Ban cheaters on Daily Challenge
I'm tired of seeing people getting 25k with 0m on every Spot, any chance they're getting banned?
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Too bad you can't set something up for the 90% of us who would enjoy a brisk challenge and have paid their annual rent!
i don't believe the devs could prove someone is cheating. and i don't believe the rules of membership involve *not* getting 0.0 every time.
i don't believe anything can be done by the devs. many cheaters, i guess, are paying customers and GG is a business.
i believe the only thing and perhaps the best thing any of us can do is pity the cheaters and know that they are the losers even when they will.
Making me twice about bothering.
Thing is, what does it get them? Unlikely they will be known in person, no monetary value.
Locking out the leader board ?
Anyone who gets 0m should be suspect.
Do you notice that the 0m location is often not on the street where all the pictures are taken from because the street map doesn't line up to street view properly? Therefore if a user pinpoints a location off the street in google maps and ends up with zero m then they should be eliminated. That would take care of about 99% of them.
Usain Bolt's world record 100m is 9.58 seconds.
If someone beat him with a time of 2 seconds i'm willing to bet they are cheating.
That's what 0m results are ... 2 second 100m dashes...
only true way would be every one getting a random 5 locations, which obviously puts everyone on unfair playing level - but cheating could be made "impossible".
Came here to post the same thing. One person is doing it to market a Twitch channel. They are using two accounts (or more). Finding locations with one account, then rapidly going to the now-known locations with second account.
My recommendation:
Do this once, 7-day ban.
Do it twice, 30-day ban.
Do it again, account is blocked from Daily Challenge.
A screenshot from 26 april 21 at 18:48CEST.
I scored my first ever 25k on daily challenge with a good distance (only 25m over 5 locations) As far as I can tell #1, #2, #3, #4, #6 and #7 are impossible... You can know 1 maybe 2 locations immedeately and guess them pretty fast (it still would take some time to exactly pinpoint them) but nobody can guess all 5 accurately within a minute each... I feel like I should rank at least 3rd here... 🙁
I reported several of these players in the past already since they are mostly the same people doing it day after day... and I don't know why... You don't get a badge or recognition and everyone hates you for cheating on a daily basis and you can't even be proud of an achievement you didn't actually accomplish...
Hi,
just for the records... just registered myself and played the daily challenge, then I saw the leaderboard and now I think I'm deleting myself again. There's no fun in competing with cheaters that manage to pinpoint a drop like https://www.google.com/maps/@5.2261624,-74.5009225,3a,75y,90t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sqPhnRe1cdFjguHFnpKsfyQ!2e0!7i13312!8i6656
within 46 seconds.
Call me if you get rid of the cheaters 😀
At this point i want to emphasize, that all my hundreds games are not cheated except of two single proof-of-concept locations. My 25.000-points-world-map-game-in-15-minutes-score is really "hand made".
But with all the cheaters around i don't care about scores any more, nor i'm interested in competitions. This features become largly uninteresting under this circumstances. But that's ok for me because my fun is mainly to manage it using own scouting skills.
But watch out for this cheaters because increasingly some people use obscure URLs as their user names and distribute them at top of the score.
I bothered with it recently again once, just to get everything in the overview gold which looked nice. I will now never play it again for as long as I a member here. There are far better game modes to spend your time in.
Cheating mean you analyze the transferred data from the google API calls Geoguessr uses and requires for the game. When you analyze this data you can easily find the exact coordinates of the place in clear text.
By cheating you not rely on your own skills to find a place, but read it like after opening a envelope with the solution.
Even worse: if you do that automatcally you can get a high score even without looking at the game.
I do agree somewhat with Tjerk about these rural places that have very few clues and you're just driving along a back road somewhere. But I really love it when I can recognize an obscure place just from doing this game for years.
For example "You scored 18,000, the average was 13,500"
Or, "Among 10,000 players, you are in the top 20%"
Or, "You were 25 miles away, the average guess was 400"
This way it wouldn't highlight/encourage everyone who cheats at the top, but actually give players better information, and a real sense of how we did against the larger community for each map set and regardless of difficulty.
