Anonymous Games

[Batsman]

Are there clear ethical guidelines regarding anonymous games?
Particularly, the practice of inviting another player to join an anonymous game and telling them which country you are?
Do we want to strongly discourage this, or can't we be bothered? What do people think?

Of course, setting anonymous games to random-distribution-of-country makes such practice more difficult.
But still, two people joining such a game and intending-in-advance to ally with each other could give each other a code-word to look for.

Does anyone feel strongly about this?

[BlackAdder]

Batsman,

Yeah this touches on something I wrote about in another post called player validation.

Whats to stop me from making 3 accounts and joining an Anon game and supporting myself, or whats to stop 3 friends from doing the exact same thing. Right now the answer is nothing, but also the fact that people who do cheat probably would get bored of playing and just sod off after a while anyways. I mean seriously whats the challenge/satisfaction in cheating?

There are ways we could stop this from happening.
Create a "Join Anonymous Game" button on the home page....sort of a quick join option. You set the options beforehand of the type of game (Orders Once/Day, Twice/Day etc). The server would create a random anonymous game with 7 people who havent played together in the past and who all have roughly the same rating. (See Ratings and Rankings threads). This would make sure you arent playing with your friends/own dummy accounts.

Implement an option limiting people who have joint wins together in the past x days from joining the same games.

Implement some of the other things mentioned in the player validation thread.

Cheers,

[Batsman]

Thanks Bl'Adder, sounds like some cunning plans.

I've noticed that when I build a winning alliance with a player, towards the end of the game we get to talking about what new games I or s/he are joining. It's only natural - people you feel you can trust are like gold. But it strays into unethical territory, especially in anonymous games I suppose.

Restricting players who have recently played together from playing again for X days is problematic of course for private groups of friends who just want to play each other regularly. Perhaps only public games could be counted towards player rankings/ratings. (Still trying to get my head around your post on that - made me feel anti-distinctly-minty-monty like Prince George.)