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Comment by cowthulhu | Hacker News Reader

I think a service like this is incredibly prone to false-positives and abuse, especially if you’re going to try to flag subjective things such as throwing or smurfing.

It also seems like it could be damaging, and I’m skeptical of this the “proof” in all of these proof-based accusations of boosting I’m seeing on the site. If I can find the steam ID of the owner of the site, I know who my first totally-proof-based report of boosting will be against!

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All the boosts had queued with cheaters.

I do agree though that this could have false-positives. Right now anyone marked as guilty a moderator had went through and looked at stats or a demo if not sure.

Which boosted ones looks skeptical to you?

Im wondering if i should have information about who reviewed the report and have something written up in steps taken for proof. Thoughts?

How do you tell the difference between someone being boosted by a cheater, and someone playing with their friend, who they don’t know is a cheater? I think the distinction to me is whether there is reasonable doubt. If a player has a VAC ban, sure, not much doubt there. But queuing with cheaters seems murkier! I’m not sure how you’d prove boosting by watching a replay, but I could be missing something.

Yes that’s a good question and something I’ll take into account when reviewing. TBH these reports are all the obvious ones. Like straight up aim lock or spinning. I basically just took people queuing with them because they 100% know they’re cheating. You’ll notice there are several that have “needs more evidence” and I personally viewed the stats and found them inconclusive. I tried a demo but it was expired so it got the needs more evidence status and I emailed the reported to add more context.

If there is someone you see that you feel is misreported I’m happy to explain or delete it if wrong. Maybe I need a “contest report” feature so you can make your case for why it’s a false report.

I think the concept is somewhat fatally flawed, so I don’t really have any suggestions about how to improve it.

I totally get that I’m just throwing a bunch of problems at you without providing solutions, sorry I know that’s not very fun to deal with. It definitely shows through that you are doing this with good intentions!

I hope you figure out solid solutions to the issues… if in five years I’m playing on servers that use a version of your system to do a better job of keeping the cheaters/griefers off, I will definitely owe you one!

All good I appreciate you voicing your opinion. I’m not 100% sold either but it’s worth a shot and I’m a new Dad so have had time on my hands and wanted to build something. Dealing with cheaters is also time consuming and frustrating.

Hope that I see you in five years too

Smurfing and throwing is totally subjective though. I've played on really bad days that someone could classified as throwing and then I regained rank quickly which someone could clarify as smurfing. I've also tried playing some moba and after my 4th game I got placed in their cheater purgatory. Why? No idea, I didn't even understand all the game mechanics yet. So yeah, I would totally expect grey area, even with human review of the demos.

These are all good points and I think you’re right. I’ll most likely get rid of smurfs and throwers as a report since it makes sense the grey area.

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