I agree that cheating is definitely a concern, but most of the people who get to worlds are not the cheating type. I think that many of your points are valid, and I also think that most teams won’t cheat. Also, since the possibility of cheating is always a possibility, you have to consider that when you have a virtual event. But I agree with @Nathan_Rossi in that many of the cheating methods will be hard to get away with, especially as the stakes get higher and more people (and referees) are watching.
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I sadly have to disagree. Last year the top team in the state was caught cheating. They ended up being disqualified from the season and having their trophies from that tournament revoked. Any of the teams in our org know that at least one other team in the organization cheated, but that team didn’t end up admitting it. The team that got away with it ended up qualifying for worlds. Top teams, sadly, do sometimes cheat.
Someone could easily put the bottom rim of their perimeter goals 0.1" above tolerance undetected, and have a much easier time de-scoring than they would normally have. It’s very hard to enforce that unless the full field is inspected before every attempt, which would be very time consuming if many teams choose to do the skills event at worlds.
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Obviously there are a million possible ways to cheat, I’m guessing the most common ways will be the laziest ways. If any one type of cheating proliferates, it’ll be the goal tolerance stuff. I think it makes sense because that’s the stuff that teams might be able to get out of by claiming ignorance of the issue. If you’re taping the balls down and someone notices, you’re 100% screwed when it comes to claiming innocence to some degree. You’ll have a lot more at stake than one record run.
Edit: Anomalocaris, we’re basically thinking the same thing I think.
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Someone (at the top level) wouldn’t do this to avoid a ball getting hit by a stray ball and moving; they would do it to ensure 100% consistency in the field setup every single run, and to negate the risk of a ball rolling away from the robot when trying to intake it. It would not be done to account for messing up, it would be done to minimize the chance of messing up, which is why it would be extremely hard to catch.
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In my personal opinion, cheating will be no more of an issue at worlds this year than it is in any other. I’ve been now to 3 virtual skills events, and I can say that most of your concerns are non-issues.
- Driving during auto
a) It’s clear when something is driven rather than programmed
b) You need to tether to the brain prior to the run
c) There are a fair number of teams with 126 in both runs already, so I don’t see this giving an advantage to a team even if they were able to pull it off - Illegal components
a) Inspection exists for a reason. It’s pretty clear when something is using non-VEX parts, and inspection would catch practically everything - Field specs
a) If a ref thinks a field has been messed with, they could request a team measure their goals or whatever they need to do to prove it’s in spec. I’m fairly confident if there was an issue with our field during the CiTC events, Nathan would have brought it up and requested it fixed. - Prerecorded runs
a) Just talking with the team beforehand should prevent this
b) Everything will be recorded, so identifying a jump cut should be pretty easy
c) I’m pretty sure VTOW would see a jump-cut and call it out in real-time, in fact - Magnets
a) Once again, it would be obvious on video if something was afoot with the game objects
b) You’re not gonna be able to do anything meaningful to prevent scattering of game objects and have it not be obvious to at least someone watching
I think I’ve covered all of your specific points, but to state again, I do not think that cheating will be a significant issue at this event. There will be cameras recording everything, and too many eyes will be on the fields for anything of substance to slip through.
I just want to point out that at the very top edge of the tolerance, there is already 0 resistance when removing a ball.
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Very easy to prove - just give someone your code and have them run it on a clawbot. If it moves in the same general pattern, it’s clearly a valid run.
Uh, very hard to manage.
Then… require good enough camera quality to be able to see the field?
I disagree. Seeing as it’s in a live stream, and there would be a million ways to mess it up, no one would run a
cost-benefit analysis on this and decide to try it.
This would be VERY easy to detect upon replaying the video.
this is a good point, technically it isn’t illegal to open that gap to the maximum allowed tolerance, so I suspect this will become standard among live remote matches and remote skills runs. you get an advantage over a perfect field, but not an illegal one.
because of this, teams have nothing much to gain by opening the rings even wider, since the balls already slip cleanly out of the goals at maximum tolerance. So even if teams do cheat in this manner, it really doesn’t give them any advantage over goals that are pushed to their legal maximum.
obviously there are still going to be ways to cheat, but the best solutions to cheating is not to try and catch it in every way you can, but to make cheating not advantageous. (for example, encourage teams to open their goals to the max tolerance. now everyone has a legal even playing field, and nobody is incentivized to cheat their field because it will give no advantage)
now, I’m not sure how you would do this for some of the mentioned things, since modifying motors and that kind of this will give an advantage and will be relatively undetectable. But I think this kind of cheating will be rare.
