In the current domain league (Domain 1) there is all kinds of dirty and dishonourable play going on. Not only are many players avoiding many others even though they are scoring higher than them which is incredibly lame by itself, I've heard from reliable sources people are actually buying and selling wins. Because of these folks, the rest of us have to win every freaking game while playing mostly against the scarier opponents (most of the rest chicken out and try to catch easier prey) to have a chance to win the league.

Is there anything that could be done about this or must we just accept it or not play domain?

If someone tries to bribe you to throw a game please let us know. It is cheating and we will deal with them.

Jed, why not throw in a sweetener.
You get all the cards the cheater would have got in the domain. Then EVERYONE would be on the lookout for such cheaters.

Me still saving up for domain.

i completely agree that such behaviors in Domain should be nixed. That being said, I'll freely admit that I've been aware of or even part of such things before. As have some of the people posting in this thread.

There have been times when someone has lost a match they would have really won, because they had already lost enough matches to put them out of the running and their opponent stood a chance of getting money prize.

There have been times when one player decided to give up a win in exchange for gold or cards, in essence, trading their domain points for gold.

There have been players (one who posted in this thread) who have sent pm's selling games for gold.

Until now, there has been no rule posted defining what is or is not considered cheating in Domain. There has been no rule saying that such acts were against the rules.

Now that is is clear that there are rules for this, I propose the following:

1) remove the resign option from Domain games
2) post specific rules that are agreed to when one signs up for domain that outline what is or is not cheating
3) post consequences for cheating, probably the loss of the money/cards you invested/got from domain

_________________

Altren wrote:

I agree with Keyser, and that's what I'm planning to implement actually.

|| The Rise of the DCC | Plasmatium Netherious | Tastes Like Chicken | The Astridian Conspiracy ||

Guild -> | Platypus Rising|

The league format just needs to be changed to stop incentivizing bribery. Even if there are detailed rules specified, there will still be a problem of proving conclusively that someone has 'cheated' in any way.

Regardless, to suggest that jed has no legal way to somehow punish 'cheaters' is laughable. I have no opinion as to whether jed should or should not punish anyone this time round, but he certainly would have legal methods if he so chooses to do so.

Where is the rule to define it as cheating? I know that this is your game, jed, and you can do what you please with it, but making up rules in a forum read by only like twenty people is not a good (nor serious) thing. I've read so many posts on this forum in the last couple of weeks where people try to help out defining what is to count as cheating but until there is at least the blueprint of a TOS/EULA this will just be idle talk. Although I won't do it, I could just throw all my games. There is no place where there is a rule against this, as far as I can tell...

What is most silly about this is the way that many top players actually asked me to drop domain games against them when i started playing domain. They knew i was there only to get the cards and not actually to play any games (I don't like domain games and never had). But they thought I could just give them easy points anyway. That is sad.

There are some great people in this game and I am sure that many of them are willing to help out with things like a TOS/EULA. I've said it before and I will say it again: Ask for help on the forum and I'm sure you shall receive it.

Voices.
There is a TOS/EULA under review by Jed as we speak.

_________________

Altren wrote:

I agree with Keyser, and that's what I'm planning to implement actually.

|| The Rise of the DCC | Plasmatium Netherious | Tastes Like Chicken | The Astridian Conspiracy ||

Guild -> | Platypus Rising|

I had completely forgotten about it, but Keyser reminded I am guilty of selling 1-2 games in some historic domain league as well. I am ashamed of myself now, but at least I never bought any wins.

It's true it's not stated anywhere that bribery in domain league is cheating. However, it's also not said anywhere that the prize money will always be determined by the number of points, and only by it. Also nowhere it reads that Jed can't take away some points from someone at his own discretion. The case for buying wins being cheating is pretty clear, because it will let you score higher without doing any better in your matches. I doubt many people would complain about a small punishment for this, for example losing part of the prize money. The case of selling wins is a bit more complicated, as throwing your games won't work for getting high on the score table. There needs to be a rule for this.

