Conspiracy theorists and the Downraters
Conspiracy theories (and theorists), the world is absolutely full of them.
JFK assassination, 9/11, moon landing hoax, are probably the most notorious modern day conspiracy theories. They have a lot in common, like most conspiracy theories, they fail Occam’s Razor, they’re not falsifiable, they’re not support by industry experts, they defy logic, they demand too many people stay silent.
They just don’t make sense.
In the online poker world, the newsgroups and forums are full of conspiracy theorists. Same old story, person deposits money, person looses money, person can’t accept he is a losing player, person blames site. What’s even funnier is the conspiracy theorists keep depositing money onto the site they think is corrupt.
It doesn’t matter that various poker sites have published billions of hand histories, and poker enthusiasts have run the hand histories through every statistical analysis possible. Every test demonstrates that everything falls in place where probability suggests they should. Aces are dealt as often as they should be, pairs, connectors, suited holes cards. Everything.
It doesn’t matter that individuals have statistically analysed their own hand histories. Hundreds of thousands of hands, and once again everything falls perfectly into place. There is no conspiracy, at least not at the major poker sites.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t dishonest sites and people, there are. Check out the Absolute Poker scandal, if you’re interested.
Conspiracy theories have now made their mark on the GMC and YoYoGames. The basic premise is games are deliberately rated one star, instead of their true rating from one to six stars. They even have a name for these malicious gangs of cyber thugs; Downraters.
The theory being, deliberately rating games poorly, Downrater’s games will have benefit by higher prominence Or, in contests by downrating, your game has a better chance of winning. Like all conspiracy theories, it makes a little sense to the causal observer, but upon closer inspection, it just doesn’t make sense.
Now before anyone gets all excited. I’m not suggesting at all that there aren’t mean spirited people who deliberately give low ratings. But there just isn’t enough of them to have any meaningful significance on games that deserve attention.
Like the poker players who can’t accept that their losses are because of their own poor play. It’s easier for game creators to blame poor ratings on others then their own games.
September 14th, 2008 at 10:53 pm
Unless of course, your game happens to be rated 4 times before even being played.
September 14th, 2008 at 11:53 pm
“Unless of course, your game happens to be rated 4 times before even being played.”
Are those the only 4 ratings you expect to get? Did you consider the psychology of rating games? People never rate objectively. Their decision for the rating is based at least in some part on the rating it currently has. If someone comes along and sees a game that they like with a low rating, they’re more likely to give it a higher rating than they would otherwise. They’ll try to push the rating in the direction they want it to go. Ultimately your game will get the rating that people think it deserves. Welcome to democracy.
September 15th, 2008 at 2:23 am
Every poker player is aware of these conspiracies. The funny thing is though that as well as losing players having these conspiracies, I also see some winning players thinking these same things at times as well. Some people just simply don’t grasp the concept of variance, they can’t comprehend that with the amount hands that they play that at some point of playing they may lose 10 allins in a row or something .
Another problem people have is that they don’t recognise when they are getting good luck. When people are on a good streak you tend to quite naturally not notice it as much and also you think to yourself ‘it’s normal, I’m a good player, I should be winning, I’m owed luck’. Along with people only documenting when they have been unlucky and not mentioning when they have been lucky as much, it’s gives a massive overall negative skew in the poker community (of course rake gives a negative skew anyway).
The most common conspiracy theory that I am seeing at the moment at the site I am on, is the one of the ‘withdrawal curse’. A lot of people, including some that I know are farely good winning players, have got it into their heads that when you make withdrawals from the site that it curses you, probably based upon their conspiracy logic that the poker site doesn’t like you withdrawing and deliberately targets you. As well as the fore mentioned reasons I gave for why people start to believe in these conspiracies, this particular one also has the added boost that it occurs after a particular documented event.
Now whenever people make a withdrawal they will be specifically looking out for contracting the dreaded withdrawal curse, and the few unfortunate that get hit by the negative variance bug will scream out ‘arrrrrrrg I’ve been infected, I‘m never withdrawing from this rigged site ever again!’.
September 15th, 2008 at 2:50 am
Deftly applying Occam’s Razor, I posit that these low-rated games exceed normal levels of suckitude. That said, more •–• •-• — •••• •• •- ••• please.
September 15th, 2008 at 3:35 am
What’s that Morse code looking garbage, xot? RRTHIAS?
September 15th, 2008 at 9:39 am
“What’s that Morse code looking garbage, xot? RRTHIAS?”
Multiple dashes are being munged into single dashes, making cut and pasting of xot’s code into a translater imposiblle.
Having said that, here you go xot.
http://blog.nakedpaultoast.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/spyvspy_2.jpg
Note the code on the bottom of the upper left panel.
September 15th, 2008 at 4:30 pm
Ahh, Prohias.
September 15th, 2008 at 8:18 pm
I have to say, I agree with almost everything that you’re saying, NPT. Most of the people on the GMC and YYG are probably just kids (who think they can make great games with their eyes closed) and they can’t accept the fact that “Hey, I spent a lot of time on that game! Why is it rated so low? Better blame those dirty downraters!”
Now, I’m sure there’s some legitimacy here (once in a blue moon) where other members actually DO downrate games to get their own game higher, etc. When I had originally posted some of my own games on YYG, they got surprisingly low ratings (around 3 or so) when I thought they deserved more. But as time passed I realized exactly what Yourself said: it evened out. Now a majority of my games are scored around 4. Democracy at work!
Just while typing this, another thought ran through my head. Another reason that people would blame downraters is just because they don’t have the patience to wait a few more weeks or months for the game to get more popular and recieve higher reviews. If a good game is given a bad score, I have no doubt that after some time passes it will right itself and get fairer reviews.
Eh, just felt like ranting. Side note, what does Prohias mean?
September 15th, 2008 at 9:50 pm
The Answer is 42. What is the question?
September 16th, 2008 at 1:06 am
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September 16th, 2008 at 3:22 pm
Doh! pwned by the filter. Thanks, NPT!