Deranking

[trb]

Sorry all, I search the forums and saw a handful of posts but nothing that answered the question I had, so I figured I would post it here.

Just had a game deranked, and was wondering...

1) Are there rules posted somewhere that I can familiarize myself with what happens in deranking?
2) Is there an appeals process if your game was deranked (and you weren't the offending party )

Thanks!

[Zosimus]

Let's take a simple scenario. Let's imagine that Germany and France are being run by the same person. The negotiations from each of these people are pretty much half-hearted. Between themselves there is no communication at all (What's the point of writing to yourself?). Additionally, they log in from the same IP address.

Germany and France quickly beat the stuffing out of England and then go after Italy together. This is strange behavior. Someone complains and a moderator investigates. He quickly works out that these two people have multiple highly coordinated attacks with no in-game communication and that they have the same IP address. He bans them and considers that the game has been so tainted by the cheating that it is deranked.

You, playing Russia, have benefitted greatly from this. You took over Sweden and Norway while England was getting creamed and made good progress against Austria and Turkey while Italy was getting beaten up on. But now, the game is deranked. What does that mean?

It means that you'll still probably win, BUT you won't get any rating points for that win. After all, without the cheating, it's entirely possible that you wouldn't be in nearly as good a position as you are in now. Doubtless you feel that this is unfair. Perhaps it even is unfair. But, as far as I know, there is no appeals process. The game will proceed as an unranked game.

[trb]

Your scenario makes sense. In the game in question, I think the positions and outcomes could be read differently, but I could see it as totally plausible that an admin would still consider the game to be tainted and derank it anyway...I'd just like the opportunity to make a case for consideration, if possible. If that's not a thing, so be it.

[WarSmith]

Sure - no problem at all.
I was the admin who deranked the game.
Put basically the cheating people (2 accounts controlled by one person) had negatively impacted the game for at least one of the other players - and that isn’t fair and shouldn’t impact anyone’s ranking.
You are welcome to write to the Cheater-Hunters group in PM and ask an alternative Mod to review the game in case I made any mistake.
All the best,
WarSmith.

[Nanook]

If you think a game has been unranked unfairly, you can PM the Cheater-Hunters group and make your case for why the game should remain ranked.

Please keep in mind that we tend towards unranking games where one or more players has been directly adversely effected by cheating.