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When a player is found to be a cheat...

...why aren't ELO points awarded back to the victim like it used to be? It's incredibly annoying playing classical time control competitively because 30% of the players are cheaters and you won't get your ELO back if you are a victim of a cheat.
I just played and lost vs a confirmed cheater and no points were awarded or subtracted in the first place.
@Eliobonor, because I play classical time controlled games usually around 1900-2200 ELO. This range (and higher) is infested with cheaters.

@Physis, was the cheating autodetected? I'm talking about simply losing the game to a cheater, and then reporting him. It used to be the case where if the player you reported was found to be cheating, you would get your ELO back, but as far as I'm concerned, that's not the case anymore.
In my opinion such things are messy. If you lose to someone whose ELO is illegitimate, it's a pain, yes. But their illegitimate ELO reflects the strength of their engine use in a way. It's worse when someone sandbags around 1400-1500 and uses an engine to crank out a perfect endgame, imo, because you are effectively losing to someone of a much lower ELO and thereby losing a lot of rating when they suddenly become a 2000+ player late in the game. If they're rated fairly high (1900+) due to engine play, the lost ELO is likely not much different than if you lost to a legitimately ranked player. Unfortunate, but not truly rank breaking is it?

The other sticky thing is what about all the games you play in between reporting them and them getting flagged? If you play 15-20 games in between, should all of those 15-20 people also have their ELO adjusted based on what your ELO should have been? And what about the other 15-20 people they played? And so on? It gets to become a tangled mess of ELO adjustment whenever one person is awarded points back due to a cheat.

I'm not condoning the cheats, by any means, nor attempting to make light of the situation. I think it's terrible that people cheat, and therefore also terrible that legitimate players lose ELO rating because of cheats. But the matter is tricky. We aren't dealing with a cheater in club matches or tournaments, we're dealing with an online community where ratings are intertwined much farther out than a few handful of people that play rated games once or twice a month. It makes it far more difficult, I think, to make those sorts of adjustments. It may just be easier to take it in stride and accept that ratings are inflated due to ease of accessibility to rated games when we're not really prepared to play rated games, and due to cheaters. As such, I don't think awarding points back really serves to balance what is already naturally an inflated rating...

I don't know though, maybe I'm wrong.
I must say, I don't understand why you would want to cheat. Money? No. Kudos? No. A sense of superiority? Hardly. On the other side of it, as there are none of these things for me either, I don't worry too much about losing to people even if it does mean occasional losses to apparently much weaker players. So what? It would be nicer to know that all of your opponents were sports, but c'est la vie.
"I play classical time controlled games usually around 1900-2200 ELO. This range (and higher) is infested with cheaters."

Where do you play chess? I've played in tournaments since I was a 9 year old kid and this has never been my experience. Cheating is very rare, in fact I don't recall having played a single game where my opponent seemed to have cheated.

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