Ok, I don't play as much regular chess online as I used to, I play mostly variants, so maybe I'm not experiencing it the way others are.
Also I play slower speeds and pretty much always with increment, and there is a higher volume of cheating there than before.
Maybe in the last few years since lockdown and Queen's Gambit and thus the popularity of chess, that you meet people who appear to match your standard already if not a lot higher when they've been playing regular chess for 2 years whereas I was playing for my school at the age of 11, top board in the juniors at age 12 and in the seniors at 16 and also played for University of London and even a couple of games for the BBC in 2011.
Of course al those games were played at classical time control. We didn't have clocks with increment so when we played blitz it was normally 5+0 although I'd also played with a buzzer, and I also played one rapid event 30+0 when I was 18 and finished mid-table.
And of course in those days I didn't encounter any cheating, and if I played against chess programs I usually won anyway, because they weren't that good back then.
I can't tell if the world is "rotting at its core" but people always look back at the old days like moral standards were much higher when they weren't. There was drug-dealing back then too, riots, racial hatred, burglary, etc. In the UK there were terror attacks from the IRA in addition to riots in Brixton and Toxteth around 1980-81.
But back then if I wanted a game of chess, I went to the local chess club or played at school. So suffering cheats in that aspect wasn't an issue, as is the case now most of the time in OTB.
Also I play slower speeds and pretty much always with increment, and there is a higher volume of cheating there than before.
Maybe in the last few years since lockdown and Queen's Gambit and thus the popularity of chess, that you meet people who appear to match your standard already if not a lot higher when they've been playing regular chess for 2 years whereas I was playing for my school at the age of 11, top board in the juniors at age 12 and in the seniors at 16 and also played for University of London and even a couple of games for the BBC in 2011.
Of course al those games were played at classical time control. We didn't have clocks with increment so when we played blitz it was normally 5+0 although I'd also played with a buzzer, and I also played one rapid event 30+0 when I was 18 and finished mid-table.
And of course in those days I didn't encounter any cheating, and if I played against chess programs I usually won anyway, because they weren't that good back then.
I can't tell if the world is "rotting at its core" but people always look back at the old days like moral standards were much higher when they weren't. There was drug-dealing back then too, riots, racial hatred, burglary, etc. In the UK there were terror attacks from the IRA in addition to riots in Brixton and Toxteth around 1980-81.
But back then if I wanted a game of chess, I went to the local chess club or played at school. So suffering cheats in that aspect wasn't an issue, as is the case now most of the time in OTB.
