Competitive Gaming

For those interested in competitive multiplayer games on a more formal and organized level there are some unofficial options that are made available by the Wesnoth Community. Have a look to see if anything fits your shoe, and please help us keep the list updated by adding/removing alternatives.

Ladders

• Ladder of Wesnoth

A 1 vs 1 ladder that uses an Elo rating and allows the Default era.

Reacurring Events

None at the moment.

About cheating

The Facts

The following is true for all games that are played remotely & multiplayer in Wesnoth.

There is currently no method to guarantee that a persons doesn't cheat in multiplayer. Some of the more obvious ways to cheat are:

• The editing of save files, granted they're used to load a game.
• Observing the opponent with another instance of Wesnoth running, which of course only matters if you play with fog and also allow observers into the game.
• Creating and using a version of the game that gives any kind of imaginable noticeable and unnoticeable advantages. Since the project is open source this only requires some programming skills and the will, as there is currently no way for a normal and official version of the game to know for sure that it's connected to another official version.

Knowing this makes you able to take it into account when participating in or arranging competitive events. As seen, the system as it is today doesn't offer a 100% certainty that your opponent(s) don't cheat. With that said it's perhaps also true that most players you'll come across don't have the skills to deal with the more advanced ways of cheating, and it might be the case that most cheaters are easily discovered if you watch a replay, know the rules of the game and have a decent idea of what the opponent is up to on the map. After all, the game math is known by all of us and all large deviations will get noticed.

Effects on competitive play

It's hard to know the exact effects that these kinds of problems have on the competitive gaming. For some players this is more than enough to not engage in competitions. For others it doesn't matter, since they them self don't cheat and trust that most players don't. There are only two sure and interlinked things we can say about the phenomenon:

• There a few that cheat.
• A great majority doesn't.

The logic behind those statements lead us to a conclusion that tells us that competitive gaming is fully possible in Wesnoth and that it should be considered as a serious option by those interested in it. Most games will be legit because of the following reasons:

• Discovery - The most common ways of cheating can be spotted and/or prevented.

• Knowledge - A really small minority of the players have the knowledge and will to alter the source code in order to cheat.

• Your psychology - If you stumble across a cheater and don't discover her/him, it's not sure it will really have an affect on you since you're not aware that he/she cheated.

• Cheaters psychology - There are very few people that play a game for a long time if they're in the need to always cheat when things get rough. Their victory is almost a paradox - they cheat to win, but know them self that they didn't. Most cheaters quit the game pretty fast because of that and other self-evident psychological facts.

• Effect - Even if you don't discover cheaters the number of times you'll play against them are relatively limited, making their overall impact on your gaming experience small or non-existent in the long run.

Resolving Cheating Disputes

These are two suggested actions:

1) Submit your replay to the administrator of the competitive framework (ladder or tournament admin, etc).

   If an RNG cheat was used, speak with Dave about implementing the anti-cheat code.

2) If your replay is different from your rivals: One of you altered a replay, and its impossible to know who. As the admins of the competitive framework can not tell for sure who is being honest in this case, they can simply record that the game's winner was disputed by both parties. While this gets you nothing as the victim, anyone cheating in this manor more than once will effectively be "caught". As his or her disputes pile up no one will accept matches with them. If the competitive framework uses some kind of identification the cheater will have to create a new account and spend spend time on getting his/her rating back.