SMG Studio

I'm great at the game of RISK when I play other people. I usually win.  When playing against your computer I win. I have played SEVERAL GAMES with "live" people at my rank or below and have never come CLOSE to winning.  I'm not going to play Steam Risk until the cheating problem is solved.

I've never heard of that one, and as a player it's hard to say what's going on.  If it's a bug it will likely happen at a seemingly random point in the game.  If it's a hack, it will likely happen at a critical point in the game.  But it's very hard to tell with some strange events whether they're bugs or hacks.  A good hack could look like a bug, and a bad bug could look like a hack.

Wow @Mark ,

Thanks for your statistics: I never thought about the % to meet two granmasters in the same game, and, let me say, you are right. 

I'm playing this game - and I love it 'cause when I was young I was kinda addicted - for about one year (more or less) . About cheaters: I met only one time a guy who did double his army in a country at the end of turn. Just one time. Most of the time I met double-account-one-persona cheater type that you described. 

Then there is another issue that many people think is cheating but I'm not sure. Can be a bug: it's when your turn expires immediately and you are not able to do your move and system deploys your armies on behalf of you. Reading this forum I notice that many users met this problem .  

What do you think? bug or cheater? 

Agree on the privacy concern. I think one thing SMG could do is to build a battle log for users. Something like "most common player you're in battle with." This would easily give away the cheaters. 

And for non-cheaters, it's a great stat to see how many games you've played against your kid, SO, or parent. I would love stats like that. And if you do know that someone isn't a cheater, to see what that rivalry is like. 

I've definitely learned a lot from this forum. First, I never play GrandMasters now (I'm at Master level). No point unless it's 1-on-1 with bots but even then, it's a crap shoot since it's all luck rather than strategy. Anyway if there were more player info, I really believe that will help a great deal.

Aurelio,

I get what you're saying, but that idea has some serious privacy/security problems.  I, for one, would not want my IP address or my location to be made public like that.  Furthermore, there are still many devices that are not GPS enabled.  In fact, the device I use to play risk is not GPS enabled.

There are other ways to keep cheaters out of your games.  This is what I do:

1) I always host my games.  This gives me complete control over who can join.

2) I never play novices.  This stops most of the two account type cheaters because often one account will be a novice and the other will be an expert, master, of grandmaster.  It takes longer to get games going this way, but the extra time is worth it because it helps avoid cheaters.  Furthermore, I would do this even if it weren't for cheaters because most novices play like fools and often ruin otherwise good games.

3) If players join my game at the same time, I boot all of them except the highest ranking player.  More often than not, the high ranking player will leave too.  I'm even suspicious of players who join within 10 seconds of each other.

4) I never allow more than one player at or above master class into my games.  The probability of randomly running into more than one player at or above master class is roughly 0.00000484.  Master class starts at around rank 11,000 and according to SMG there are over 5 million players; (1.1*10^4 / (5*10^6))^2 = 4.84*10^-6.  So if you see more than one player at or above master class in a game, they are probably cheaters.  However, this isn't necessarily true if the host is a master.  I myself am a master and I always want another master (or grandmaster) in the game, but it's rare that I actually get to play against one.

Doing those four things will keep most cheaters out of your games.  Of course all that does nothing against the hack/cheaters, but they're much rarer than the two account cheaters.

It would be so easy avoid cheaters  if one would be able to see geo location and ip address of his opponents.  When one human uses 2 characters they must have in common at least one of these these two  things.  Now every devices is GPS-able so should be very easy implement this feature. 

I have 1 primary rule I live by when it comes to who I will play Risk with and who I will allow to join my hosted games:

*  It doesn't matter if I am hosting or joining someone else's game...if I see a Grandmaster in that game, He is booted out if I'm hosting.  However if I join someone else's game, I just simply get the heck out of it or don't confirm my play..  Don't care how legit or not he is.  Not going to waste my time on a game that has a better than average likelihood of cheating going on.  

*  I used to also give the boot to anyone at the 'Master' level as well, but am more tolerant of that level now since I changed my game strategy of only allowing 1 human person to join me and the rest are the A.I. so in that way, it would be impossible for them to play 2 different accounts in the same game.

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