After making the above post, I logged out and played another Guest match. The match felt totally legitimate this time. I was actually winning but he offered a Draw which I accepted because I just wanted to test the Game Review. And... look! No Engine Error this time! Review worked!
I still have the other "sus" game from 30 min ago open on a different Chrome tab, and it still does not allow me to check the review of that match, even after it worked for the above match. So... perhaps I've confirmed my own question with this experiment. It would sorta be validating/reassuring to inform the losing player that suspicious gameplay was detected in the opponent who won, which would be an implied "so yeah... don't feel so bad about losing that one" lol, but perhaps it would also be a bad look to draw attention to the whole idea that some players are doing such things, too. Ah well. Thanks for reading and I would be interested to know if anyone else ever does this experiment, too. Maybe send me a PM if you stumble across this thread in the future.
Can anyone confirm my theory about this error message on GUEST game Game Reviews?
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Hi, a little preface is I only made my account recently and have typically played Guest matches. I've been trying to not get too invested, and playing Guest games strictly has allowed me to stay pretty unattached.
I want to clarify this has nothing to do with the "one free Game Review per day" feature. These are Guest matches, not logged in matches. And there doesn't seem to be any limit to these bare-bones free Guest reviews... Meaning, I can start another game right now as a Guest, after seeing that error above, and the review may work on that match. But every time I suspect the opponent was a cheater, without fail, I get that message. I also don't believe "Well sometimes the service is just slow" either, because, I will leave a "sus" game open in my Chrome tab, and continually attempt throughout the day that free Game Review. Nope... Engine Error, forever.
There are several things true about Guest matches. One is that skill varies a lot, understandably. Two is that Guest matches actually allow infinite Game Reviews, BUT, they are very bare-bones Game Reviews. There are no helpful comments, no displayed accuracy ratings, and number of "Brilliant" and "Great" moves are always hidden, and "Misses" are also excluded. It DOES however show you the number each player made for Best, Excellent, Good, Book, Inaccuracies, and Blunders though, which allows one enough information to make a rough ballpark guess on the overall accuracy of both player's gameplay. And one final truth about Guest matches, is, understandably, cheating is more common, which is not a complaint, it's just a statement that it's more common because well, it's anonymous and the cheaters have nothing to fear.
So, here is my question, which comes from an observation. As a Guest player, I used the heck out of those bare-bones game analyses to gauge my gameplay. However, something I noticed... is that every single time I STRONGLY suspected the other player is cheating -- like, spending exactly 5 seconds on every move, and never making a single mistake, which what seem to be engine moves -- every time I have a Guest game like that, when I go to use the free analysis, suspecting to confirm they indeed had super accurate gameplay, I ALWAYS seem to be greeted with this message:
So... my theory is that the algorithm does indeed detect they were cheating, and once detected, it decides, "Hey, since I've detected that player was cheating, I'm not even going to waste any processing power to further analyze this game, because why even bother, so I'll just pop up an Engine Error message instead."
The reason I ask all this, is it would honestly be a massive relief to know this was indeed the explanation for this happening, because it would mean I'd know instant clarification the guy I suspected was cheating and that I wasn't imagining it. I can anticipate replies like "No, the engine is just down sometimes" but I'm saying that 100% of the time I've suspected cheating on Guest matches I've gotten that error, so, that would be a big coincidence?
If my theory is interesting, maybe anyone reading this can try it out and see for themselves, check if the moment you get a super super sus game, suddenly you aren't able to utilize Game Review on them to confirm it. Thank you, and I appreciate any thoughts!