New Scaratings

Yesterday afternoon (February 3, 2020) AUVA dropped into B-52 Burgers and Brew for a quiet game. Playing solo, he logged into his off-account, NOVA, and discovered that he was joined by CHEEGO, a player not known to him. He stepped away from the bar and took a tour of the dining room, to introduce himself. His was the only playmaker out of the cradle, and the handful of tables in the dining area were not, to the practiced eye, occupied by anyone construably a Buzztime player.

Out of idle curiosity, AUVA looked up CHEEGO's game play history, and discovered that, half an hour earlier, CHEEGO had been playing at Rum Runner's, in Palm Harbor, Florida. (How AUVA learned this I don't know. I only learn of the previous day's numbers on my desktop.) CHEEGO stuck around B-52, nimbus-like, for four Countdown quizzes, averaging maybe 14.3, and then went back to Palm Harbor.

CHEEGO is registered at BWW-Wilkes-Barre. There are four accounts from that site which are active in Countdown at Rum Runner's. Another would be ZUCHIE, who on January 22, played two Countdowns at Underdog's in Harrisburg, then a quiz at McKenna's Place in New Smyrna Beach, and without a break played the following quiz at Elsa's in Dayton, Ohio. The only player at Elsa's, ZUCHIE ran the table for a 15K. The ZUCHIE account enjoys a 12-ish average, which one might imagine is wind-assisted.

I enjoined JOHNL, REVE, and AUVA to log into Rum Runner's on their Buzztime apps. All three of them failed. (I've upgraded from a clamshell, but just barely, and couldn't participate.)

The HELP WANTED sign out front, the one that drew you in, is an invitation to players on Florida's Atlantic Coast to chat up their Dubber guests (yes, it's a real demonym), with appropriate blandishments, to prise out of CHEEGO, ZUCHIE, or any of their fellow travelers, the secret entrance to this wormhole of theirs. But proceed with caution: you'll be dealing with serious pranksters. Do not, under any circumstances, exchange Social Security cards (as is sometimes requested, as a test of good faith).

Please report back if, given the chance encounter, you obtain any insight into the method of their madness.

GONE, once again it's all in the phones these fuckers are using to game the system.

They are changing the GPS location of their phones to the GPS coordinates of B52 or whatever bar. That allows them to play wherever they want. That, if they were playing straight up isn't so bad, BUT then the assholes are also playing at the same time in a bar that has a computer clock time that is ahead in the game being played. They see all the answers and have plenty of time to answer for perfects using the lag on their phones logged in elsewhere.

The plan would be to reboot the computer when you see them at B52. Yes, you lose that game but hopefully they will go elsewhere.
Also if we can figure out what bar they are getting the answers ahead of time from, we call that bar pretend to be from BT and ask for a reboot setting their computer clock to the right time and no lag to exploit. The other option if the lag play gets too bad is to have BT remove B52 from the BT sitefinder making B52 unavailable for any phone play as it won't show on the list. Several bars have already gone that route of removing themselves. All the scores do show in the hall of fame and do show on the boards.

Mr Z in SC is doing this everyday at various bars around the country as well as these PA assholes who I have played with at Grotto Pizza in Wilkes Barre. They were good players, playing straight up, but now in FL for the winter I guess they are bored and jumping in on known excellent bars trying to Fuck with their monthly LT and CD boards.

I would go with calling the bar they are cheating from to get a reboot there to synch the games up.

_________________
BUD - Stained Glass Pub Silver Spring MD
OC BUD - Grotto Pizza DE near Ocean City MD

LET'S GO ....Caps and Os!!!!

Thanks, BUD. As always, your advice is much appreciated. REVE wishes to add his two cents' worth:

"I woke up this morning (2.6) thinking about the time lag problem described by BUD and as seen between Drak's and B-52. If BUD is right the servers use their internal time to launch the questions at a predetermined time, i.e. 3:01, etc. The problem being each server has a different perception of what is 3:01.

"The servers are all running Windows 7 (XP?), which is equipped with a widget called NTP, network time protocol. NTP is capable to setting and syncing the PC time to a standard network time source, e.g. the naval observatory. In financial institutions this time must be within a handful of milliseconds for interhost traffic to work. Time is an integral part of encryption technology.

"You will notice on your own PCs that you never have to enter or set the time. That's NTP. The time is set accurately at each reboot. If, however, you let the PC run continuously for a long time, as the Buzztime servers most likely do, the PC time will drift plus or minus from the real time. This is because the PC's internal clock is really crappy. I have seen drifts of up to two minutes a day when I was deeply involved in the time problem on our mainframes. You can check it out by poking at the clock icon in the system tray, which will lead you to a time set screen. (Again, that's NTP.)

"The problem with Windows 7 is that NTP is configured to do a network sync only once per week (counted from the last reboot). This gives these servers ample opportunity to drift apart, exposing the time lag used by the cheaters to improve their scores while "roaming."

"There is a way to improve the frequency of the update, but it takes manual manipulation of the Windows registry - which I would NEVER suggest to a bunch of random bar keeps! There are, I think, only 2 solutions. One is to convince every location to boot daily. The other is to convince Buzztime to preset the NTP sync interval to a much shorter interval, like 2 to 4 hours. They would have to modify the registry settings for NTP and reload those changes on all the servers."