I think it's not about Googling which is not forbidden on the Daily Challenge (for me it's no fun with Google) but about the accounts, that use a bot or something like this to get the coordinates or that are playing with two accounts. It's really easy to find this impossible scores but Geoguessr does nothing against ist.
So I created a tampermonkey script to initially hide the highscores (daily challenges), previous winners (same), results page (same) and leaderboards (explorer and custom maps).
Results will only be shown once you click one of the horizontal lines (daily challenge results page), or on the All or friends button (all other pages)
If you want to try it out, install the Tampermonkey extension for your browser and get the script at:
https://paste2.org/6fEFKtfX
(Also let me know if I missed something or if you find a bug)
I usually try to find out where I am using Google Maps. In many cases I have to google locations like town names. Then I use Maps to find the place I started from. And if I have identified where I am but it is hard to locate it exactly enough to get 5000 points I use Street View to optimise my 'guess'. Else it would not have been possible without real cheating to get 25000 points even in Mongolia. But it often takes lots of time.
I hope that you do not consider this way of playing as cheating. It is some kind of detective's work. In Daily Challenge I do not have any chance to compete with real cheaters and semi-professional non-cheaters as 3 minutes are not enough for this way of playing.
However, I think it's fair to argue that what you do to get perfect scores does go against the spirit of the game, especially as soon as you start comparing your scores to those of other players who just stay within the Geoguessr window like you're (in my opinion) expected to.
Also, I do not think this game owes anyone a perfect score in every country. That requires a lot of luck in some countries. First you will need to get five good locations in a row and even then you often need to guesstimate the correct distance from specific recognizable points. In more than a few countries that will definitely take multiple attempts, but when you finally get it, I think it will be more rewarding than using Google and Street View to get 25.000 on your first try. I will never get a perfect game in Russia and that is fine by me.
Of course I realize that this is very personal and I am honestly not trying to attack you. If you are only playing by yourself then what you do is fine to me and I hope you're indeed having as much fun as I am. But on the other hand this topic is specifically about the Daily Challenge, where you compete with other people. There should be a level playing field there and we should be allowed to define "cheating" a little more strict.
Anyway, we should not get too worked about it because a level playing field is impossible. There are simply too many easy and undetectable ways to cheat. You can even find and install a Tampermonkey script within seconds and get perfect scores with a single keystroke. (I tried that earlier this week and let me tell you, it suddenly puts some of the godlike battle royale players in perspective.)
To sum up: if the Daily Challenge cheaters annoy you, the best thing to do is just ignore the game mode altogether. There are better ways to spend your time on this game than that daily parade of lackluster locations anyway.
This may suggest using Google (which probably including Google Maps) is cheating. But how they worded this makes it hard to be sure.
Using Google is considered as cheating by a lot of people as the game's goal is to find where you are only by using what you see in the game and the map, map that purposely lacks of a search bar. Now you can use Google like you want on single player games as it only affects you but in multiplayer this would be considered as cheating.
Another way of playing does not make any sense to me. I have got 1 free game every 24 hours. If I just guess where I am I do not learn anything.
Of course, if people play multi player games all participants should play by the same rules. But that's not sufficient. They also should have the same technical conditions. I have got quite a slow internet connection. I usually have to wait about 5s after each move until I have a sharp view again. This makes a 3 minute play very unrealistic to solve even when you use Google - Google Maps is not very quick in reloading, too...
If you stay within GeoGuessr window you do just have that small map window and not even Satellite view, do you? Most landmarks like trees are not included in that map. In Mongolia there are even lots of sand routes that are not shown as a road in Map view. How are you supposed to find out where you are if you are not even allowed to use Satellite view???
Surprisingly, in the low left edge of the map window you have a link to open this area in Google Maps, where you can use search, Satellite view and Street View. I used this link many times to finally get 25000 points in Mongolia in spite of being in regions where there are no landmarks in Map view. I do not understand why they include this link to Google Maps in their map when they do not want us to use it.
As for the map included in the game, yes there is no satellite view at all. Many official maps are bad because of those middle-of-nowhere locations and Google Maps itself is often lacking of data in many countries (or some places are just empty). Anyways if you play them in single player for the explorer mode feel free to use Google if you want, because some maps are indeed impossible to guess correctly.
