Planet M.U.L.E.

Joined a game today hosted by "akire1".  Had one other human player and one AI.  I had a relatively high ping (400), and noticed considerable lag during land grant and auctions.  After 3 turns, the game disconnected.  The same three players rejoined to start another game... again, I was experiencing a fairly high ping.  I offered to host the game, but "akire1" said no.  I should have suspected something at this point.

The game proceeded through round 8 - with a few predictable lag problems associated with the latency problems.  I was in the lead, the other human was 2nd, the AI was 3rd, and "akire1" was 4th.  At this point, "akire1" kicked the two human players from the game (verified from the game log).

I noticed that "akire1" finished the game in 1st place and has established a very impressive 13 of 14 win ratio of 94%! And, as of this writing, "akire1" is ranked 3rd in this week's Top Ten (with an overall ranking of 44).  Curious as to whether my experience was a rare occurrence or not, I checked the results of the other games played by "akire1".  He's hosted the last 12 games in a row and, of course, won them.  In all but one instance, "akire1" finished against AI's only... the human player(s) were kicked mid-game after "akire1" had fallen behind.  In short, "akire1" has posted 13 victories, but only one time did he win a game with another human remaining after the last auction.

As for me, I have two "Abandoned" games for today's effort. 

I've read lots of discussions about highlighting bad hosts and realize that's easier said than done.  There are occasions where a host has every right to kick another player, and there certainly are accidentally dropped games that have added an undeserved "abandoned game" to our records.  The rankings aren't perfect and other players have posted good ideas on how to address some of the issues.  However, when we have a player intentionally and obviously cheating to pad his or her record, there should be some way to let the rest of the MULE world know about it.

I obviously won't play with "akire1" again - and hopefully no one that reads this post will either...  but what about everyone else?

Mean Jim

Hi Mean Jim,

I agree with you.

I think he hardly can loose a game.
I played with him one match (I hosted the game) and if he didnt grab his favorite plot he disconnected.

You can see at the statistic of him that he almost play as a HOST and mostly with 2 AIs and a noob-player.

He is playing for ranking not for fun.´I guess.

Flotti

No one who has a number in their name should ever be trusted.

Perhaps a moderator can examine his games and if it is determined he is a cheater for score, ban his IP from Planet MULE all together!!

if anything this has gotten more blatant since this thread opened. i'm glad i checked my ping before committing to a game with him today cos i totally forgot what an awful person he is.

what happens when more people replicate his behavior in pursuit of ranking? it is already difficult enough to get a game going what with ppl refusing to play noobs or if they can't have the color they want.

can nothing be done about bad hosts?

Our plan is to re-work the current model and replace it with a dedicated server hosting and managing all games, so no player can take advantage of a "hosting privilige" anymore.

This will however take some time and likely be implemented in PM1 only after we tried the new model for a possible successor that is currently in development.

If a particular host is so universally deemed unscrupulous, why can't they simply be banned?

Or even more simply, why can't they be banned just from hosting games?

If only there was a way to give recognition to honest hosts. Most of the hosts would get a thumb up from me. Suspicious hosts could be identified just by checking their "thumbs up" -statistics (thumbs up vs. games hosted).

Believe or not, akire1 was just awarded with silver Player of the week badge. Personally, it makes me sick.

Simply adding statistics and basing your rank on the number of human players that finish a game would eliminate this problem. It would be a big help to other players. We could easily see who likes to play 4way games from those who dont so we can more easily pick who we would like to play with.
My opinion is any game that doesnt finish with 4 players shouldnt be included in any awarded rank system.
Then the Akire1's of the world will be forced to play 4way games to have any rank.
People will say there are some who will drop out to spite the other players and keep the game from being rank. Well this also hurts them and we will quickly learn who these people are and choose not to play with them. Also, 2way and 3way games can still be shown in a player's statistics.
I would like to see rank base on 4 way games that all players have finished
Percentages of 2nd, 3rd and 4th place finishes of players.
The number of drops/abandonments and a way to have this not count if all players decide to end a game before its complete

In case anyone was wondering what happened to our friend "akire1", he apparently chose to retire after his successful game on March 23rd (against two AI's and a first time player who quit in turn 3).  "akire1" posted an impressive record of 51 wins in the 52 games that he played, achieving an overall tournament rank of 9th place and earning one weekly Silver badge in the process.

The day after "akire1's" last game, on March 24th, a new player arrived on the scene with precisely the same method of racking up victories as "akire1".  "uschi" is presently 1st for the current weekly top ten race and is overall 19 of 19.  Of those 19 wins, 10 were achieved with zero humans still playing at the end of the game. 

Oh, and if the method of play doesn't convince you, "uschi" even assumes the same chatty nature previously displayed by "akire1", which is to say he starts the game with a "hi", followed by a "gl".  Nothing else is heard the rest of the game.

Just another public service... if you didn't like getting kicked out of "akire1's" games, don't join a game hosted by "uschi".

thanks!

Hello,

I just wanted to take the opportunity and drop a line here to let you active players know that we are following things around and see the issues at hand.

It's a bit sad (but not unexpected) to see these stuff happen, so we really focus on making things better for competetive play in the currently recoding of the underlying network version.

PM is meant primarely for fun play and the meta-score is currently only a very basic add-on.

To bring MULE to a true competetive level, we need to work on several things, whereas a stable, dedicated network code + a much more sophistaticated ranking system (as discussed here) are the two major points.

So don't judge our seemingly silence on this and related topics as a sign of resignation, but rather a sign that we are spending all our time actively working on a major overhaul of many of the points raised and proposed during the 4+ months of PMs existance!

Thanks for all who participate in the process to make MULE even better!

the dev-team.

Would like to make note that along with akire1, we have a bot holding top spot this week, "uschi"

Annoying!

Throwing my hat here too, he just did it to me as well.  Do not play with this guy.

There's plenty of legitimate ways to fix games, there's really no reason for this BS.