Speed Records and "Cheating"

[compuspud]

What's really sad is that some people have to cheat on a simple game. They have no pride, honesty or class.

[hootmon]

Still waiting for someone to explain how this cheating takes place. To me, the sad part is that the players who are not as fast or competent assume that anyone better or faster than themselves is cheating. If you do not have an answer as to how cheating is occurring, please refrain from making accusations.

[Dunderchief]

Still waiting for someone to explain how this cheating takes place. To me, the sad part is that the players who are not as fast or competent assume that anyone better or faster than themselves is cheating. If you do not have an answer as to how cheating is occurring, please refrain from making accusations.

You mischaracterize compuspud and others -- they are not saying ANYONE better or faster is cheating, but certain individuals must be as their times/scores don't seem possible.

Take yourself for example: over 1048 games this month you have an average score of 779, where highest possible is 800. This score over this many puzzles is not remotely possible in a random selection of puzzles that includes longer and harder puzzles. I think I know what you are doing, which is to keep hitting the "Play" button until you get an easy puzzle. Is that "cheating"? Well, I say no because the game itself lets you do it. But it isn't straight play either, where you play whatever puzzle you get by the random selection.

I wish Admin would disable this ability for anyone playing in "competitive" mode. I have said this before. It would eliminate most of what people are calling "cheeating" and it would go a long way towards making the scores straightforward. (However, if someone is playing NOT in competitive mode, especially newbies, let them keep this option while they are learning.)

As to other "cheating" schemes, I also take issue with your assertion that no one should mention it w/o showing how the cheat is occurring. Non-computer geeks would not have a clue, but still have circumstantial evidence of at least irregularities. "Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.". Henry David Thoreau. So I for one am keeping an open mind, although it might just be that some have found other tricks or techniques allowed by the game to enhance their performance. Also some have worked an unbelievable (to me) number of puzzles and might just recognize far more clue answers than the average solver finding the puzzle cold.

I am one of the original players on this sight way back in 2012. I am still in the top 100 all-time list, although I have slipped all the way down to 74th bcz I quit playing in competition mode a long time ago, bcz the scores stopped being meaningful but yet I am too competitive a person to ignore them and was therefore spending more time on this game than I really wanted to. But I know what I am doing here. Thus I empathize w/compuspud and others who say that something "fishy" is going on here!

[Bullwinkle311]

Is there a way to pause the game? Most of my poor-scoring games are due to walking away from my laptop for any number of reasons. Other online games can be paused, but I've never figured out how to pause Acrostics.

[hootmon]

Pausing the game would be gateway for what many posters are talking about: cheating. If you could pause the game, you could then easily look up answers to the clues. That is the only reason needed to keep it from happening.

[breldan]

I just saw this comment thread on the side of one of the puzzles and I haven’t read through it all, but I can say that I got a record time-yesterday I think. It was on a puzzle that I had completed only a couple days before and recognized. It was easy to fill it all in from memory once I recognized it. I’ve always assumed that the people who keep showing up with the record times have done the same thing. I can’t imagine spending that much time on something I consider a time waster, but to each their own.

[sewaneesue]

I have poor vision, so I choose acrostic puzzles that were solved in less than 650 seconds. This way, I can enlarge the words for easier reading. I would also like to be able to pause play, because I never know when there will be interruptions. I do not know how to pause. I do think that persons who have very low scores have played that puzzle before. I am 73 years old, and don't remember the quotes! So, it's like playing a new game every time. Sue Vaughan

[compuspud]

It's not just that they plated the puzzle before. They have to be cheating. No one can solve 40,000 puzzles and never miss one. No one can solve more puzzles than they worked on, but two people have.

[stewartp]

At one point, i had completed more puzzles than I had played. I don't know how or why that was. I was also the fastest solver for a long time until others figured out how to game the system. I never really cared about either issue. Now I just enjoy solving puzzles.

[briang]

Hi everyone,

I've been playing on this site off and on for a couple years, and I've always done so as guest. In that time, I've had plenty of time to see the handful of accounts that routinely finish ~1000 second and greater average puzzles (the only ones I typically play) with virtually impossible record times well under 200 seconds and with 100% solving rates.

I consider myself an extremely fast crossworder (sub-10min Sunday Times) and acrostic solver, and I typically feel like I have done quite well to even get within 100 seconds of these scores.

That said, lookee what just happened today, now that there are tons of new puzzles. I just completed this 25 clue puzzle in half the time that one of these notorious "super solvers" did.

Screenshot_2020-10-16 Acrostic Puzzles Congratulations.png

Sure this is circumstantial evidence, but it's for someone that on all the old puzzles scores always outrageously better than this, has a 100% solve rate, and whose records I have never beaten in the past. This strongly suggests to me that Kellnerin et al have access to some kind of database, either self-compiled or hacked, with all the old puzzle solutions in it, and cannot solve the new puzzles nearly as quickly. Incidentally, I also have been setting records on about 90% of my plays on these newer puzzles, something I never managed to do with the old ones.

This is actually surprising to me, since I took a look at the publicly viewable PHP code the site and noticed what would seem to be an extremely trivial way to generate false times without knowing any of the answers, and I had always assumed that the cheaters had exploited this weakness.

I won't go into detail here, since I don't want anyone trying to exploit it, but suffice it to say that the way that the site checks the validity of the inputted answers is NOT very secure.

[sewaneesue]

briang, aren't those blue letters New Record beautiful? When I first started playing several years ago, I saw them frequently. Now - nevermore. I'll have to go with the flow regarding changes. But Acrostics is my favorite word game, and the hours fly by, such fun.

[rsmcclain]

Very interesting comment, briang, and it explains a lot. Now I have absolutely no respect for these supposed "record times" Thanks for your simple explanation.

[LMood]

I stopped playing competitively a few years ago because I wanted to work on some longer puzzles, and at that time the scoring system penalized you for doing so. The new scoring system dis-incentivizes only solving short puzzles.

That said, I have thought about how you could cheat to get the incredibly fast times. The only thing i could come up with would be to open a puzzle, take a screen shot, then close it. With the replay option you have, I believe, ten minutes to look up the answers. Then you can reopen the puzzle and simply type them in as quickly as you can.

[PatienceCrabstick]

Every single competitive online game has cheaters. Every single one. It shouldn't surprise any of us that there are cheaters here.

8 or 9 years ago I was pretty addicted to the Free For All matches in COD Black Ops. I'd play for hours every day. Fun times! Except when one of the cheaters showed up. These guys were somehow able to hack the system to make themselves invisible within the game, meaning they easily killed everybody else in it while taking absolutely no damage themselves.

Based on their rankings and what other information the PS3 network gave, I could see that each of these cheaters had hacked through literally hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of matches this way. All of that time and effort put in, and yet in reality these cheaters achieved nothing, had no skills to boast of, etc. All they accomplished was to ruin the experience for everybody else in each and every match they showed up in. Sociopathic behavior, pure and simple.

As for those players gaming the system here (and we all suspect who they are), I think they're more to be pitied than anything else. But I do wish they'd either cut it out or just get out.

Rant over!

[sewaneesue]

I am a baby boomer, 1946, and not tech savvy. So, don't understand what LMood wrote - screen shot, close it, replay?? I've always believed that the lowest scores are attained by the player having played that particular game before, remembering the exact quote, and quickly typing the quote. Why would someone go to the trouble of hacking games, when no one knows who they are and there is no money involved? Sociopathy could be an explanation, Patience. I just hope that I can continue enjoying playing Acrostics.