In this case there is an additional factor because I had to read this thread to learn that some people think that using Google at all is cheating. I just thought that was the way you played the game. Playing a game of what I am going to call 'Naked Geoguesser' was quite interesting. It only made sense to me to play it on my own country (New Zealand) but it was quite satisfying to score over 24,600. I intend to use both methods and treat my scores as different categories.
That is really the answer to this situation. In just the same way that you cannot compete with Usain Bolt over 100 metres, you cannot compete with the people who are playing the game with different rules. Usain Bolt is not cheating, but unless you are also an amazing athlete you are not really competing with him. Just have fun playing the game your way and try to do as well as you can. Maybe have a friendly competition with someone you know is playing by your rules.
For those that do want to play the Daily Challenge it would be good to have a message at the end of the day that told you how well you did. Something like:
The Daily Challenge for March 22nd was played by 20,743 Explorers, each exploring the same 5 locations using the methods they think appropriate.
Your score of 19,423 was ranked 8,472 which places you in the top 44%
If you played Naked Geoguesser on the Daily Challenge you would have to be delighted if you got in the top 90% and beat just a few people, but that would still make it interesting to do as well as you could
Do you want to know what i define as cheating? Then follow this instructions:
- Press CTRL + Shift + I in your Browser
- Switch to the network analyzing tab
- Start a game
- Look for a GET request starting with GeoPhotoService.GetMetada?....
- Get the matching URL in the right window starting with https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/js/GeoPhotoService.GetMetadata?....
- Copy this URL in an other browser tab, save the result to disk and open it in a text editor.
- Search this file for address data and coordinates like
["213 Catarina","es"],["Cuernavaca, Morelos","en"]]],[[[["© 2021 Google"]]]],[[[1],[[null,null,18.93339638995654,-99.23590109399893]
That's all. No further effort has to be taken. The address (in this example "206 Catarina, Cuernavaca, Morelos") or the coordinates (18.93339638995654,-99.23590109399893) added in a google maps query will lead you exactly to the place the game started.
I don't understand how the game make sense for people in duty of work and family without using all methods of internent based open-source intelligence. And that means for me: common search engine based research methods are included.
(Analysing the api calls of course is'nt meant by this.)
Again, if you want to use google as an aid because GeoGuessr is too difficult for you, that's fine, but I think everyone should at least attempt playing unassisted as it is less forgiving, but much more rewarding.
The country/landscape (and region within it) where i'm landing is almost every time clear for me at the first view, that's no challenge. But my claim is to find the exact location even in the south patagonian pampa with only desert arround me. As near as possible, even a single rock as a orientation mark. And that efforts more sophisticated methods.
jm, we all know what kinds of searches you are making, don't be immature. I've made it pretty clear where I stand and why using Google, in my opinion, is not the way to play the game, especially in competitive modes.
Again, I'll say it a third time IF THE GAME IS TOO HARD FOR YOU, go ahead and use Google as a training wheels to look up restaurants or street names.
I'll even include this section of the GeoGuessr FAQ in case you're still confused:
1. Unlimited time, but using only the pictures and the map function on this site
2. Restricted time but the ability to use simple google searches
Unrestricted time but using google is much less challenging
Restricted time and no google is ridiculously hard unless you are an autistic savant
Even ignoring the handful of players who use sophisticated technological methods to make a mockery of the game, it is clear from their scores that over 90% of the people on the Daily Challenge are using Google searches. There is no other possible explanation for the level of scoring.
That is perfectly OK with me. The Daily Challenge is a Type 2 game, but when I am exploring maps on my own I am definitely a Type 1 player
For Type 1 players I have to say that some of the locations are a pain in the backside. Some clever twit that thought it would be a good idea to walk around a small flat island off the Dutch coast so that you couldn't see anything useful and couldn't get off the island. Fortunately idiots like that are in the minority.
I usually try to find out roughly where I am without using Google. I agree that it is more satisfying if you find out where you are without Google's help. But as (like Kevin McGrath writes) the game is too hard for me, I still have to Google locations quite often. I try to improve this but with maximally 1 game of 5 locations every 24 hours this is not easy.
