time games. Take the Kiseido Go Server for example, you can:

Of course, Go is an information complete game. Wesnoth isn't. It is possible for one player in wesnoth (even without fog) to have information that the other doesn't. Also, Go doesn't depend upon random outcomes. So, a GO server is not a very good comparison.

[Elvish_Pillager]

It is possible for one player in wesnoth (even without fog) to have information that the other doesn't.

It is, however, not possible in the absence of Fog, Shroud, Ambush, and Nightstalk.

You may not be able to easily tell how much gold the enemy has, but since it is calculable, not having that information when the opponent does is similar to not knowing what units are on the map because you didn't look at the screen.

It would be nice if you could have an actual information-complete game setting, without the inconveniences. (no fog, shroud, Ambush or Nightstalk, and display gold on status table)



I think I'm going to create a macro to use in all my maps that makes Ambush and Nightstalk not work.

[Artis]

Of course, Go is an information complete game. Wesnoth isn't. It is possible for one player in wesnoth (even without fog) to have information that the other doesn't. Also, Go doesn't depend upon random outcomes. So, a GO server is not a very good comparison.

Go is a much better comparison than a MMORPG or FPS. A real time game, even with the server doing all physics and visibility calculations (poor server), leaves the door wide open for computer assisted play, think aimbots and automatic gold harvesting.

[turin]

Cheating with fog/shroud would be nearly impossible to prevent unless you are going to disallow observers for all ranked games.

Players should have the option to disable observers even without ranking games.

Which they already do. WTF is your point?

my point is, unless you are going to disallow observers, trying to prevent all cheating is an unattainable goal. Not that I am advocating disallowing observers for ranked games - I think that's a horrible idea. Instead, we should accept that a cheat-free system is impossible, and just do our best to make cheating hard.

[Artis]

Players should have the option to disable observers even without ranking games.

Which they already do. WTF is your point?

That players can choose how much possible cheating they expose themselves to (as oposed to the other player having all the info no matter if observers are allowed or not), that and I hadn't really noticed that option

Instead, we should accept that a cheat-free system is impossible, and just do our best to make cheating hard.

In practice there isn't much difference, making it hard to cheat involves removing known cheating possibilities.

[turin]

But as I said, there is a huge, obvious cheating system, the observer one, that we CAN'T resolve. Unless someone has a brilliant plan for solving it that won't remove the possibility of observers from ranked games...

Anyway, I guess my main point is, security is not a huge deal. We're not playing for money. Preventing cheating is nice, but we don't need to waste time trying to stop it when we could be doing more useful stuff...

[Gwain]

2 ways i tought for the observer point, they can be smart (maybe) or stupid (probably :p )

1)limit one the game lobby to one Specific IP at a time (basically i mean that no one with the same IP could connect twice to the same game)

or

2)when observing a game, the observers could only see the units that are in LOS (line of sight) for both players (tricky, not appealing, but can't think anything better).

[chains]

Username and password is optional for the server to start storing game stats. All we REALLY need is a marker next to user names who have played 10 or less games on the server... sure it would be annoying to have someone steal my usernames... but its already annoying when that happens!

We shouldn't let cheaters distract us from new development. Sure someone might cheat in a rankings system. But a ranking system could be extremely straight forward to implement if we do it like everything else has been done for wesnoth. Make a functional prototype and evolve it from there.

So what if someone cheats and makes themselves the number 1 player? Annoying yes, but not a big deal. The point of a ranking system isn't to be the ultimate arbitrator over who the best Wesnoth player is. Although that feature is a nice one, more important is a very simple tool for matching games. I have played hundreds of games, and if this is someone's first Wesnoth game the server should tell me so before the game starts.

We don't need to worry about RNG's or Encryption schema for WML... all we need is a username and password login and registration system via ssl, and the server needs to store the victor and loser of each game. (It would be nice if it stored every detail of each game in a database that was searchable by players, as this would make balancing wesnoth easier and playing the game more fun. However, all we really need is an icon next to user names that haven't played 10 games on the server before... that does not require passwords... if you change your username your marked as a newbie, if you use someone elses you aren't. No one cares if thier username is stolen now. Eventually it would be nice to see a ladder system built into wesnoth and an automatching system for playing on that ladder. But all we really need to know is "Is this guy who just joined a complete newbie, or has he atleast played the tutorial?"

[Weeksy]

chains, just ask "have you been playing long", or start games with people you know.

[Thrawn]

why resurrect a 2 year old thread for an idea that gets brought up monthly?

A rating system is pretty much an FPI already, and has been discussed and rejected many times recently. I'm sure a quick search for "ladder system" or "player rankings" will get you several similar topics.

As such, this thread is Soft Locked, until chains can respond, at which time I'll either lock it or re-open it.

@Chains: please do some research on other topics with similar ideas, and show how you are adding something new.