So many people are cheating nowadays. What happened?

@KMcGeoch said

However solution is quite simple since if you play honestly all the time you'll win about as many games as you lose and your rating will reflect your true strength.

A completely erroneous statement (I see that you made this erroneous statement not as your main idea, but as a secondary one; but it has already been quoted; it is definitely impossible to leave such an erroneous statement without refutation; after all, many people who understand very little about the topic actually think this way; and here they would read this erroneous statement as confirmation of their erroneous opinion; that is why I am writing this refutation)! It can be proven in a bunch of simple ways. For example, like this. There is, for example, a cheater who really plays due to his rating of 1800. But he wants to show results at the level of a rating of 2400. And he cheats. And his rating fluctuates around 2400 (for example 2325-2475). And he, for example, wants to play with people with a rating of about 2400. And so he plays a lot of games with people with an average rating of 2400. And he will score about 50% of the points. For example, 5,000 points in 10,000 games. And vice versa. There's an honest player. He plays at a realistic rating of 2,400. And he likes to win a lot. So he plays against players with a much lower rating. For example, they have an average rating of 1,800. And he beats them by a ratio of about 27:1. As expected with a real difference in strength of about 600 rating points. That is, he (his level is 2,400) scores about 96.5% of the points against them (their level is on average 1,800). That is, out of every 100 games, he scores about 96.5 points against them. That is, out of every 10,000 games, he scores about 9,650 points against them. The first player (with 50% of the points scored) is a cheater, incredibly brazen, and cheats regularly. The second player (with 96,5% of the points scored) is a completely honest player who never cheats.
And this is based on a 600-point rating difference. You can choose opponents with a rating much lower than that, not just 600 points lower. For example, 1000 points lower. The expected score against them (based on the rating difference, which is exactly what it means, mathematically) is approximately 250:1 (not approximately 27:1, as it would be with a 600-point rating difference).

"if you are perceived to report non-rated games you could be shadow banned for doing so on the whim of a mod", writes @boombox2000.

Absolute nonsense. I don't even need to explain to sensible people why.

@KMcGeoch said

However solution is quite simple since if you play honestly all the time you'll win about as many games as you lose and your rating will reflect your true strength.

@Inventor_1 said ^

A completely erroneous statement (I see that you made this erroneous statement not as your main idea, but as a secondary one; but it has already been quoted; it is definitely impossible to leave such an erroneous statement without refutation

It looks like your whole argument is quoting mining me with a straw man argument while ignoring context in same post. My comments refer to anyone who plays using default match up e.g. via quick pairing against a similar strength opponent. This is specifically mentioned in quoted post

@KMcGeoch said ^

However when you realise matchmaking pairs you against similar strength opponents it gets a lot worse.

It looks like instead you've gone on some wild tangent about people being consistently paired against people 600 points below them that has nothing to do with what I posted. Sure people can play Stockfish at strength 1 if they really want to win but that's not what I mentioned. You can also argue that manipulating opposition to face opponents you'll always beat might not be a way to honestly find your strength and instead is rating manipulation. It's also hard to do with custom pairings since range is -500 to +500 with best range being -500 to 0.

If someone gets to 2400 using an engine and maintains that rating using an engine they're effectively a bot operator. If anyone gets to 2400 using an engine and then starts playing honestly when they're 1800 when facing 2400s they'll lose pretty much all the time. I don't think that's controversial. However once again if you read my post you would see the following refers to a specific cheater who claimed to sometimes cheat and sometimes play honestly:

@KMcGeoch said ^

Let's make the following assumptions:

1. The cheater doesn't always cheat (Reddit post claimed 1 in 5)
2. As a result of cheating the player's rating is 200 points higher

So now we have to see what part is wrong so there are the following candidates:

1. The idea that a 2000 rated player playing against a 2000 rated player will on average score around 50% based on ELO probability estimates.
2. A 2000 rated player playing regularly at 2000 strength will be rated at around 2000.
3. The idea that a 2000 rated player with a fake 2200 rating playing against a 2200 will on average score around 24% based on ELO probability estimates if playing honestly.
4. A 2000 rated player cheating to get a rating 200 points higher than their real strength would be rated at around 2200.