I propose some tweaks to the format that would partially solve these problems:

-Remove all the names in the league room and replace them with something like "Player 001" (numbers in joining order) in the score table, so that there is no way to know who's looking for a game or who has even joined the league and who has how many points / played games. The list of players who are in the league room at the given moment should be empty, in case this was left unclear.
-Add some way of asking for league games anonymously. For example some button that broadcasts a message in the lobby: "A player is looking for a domain X match". Or even better, have the button send an anonymous pm or an email - if they have subscribed for it - to every player who is in the league.
-If these changes would make it harder to get all 20 games played, the number could be reduced to 16 or 12, and instead add 1-2 more tiebreakers to every interval.

EDIT: improved and clarified the proposed changes to the format.

Another thing that would help discourage getting the 1st at any costs, would be tweaking the prize money distribution, making it more even:

Let's say there are n players. So the amount of money in the pool is P(n). Let's mark the amount the last scoring player gets by a. I would suggest making the payout as follows: every player gets k*a, where k is their placement counting from the bottom (last one would be 1 and 1st n), where a = 2*P(n)/(n(n+1)).

Explanation: n(n+1)/2 is the sum 1+2+3+...+n. Thus a+2a+3a+...+na = P(n), the money in the pool.

Introducing a set of rules will discourage the less courageous to participate in a culture of bribery. But bolder people will still be able to find other bold people to make such deals, and there would be no concrete way of conclusively proving that anyone is participating in the act of corruption. We are all free to give away our own cards and gold no? We are allowed to resign anytime we want no? As much as rules can bring about justice, it can also bring about injustice. The last thing the game needs is for players to accuse each other of cheating, to create an air of suspicion, for there to be reason to punish people when there are no conclusive proofs of anything. I wouldn't say that rules are useless, but I don't think they're necessary for us to solve what is fundamentally the problem.

The root of the problem is that the league is initself a broken system. I've said time and again - it incentivizes bribery. What seems morally suspect is arguably just good business sense. Even if you define rules, or make it harder for bribery to occur ala headshot's make-it-more-anonymous suggestions, it doesn't change the fact that bribery, when it happens, will still warp the format. I don't like headshot's suggestions at all, because I think it doesn't necessarily solve the problems even at the surface level. Making the league more anonymous seems to make the system more shady, not less. I would suggest that instead of trying to 'fix' the broken system, we rebuild it from ground up, retaining what we want about it and change everything else so that it no longer incentivizes bribery.

One of the reasons why the system attracts many players, is that it is the only way to buy cards from only a single domain. It is also one of the reasons why the system encourages bribery. What do people do with games they can't play, or they think they can't win? They sell them! The solution to this particular problem, obviously, is to allow players to buy cards from specific domains from other venues.

Domain is also where there's "2000 gold extra in the prize pool". The system is really profitable. One solution is to make it less profitable, but what all that is required is really to make it less _directly_ profitable. Note how many anonymous (alt accounts) players are at the top of the league. The system rewards player only with gold, and no fame, so it actually also incentivizes anonymity. Being anonymous means your opponents have no idea what your true strengths are when they are playing against you. I suggest that the league should be less directly profitable by making it a part of a grander scheme of things. Perhaps the top X players of the league could go on to get a certain amount of league points, which would go towards qualifying them for a grander (say, quarterly-held) tournament. That tournament would be free to enter and would command a greater amount of rewards, including even more prestige, with custom avatars, medals so on and so forth.

If the above scheme sounds too grand, there are plenty other methods to achieve what its benefits are, which is that it makes minute cases of bribery less format-warping. Sure, someone can bribe another to get into the bigger tournament, or another person could give up his spot because he doesn't want to join the bigger tournament and get something in return. The point is that if we can reduce the impact of bribery when it happens, then it will cease to be a dire issue. Bribery can directly decide who gets a lion share of the prizes now, which is why it is so rampant and so troubling.