I no longer have time or interest to properly maintain RatioGhost. I am looking to sell the website/code/business. Please contact me if you're interested in buying it. RatioGhost is currently the most popular BitTorrent ratio cheating software, and has been for many years. It has significant untapped monetization potential.
It looks like a lot of users are misunderstanding how the Ratio Ghost options work, so I wrote this guide to walk you through exactly how the cheating works.
That first thing you have to realize is the mechanism that the cheating works by. Ratio Ghost works by intercepting your torrent client tracker announce messages and modifying the reported stats. Tracker announces usually happen every half hour, but trackers can request a different time if needed.
Every announce your torrent client sends the amount of data uploaded and downloaded for each torrent. Ratio Ghost will modify these numbers to lie to the site and increase your ratio.
You should also recognize that Ratio Ghost is meant to run continously in the background increasing your ratio a tiny amount on every announce. It's not made to increase your ratio by a large amount all at once, and if it did, catching cheaters would be trivial.
Here is a screen shot of the Ratio Ghost options. I'll explain each option one at a time.
When you cheat on a site, the tracker has no way to know who is cheating. They can, however, look at the numbers for an entire swarm and see that cheating is taking place. For example, if you report an upload amount of 100mb, but there is only one leecher and he reports a download amount of 50mb, then the site knows that one of you is cheating. The site cannot know who in this example, but it might be more than enough for the site to mark both accounts as suspicious. If you get marked lots, well they can take a good guess that you're cheating.
So option A is an option to basically disable cheating for torrent swarms with a low number of leechers. If you only cheat for bigger swarms, then the site will have a harder time detecting who is doing the actual cheating.
One trick to not getting caught is to not be predictable. So if you look at options B and C you'll see that they take two numbers each. The way this works is that each announce, Ratio Ghost will pick a random number between them and use that for the multiplier.
For example, let's assume you set B to between 0.0 and 0.07 (like in the screen shot). Now what happens, is when a tracker announce is made, Ratio Ghost will choose a download multiplier B that's between 0.0 and 0.07. This happens on every tracker update. It might pick 0.0, it might pick 0.025, it might pick 0.06. You get the idea.
Setting B is the download multiplier, and it is the amount of download added onto your reported upload. Let's say you downloaded 100mb and upload 0mb during an announce period. If the download multiplier is 0.05, then your upload will be reported as 5mb instead of 0mb. That number is the 100mb actual download times the 0.05 multiplier.
I suggest you keep the download multiplier below 0.1. Higher values will throw up more red flags that you're cheating.
Setting C is an upload multiplier that gets added to your actual upload amount. This is where most of your cheating should come from, because it is the hardest for sites to detect.
The way it works is like this: say that you've uploaded 100mb during a period and say ratio C is 2.0. In this case Ratio Ghost takes your 100mb and multiplies it by 2.0 to get 200mb. This 200mb is then added to your original 100mb to get 300mb. 300mb is then the upload amount reported to the torrent site.
Something to think about, is to avoid detection you should cheat as little as you can get away with. If you can normally keep a ratio of 0.5 on a site without cheating, you could setup this C multiplier to average out around 1.0 and that alone will be enough to bring your ratio to 1.0 in the long run.
Here is a table of values to consider when selecting this multiplier C. Find in the left hand column the ratio you can keep without cheating. Then the next column tells you about what multiplier C needs to be to bring your ratio up to 1.0 in the long run.
| Non-cheating Ratio | Suggested multiplier C |
|---|---|
| 0.05 | 19.0 |
| 0.10 | 9.0 |
| 0.15 | 5.7 |
| 0.20 | 4.0 |
| 0.25 | 3.0 |
| 0.30 | 2.4 |
| 0.35 | 1.85 |
| 0.40 | 1.5 |
| 0.45 | 1.3 |
| 0.50 | 1.0 |
Setting D is used to just add a little extra upload over time, even when you're not uploading anything at all. It's useful when you're seeding a bunch of torrents, but nobody is connecting to you to download.
Setting D is divided into two values, the KB/s amount, and the percent chance. The percent chance is to keep this option from applying all the time. In this example, the percent chance is set to 20, so this option will only take effect during 20% of the tracker announces. It will not do anything during the other 80%. This is to keep you from getting caught, as this option can be easy to detect if overused.
The first value (120) in this example is the rate to cheat at. So in this example it's 120 KB/s. If your client updates to the tracker during a half hour period (1800 seconds), Ratio Ghost will take 120 KB/s and multiply it by 1800 seconds. That makes 216mb. Ratio Ghost will then multiply that 216mb by a random value between 0.0 and 1.0. The result of that will be added to your upload.
Setting E is powerful, but can also be easy to detect if overused. Basically it lets you download a torrent without taking any hit to your ratio. It's useful to use once in a while on large torrents where you'll be downloading a lot of data but don't want your ratio to droop. I would suggest only using it rarely, and only using it on large swarms with lots of seeders. Keep in mind that all Ratio Ghost options apply to all your torrents, so only use this option when you have only one torrent downloading.
Again, don't overuse it. Almost all trackers keep track of torrents that you've download but didn't fully "snatch", so when you use this option they will keep a note of that. To them it looks like you downloaded the torrent file and then didn't use it. If you do it a lot it looks like cheating.
This is used with option E. I suggest you don't use it unless you already know a lot about how the bittorrent tracker protocol works. Something to keep in mind is many sites won't send seeder IPs if you present yourself as a seeder. So this option may prevent you from actually downloading anything.
I have heard of people using this with a bunch of torrents to collect tracker seeding bonuses without actually seeding anything. It is a tricky strategy though, and I wouldn't recommend it to the unexperienced.
I actually suggest that almost everyone keeps the settings at their defaults from a clean install. The way you get a good ratio is by being patient and giving it time to work. The way you get caught is by cranking all the settings up high.
If you have a really slow interent connection (e.g. maybe less than 256 kbps upload) you might consider increasing the upload multipler (option C). The reason is that if you have a really crappy internet connection, then even a large increase here makes it look like you only have an average internet connection.
Anyway, good luck. If you have any questions, please check out our subreddit.