Accused:
giomatinni
Rschillachi
The accused are suspected of:
Being the same person using 2 (maybe more?) accounts to gain an upper hand.
Game number(s):
Game 17849659
Comments:
I suppose it could be coincidental, but there were enough coincidences in this case to exceed my threshold. I'll give a brief narrative.
I first suspected something was wrong during the game (noted above) wherein giomatinni stated "I am going down to stop him [Rschillachi]" and then (so far as I could tell--given the fog) proceeded to do the exact opposite. He also said, "This map needs Team instead of playing individuals". I thought he meant that the map itself was excluded from team formats, but I know that's inaccurate. And, furthermore, I searched his past games and found he's never once played a team game! So, why would he say that in a singles game? I chalked it up to inexperience or just small talk.
At this point though, I took note of their respective profile details: both have Italian-sounding aliases but are from USA, both started playing recently and within a couple weeks of each other, both are non-paying members, few (if any) ratings for either player. But, since they only played in 1 other game together (both games they're in the same play-order), I thought, maybe they were just friends in real life and giomatinni suggested that Rschillachi should join the game. Then our game got...weird. In a nutshell Rschillachi took a significant early lead, Giomatinni gained ground, but abruptly just stopped fighting--leaving vulnerable territories up for grabs (for Rschillachi) and otherwise reversing his previously rational play and seemingly handing the game over. He also stopped chatting entirely. So, I did a search for their usernames and found both players have extremely scant information attached to their respective names. However, that information is remarkably similar in terms of footprint and timing. If you go to bing.com and do a strict search on "+giomatinni" and "+Rschillachi", you'll see they each have just a couple listings -- one for Conquer Club, and one for Major Command (screenshots in case the archive goes away: https://imgur.com/a/XOLou). Then, what prompted this post is that both players just missed their turns at what most informed observers would characterize as a pivotal point in the game. I could write-off giomatinni being a deadbeat. I could write off Rschillachi missing a turn too. But, in my experience, it's pretty unusual to have two consecutive players miss their turns--both with 98%/99% turns taken, and in the midst of an especially pivotal moment. So I thought I'd raise a red flag to see if any of the mods and expert hunters had better methods of drawing a conclusion.
Cheers,
Evantish