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You act like we haven’t already been setting our goals to the max openness for our skills runs. Perfectly in tolerance, easy peasy for us.
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I agree that there is certainly ways for teams to cheat. While some good points have been made above, there is no way to guarantee that teams don’t cheat. At the end of the day though, the goal of vex is for students and participants to learn. Virtual worlds is far, far from ideal, but it’s apparently the only available option rn. If teams want to cheat, then that’s their decision to attempt it. Grant has made it clear that teams can try, and potentially succeed, in cheating, but providing the option for students to learn and engage is worth far more than a few misguided teams. While this is certainly frustrating, especially for an extremely competitive team such as yours, it’s just an unfortunate year. Recf could cancel, but they’re at least giving teams a chance to compete in some way. They’d rather give most teams at least some opportunity than restrict the few teams looking for unfair advantages.
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The way I see it, worlds this year –– like last year –– is more of a privilege than a right. What I mean is that we’re lucky to have anything at this point because just last season there weren’t even physical robots for worlds. If only there wasn’t COVID, then the elite standards of worlds could be properly upheld.
So, even if someone manages to make a custom gear cartridge and keep the color of the cap the same (which would be undetectable), it wouldn’t necessarily matter. It’s unfortunate to say that, but the fact of the matter is that worlds this year is meant to preserve the tradition and give seniors their well earned worlds experience (and of course reward all the other hard working students).
I think Vex has more to lose than gain by hosting worlds (to some extent at least) because they have to fund the whole event and organize everything (which costs money and effort and risk (?) –– I’m not a logistics expert though). Vex could very easiliy just conclude the season with the world skills standings (and have some way to allow any team to register with a verifiably high score), and reveal the next game. But they aren’t doing that.
Just my two cents…
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Literally the whole premise of this thread is to assume the worst of teams in the context of the RECF Code of Conduct.
Let’s stop this before everyone goes out of their way to assume the worst of behavior to find “loopholes” etc for Worlds …
@DanMantz is this the behavior you expect of teams to consider coming to Worlds 2021???
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And before anyone else responds to this thread: T.H.I.N.K. before posting!
Cheating should never be a topic taken lightly.
Mvas, you’re saying exactly what I’ve been thinking for a long time too. I’d add:
Especially because we’ll never get to compete in person, which is half the fun. They’re cheating themselves by investing the effort to cheat at something that doesn’t really matter in the long run. Or in the short run, because there are no real competitions to go to.
… a coping mechanism in case they still haven’t been able to get over missing it last year!
Everything to lose and nothing to gain from their perspective…
And… We’ll all still forget and stop worrying about missing Worlds in like 3 years.
But!
If we have Worlds like normal, the RECF gets buried under terrible PR (if they even got away with running the event anyway), tons of kids get coronavirus and spread it all around the world/US, and we all risk possible respiratory/brain damage from having coronavirus.
“At least it’ll be memorable”
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I’m confused about why this is bad, please clarify. You can talk about cheating without becoming a cheater yourself. If you can’t resist the temptation, then you’ll probably find a loophole very quickly anyway. We can safely assume we aren’t convincing anyone who wasn’t already planning to cheat to do so now…
Again, I’m confused. Is this bad? Aren’t we allowed to discuss the rules? We aren’t planning to break them by talking about how they can be broken.
Tilden’s idea was to improve things by potentially exposing the loopholes…
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Perhaps my bad, but should you not be focused on playing the game vs this topic “cheating at Worlds 2021”
Now if the topic name is a mistake - sorry for me to read literally what the topic name is and interpret intent of this thread based on the name … perhaps a new topic name or category.
That said - OP came up with ways to “easy ways to cheat…” My initial position stands - none of the items in OP were jokes, but ways to gain competitive advantage over other teams in order to win … For novice teams reading this topics to gain unfair advantage over teams who did not read this thread. For teams who are novice and read this thread, they may think it is ok to explore the dimensions of " Cheating at Worlds" is ok…
Either case, I am thankful not to be hosting events with this attitude it is ok to start with the premise : Cheating at Worlds…"
Good luck with your season.
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The point of this post was to explain how flawed the Remote Worlds system is.
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Rename it then - otherwise the title says differently