Like jm I usually try to find out where I am as exactly ascpossible. When I know where I am but there are not enough landmarks on Maps view (which is the case for many remote places), I use Satellite view to get the location as precisely as possible. Unfortunately, the official locations are not that precise on many locations. So I use Street View to verify my guess. Such a game of 5 locations often takes much more than 1 hour (depending on the map you are playing).
Mongolia is an own category. There I usually have to use Street View just to identify the track I am on. Is there anybody out there who can identify locations in Mongolia (playing the official map) without Google's help???
Of course, there are places where googling a unique street name solves a game without effort. But in general, using Google does not mean playing without effort. On the one hand, Google does not seem to know many places by the name written on signs. On the other hand, most names are used on multiple places, and Google often sets players on a wrong track. So at least on many remote places even playing with the help of Google requires a lot of effort.
I notice the geography, the people, the buildings, and the signs if there are any in all places. Mongolia has a really strange language that resembles Cyrillic, but isn't quite. From all these factors I determine the place. And I feel damn good when I nail it.
It's not impossible. You just have to have a really keen sense for geography and languages and remember things you've seen.
I do recognize mongolian landscapes at first sight. Further more they use the same camera vehicle in the whole country. Fun fact: a couple of weeks ago i zapped to a docu channel in TV and when i saw the shown landscape i shouted out: Mongolia. Just from my knowledge aquired from Geoguessr.
And yes, using google does not give you the solution in an easy way.
I keep 2 folders of screen shots - 1 of cool-looking places to check out, and 1 of GeoGuessr oddities. I wonder how many other players do this.
Speaking of obscure, what game were you playing to land on Ambryn? I've never run into that place. Never even heard of it.
the problem is not to identify Mongolia. When playing Mongolia map, you know in which country you are. The problem is that you frequently start on a road or even a sandpath which is not included in Google Maps view. I finally got 25.000 points there, after many tries where I did not 'guess' exactly enough. In most cases I could identify the street / path ony by using Street View. Maybe I could learn to distinguish the roads when I would play this map often enough. But I cannot imagine anyone to get the 5000 points without using Street View as a helping tool.
Hi jm,
Ambrym (Vanuatu) looks nice but the crater lake might be a little too hot for bathing... I was on such jungle paths several times when playing maps like Christmas Island. But I would not have been able to localise it if I would not have known in which country I am - there is a handful of jungle paths there in Street View, and using it I was able to identify where I am. Without that tool ... no chance.
I land on sand paths and jungles or in a building all the time, and it's a real challenge figuring it out, but I often do. If I don't the first or second times I vow to myself I will remember those details for next time. I just find it really satisfying to be able to suss something out that way.
Ah, Ambryn is in Vanuatu. Thanks for that info 👍
When you see the map or satellite in Google Maps, you can additionally activate Street View. It is the panarama views which we use for playing GeoGuessr. Additionally, you can see blue lines (or points for photospheres) on the map/satellite view, which indicates the routes where you can find those street views. Clicking on those blue lines opens the street view for that point of the map. This helps locating the flags in remote areas. When playing GeoGuessr, I only use it for locations like remote places in Mongolia, where I see no other way to find out where I am, and for verification of my guess (as those locations sometimes are placed qute badly, which makes you lose points if your guess is too good...)
On Satellite View you can see many ways and paths which are not included in the street map. In Mongolia and on some jungle islands we might land on paths which are missing even in Satellite View. In cases like that you might often be able to guess the country correctly. But you probably will not be able to set the flag within a distance which will give you 5000 points when you are just using the street map, do you?
Without using Google search, I would of course not have known that Ambrym (with m) is in Vanuatu... If you want to explore it you might search for this island in Google Maps, activate Street View and klick somwhere on that blue line - and then you can walk around just like in GeoGuessr. The only problem with it is that you are not supposed to guess then, as you already know where you are. But you might have to wait a long time until GeoGuessr will set you onto that island.
Some players may call this cheating. For me it is more challenging to find out where I am using Street View than just to guess where I am. And I am playing just for myself.
As i said i'm not interested in playing the challenges. So our method will not conflict with players doing it in a more 'fundamentalist' way. If someone feels better to do so, fine.
BTW, dispraising other people playing the game in another way i see merely a matter of lacking personal character-building or a missing self-esteem.
