Profile info or IP geolocation for Awards?

If I play an opponent from a particular country, the country is listed in the Passport tab on my Awards page in Profile. Does Chess.com determine the user's country based on the country they've selected in their Profile or based on the user's IP geolocation?

Members may select any one they want to display

This means someone could play himself and change the country of his second account after each game until the passport is filled up completely. Isn't this gaming the system?

You would not have an opponent if you are playing yourself.

You’d need to have another cooperating person change their country after each game.

Which is illegal since you can’t have alts.

hi

hi

If someone wants to waste their time this way, that's just more time spent on the site, more ads presented for chess.com, which is more revenue for them.  So, if somebody really thinks they are "gaming the system" when they go after gamification achievement awards, let them have at it.  Those awards are utterly meaningless timewasters...

I took a gamification course from Wharton, and the statistics on how many people are silly enough to value "busywork" achievement awards is beyond reason.  It's a treadmill with no payoff whatsoever.

The same thing is true of most level-based video games.  If a game has "extra" achievements at high levels or max level that allow you to, say, get more health or armor or whatever, people think it's cool and that they are getting more...you're not, you're *getting less* the higher you go.  All your opponents and obstacles will be balanced on the assumption that you have spent time to get the "extra" stuff, so you are spending more time and effort to get to the same relative power level you used to get just for leveling up.

Just imagine yourself running on a treadmill going nowhere...and then the incline just gets steeper and steeper, until you aren't running at all anymore, you are slowly trudging upwards on a stairmaster.

Website achievements and video game levels are designed to keep you on the treadmill as long as possible by obscuring the fact that you are on the treadmill at all.  There are suckers born every minute .