Otherwise the reader failed to comprehend initial post and went on an unrelated rant to refute something that wasn't even argued.

Irony is that there isn't even anything wrong with what was said in the "refutation" apart from quoting my post as the "refutation" had nothing to do with what I wrote in my post. If anything it's a bit like some AI answers where it doesn't answer question asked and instead goes on a wild goose chase or some rabbit hole no one asked it to.

@KMcGeoch said ^

@KMcGeoch said

However solution is quite simple since if you play honestly all the time you'll win about as many games as you lose and your rating will reflect your true strength.

@Inventor_1 said ^

A completely erroneous statement (I see that you made this erroneous statement not as your main idea, but as a secondary one; but it has already been quoted; it i...

No. You write something wrong, then something wrong, then something wrong.
I saw someone else quote your text. It's not just individual words, but several sentences. It's a complete thought. Absolutely wrong. A common mistake. It doesn't contain a single word of those qualifications you're talking about. It's a complete thought. I didn't even take it from someone else; someone else did. And I saw it from him. And I wrote a refutation. It's 100% correct. I even added something I didn't have to – I mentioned that this wasn't your main point, but a secondary one. No one is obligated to figure out for you that you're only talking about a tiny, tiny subset of the possible variations of how people play. Your statement would only be correct if everyone played the way you mistakenly presented it (if they trusted the Lichess system to always choose all their games). This is emphatically not true. People don't all play like that. People don't always play like that. Many people never even play like that!!! This is just one possible game type on Lichess. For many people, it's rarely used. Much less often than other options. And your statement would only be true in one case. If 100% of people played this way 100% of the time. You wrote a complete thought yourself. No one is obligated to look for "didn't you (mistakenly) write a clarification somewhere long ago that you'll then always write for this very rare case."
Your comment on rating manipulation is also colossally wrong. According to Lichess rules, people are 100% allowed to choose their opponents. Many people 100% play only with opponents they've chosen themselves. And they play 0% of their games against opponents Lichess has chosen for them. You were colossally mistaken in assuming that everyone plays Lichess almost exactly like you. No. Colossally not. This is just one possible game type. For many, it's not used at all, or almost never used.
And what does rating manipulation have to do with it? It has nothing to do with it! The example talks about a person's motivation: they want to win colossally more often than they lose. For example, to win more than 90% of their games. In what direction do you think they manipulate their rating? Do you understand that for some people, this motivation means a slight increase in their rating, while for others it means a slight decrease? Actually, for most people, it means a slight decrease in their rating. Chess is a very drawish game. Most people lose a little rating from games against weaker opponents. And gain a little rating from games against stronger opponents. But it's different for everyone. And the motivation is stated specifically—the person wanted to win the overwhelming majority of games, for example. There could be a whole bunch of other options with 100% legitimate motivations. For example, a person wants to build a streak of over 100 wins in a row, and to do this, they choose opponents with ratings about 1000 points lower. Against them, their expected score is about 250:1. Such a streak is guaranteed. But whether it will increase or decrease your rating is unknown. It depends on your personal characteristics and randomness. And your attempts to draw "rating manipulation" into this are 100% off.
And the very end of your text, when translated into my language by a translator (and I don't speak English; in my country, it's a practically useless skill), comes out as a disjointed jumble of phrases that make it completely impossible to understand what you were trying to say. I see zero reasonable refutations of anything in my text. I see a collection of completely flawed reasoning. I assume you couldn't have intended such erroneous information when you wrote it.

Easy Rating.

They want rating in life, that's all. A big number on there screen gives them satisfaction. They don't think about how the other player feels.