1) Using Google with a 3 minute time limit
2) Using Google with a 6 minute time limit
3) Using no outside assistance with a 12 minute time limit
4) Using no outside assistance and no time limit
In all categories the challenge has to be completed by the end of the day.
If that is too difficult to program I understand completely, however if it is possible it would have the following benefits:
1) It would officially recognize that there is more than one way to play
2) It would give a daily challenge scoring against people in your own ideology
3) The numbers in each category would show how most people choose to play
Or if there is a way, I'd _love_ to see a video of how they worked it out in 3 minutes.....
However such a large percentage of people do follow the rules that the idiots who cheat are not really a problem. Let me describe my own score as an example
No. 1: I tried Poland rather than Czechia, missed by 464 km, but got 3,664 points. No 2: I saw a sign that a particular road went to Mendoza, knew it was in Argentina but guessed the wrong direction and missed by 230km. 4,287 points.
No. 3: Guessed Hungary instead of Latvia, missed by 1,069km to score 2,441.
No. 4 Thought the vegetation was European, tried Greece not Cambodia. 17 points
No. 5 I found a sign for somewhere I didn’t know. It sounded Spanish, so I guessed Mexican desert, but it was at the bottom of South America. 14 points
10,423 including a combined 31 for the last two seems like a disaster, but I doggedly went down the high scores asking for another 25 scores at a time until I found that I was about 1300th. However out of the 4,000 plus that had played at that stage I was in the top 30% If that score was comfortably in the top third of the field then the number cheats is a very low percentage.
Part of the problem is the fact that the top 25 scores are shown. It is as though the site is saying “Look, here are the cheats and the autistic wunderkinds.” It makes it seem as though there are more cheats than is actually the case.
It would be so much better if you finished the game and got a message saying “You were 1,986th out of 4,527 explorers who have played so far. That is in the top 44% of the field. Here are the scores that are closest to your own” Then you could be shown 25 scores. Your own score plus 12 above and 12 below. That would be much less discouraging for the average player.
I had a bad score today, but thought I would see if anyone else was worse.
My score was so bad it was 901st out of 934. The daily Challenge was saying that 2,379 explorers had played at that point, so it means that only 40% of the people who start the Daily Challenge actually finish the set. The rest just give up when they get a bad result on one of the locations
you say you're banning cheaters
so why they sitting pretty on a leaderboard?
I imagine that some cheaters are easy to spot. However some people who have played this game for years can be extremely good and it can be hard to differentiate them from the cheaters. At the moment I am not very good, but hope to get better.
I also initially thought that using Google was the way you played the game when using a time limit. I had not been using it when there was no time limit just because it was more interesting. However, for the Daily Challenge I used Google for a few weeks due to ignorance of not realizing it wasn't allowed. I am glad that I found this discussion because it was someone else's comment that made me realize my error. Now I follow that rule and am enjoying the game just as much
I play scrabble both in real life and online. I have played for my country many times. My real life ranking is better than my online ranking, because on the computer I sometimes play while watching TV or talking with friends and so am less focused. However I still play well enough that many players have hissy fits and call me a cheat. They seem to lose all logic when they get that idea into their heads. Telling them to look up my national ranking so they can see my face to face ranking is better than my online ranking has never got me even one apology and I have been accused of cheating hundreds of times.
BTW I am blond with no colored relatives that I know of, but of course everyone has colored relatives. You just have to go back enough generations
1) Googling - if you spend time on Geoguessr and Geoguessr Twitch streams over a period of months, you should be able to get around 20,000 (plus or minus a few thousand) on the Daily Challenge quite often without any Googling and without having memorised every bollard in the world (learning the Cyrillic alphabet may help). I once got over 24,500, but this was astonishing to me. But there is often enough information to get two or three 5000s or 4995s on a particular day's Daily Challenge.
2) Leaderboards - invite your real life friends and family, and people you meet on Geoguessr twitch streams, to be friends on Geoguessr (you search their profile name, and when you click on it there is a green "Add as Friend" button at bottom right). This way you can see how they are doing on the friends leaderboard (difficult to access since the Oct 2021 updates - often you have to refresh the page once or twice as it tends to show the main leaderboard by mistake at present). I have 9 people on my friends list, and usually 3 to 5 of them do the Daily Challenge on any particular day.