It is official, the game is actually ruined from match manipulation.

[Trevor Boyer.6524]

I was 1608 right before the season turned over to 120 max games.

 

AS SOON AS the season flipped to 120, the ****  logged in.

 

GG, now 3/4 games I play in final week are obvious win trades. Impossible to play the mode as a clean player. Seriously, there is always a group or two of win trade online queueing and population is too low to avoid them. Even when you do add them and queue dodge them, then you get surprised when you join a game of fresh alts with accounts you've not been able to add yet, and then you lose a game vs. a team of dudes with 200 APs who perform at p2+ levels. It never ends. The ranked mode is actually completely ruined. We can thank the grand legendary decision of solo/duo only for this which enabled synch queue throwing tactics.

 

I'm like 1544 today and I'm tired of trying to fight through the unavoidable win trade play. I rally for the community to boycott ranked, just don't play it any more for every reason mentionable.

 

@Arenanet where are you? Do you even care about player base sticking around to buy things? Do you even care about the quality of your product? Take care of this problem. You know who's doing it, we all do. Take some time to prove your worth. At this point most of us would never trust Arenanet again with a competitive scene and many of us wouldn't trust your company at all with a game in general. This kitten is not only 6 steps past out of control, but it actually feels insulting to the consumer base.

[Paradoxoglanis.1904]

People openly win trading in the top 10, a hacker with like 20k ap in the top 25... The last week of a season is bad, best to just que enough to avoid decay.

[Ragazm.6018]

I think no one really cares about PvP, they make money selling pointless chairs, not doing something with bots and win-trading. In the end of day, it's all about profit, if it's don't harm profit, then it's not worth fixing. Also this is just a game, if it make you frustrated do something more joyful. Not worth spending your time on dead game mode.

[Azure The Heartless.3261]

2 hours ago, Ragazm.6018 said:

I think no one really cares about PvP, they make money selling pointless chairs, not doing something with bots and win-trading. In the end of day, it's all about profit, if it's don't harm profit, then it's not worth fixing. Also this is just a game, if it make you frustrated do something more joyful. Not worth spending your time on dead game mode.

 

Agreed. 

 

2 hours ago, Trevor Boyer.6524 said:

I was 1608 right before the season turned over to 120 max games.

 

AS SOON AS the season flipped to 120, the monkeys logged in.

 

GG, now 3/4 games I play in final week are obvious win trades. Impossible to play the mode as a clean player. Seriously, there is always a group or two of win trade online queueing and population is too low to avoid them. Even when you do add them and queue dodge them, then you get surprised when you join a game of fresh alts with accounts you've not been able to add yet, and then you lose a game vs. a team of dudes with 200 APs who perform at p2+ levels. It never ends. The ranked mode is actually completely ruined. We can thank the grand legendary decision of solo/duo only for this which enabled synch queue throwing tactics.

 

I'm like 1544 today and I'm tired of trying to fight through the unavoidable win trade play. I rally for the community to boycott ranked, just don't play it any more for every reason mentionable.

 

@Arenanet where are you? Do you even care about player base sticking around to buy things? Do you even care about the quality of your product? Take care of this problem. You know who's doing it, we all do. Take some time to prove your worth. At this point most of us would never trust Arenanet again with a competitive scene and many of us wouldn't trust your company at all with a game in general. This kitten is not only 6 steps past out of control, but it actually feels insulting to the consumer base.

 

A bit more sour than I'd put it but he's right.  I stopped engaging with the game mode to some extent the moment they determined an appropriate punishment for the first caught batch of wintraders was a month vacation, but allowed them to keep their titles. I'm willing to wait as long as there isn't a better mmo to get my competitive fix on the market, but not longer than that. I'm only going to respect the mode as much as the mode rightully demands. 

Edited May 7, 2021 by Azure The Heartless.3261

[Trevor Boyer.6524]

3 hours ago, Ragazm.6018 said:

I think no one really cares about PvP, they make money selling pointless chairs, not doing something with bots and win-trading. In the end of day, it's all about profit, if it's don't harm profit, then it's not worth fixing. Also this is just a game, if it make you frustrated do something more joyful. Not worth spending your time on dead game mode.

 

Interesting response coming from an account with 22 total posts made.

 

Not sure who you are, don't really care, but if anyone were to click your account profile and read those 22 posts, it is obvious that this account is being used to post cop-out responses to defend Arenanet's negligence.

 

This is what I'm talking about, in 2021 nothing is real anymore. Everything from the top to the bottom is now caked in theatrics, fabrications, propaganda to falsely control the flow of trends, agendas to shroud the truth in general, and flat out obvious lies which are becoming normalized and acceptable amongst modern human society.

 

I'm terrified at what the future holds for North America honestly. People should be more careful of the consequences of what they support and allow to be acceptable. Every penny adds up eventually, and karma is a ----- for everyone in society.

Edited May 7, 2021 by Trevor Boyer.6524

[Noz.4650]

Is it that common though? I'm in the same MMR bracket as you and so far I've had maybe 3 or 4 instances were I had my suspicions, but outside of that I've had FAR more games ruined by toxic ragers who afk in completely winnable games for example. Of course wintrading is a serious issue but is it really ruining games at a higher rate than some other factors like afk ragers, soloqs vs 2 duoqs, team comp losses, etc?

[Downstate.4697]

ATs are the new ranked. Anything else is a meme.

[Daishi.6027]

4 hours ago, Ragazm.6018 said:

I think no one really cares about PvP, they make money selling pointless chairs, not doing something with bots and win-trading. In the end of day, it's all about profit, if it's don't harm profit, then it's not worth fixing. Also this is just a game, if it make you frustrated do something more joyful. Not worth spending your time on dead game mode.

As true as this is, this will bite A-net so hard long term, and honestly they should have learned by now. At the endgame of an MMO, during content drought, between story updates, or especially in a game revolving around earning skins when a player has acquired every skin they care about; What is left even when the raids are tapped out? Two answers:

1. The casual one: Sit semi-AFK in towns make it a social chill game where people hang out talk, and enjoy all the life sim aspects. However many games including GW2 lack proper functionality to facilitate this kind of behavior, with no incentive to allow fashion to 'break the ice' and foster communication organically. It also lacks PERSONAL spaces (not guild halls) that you can decorate yourself and invite people in without an absurd grind or guild politics. Ultimately GW2 has notoriously had the hallmark of "Play alone, together" and that rings true for this as well.

2. Then PvP: And it's even more funny since this is the same company coming off the backs of GW1 which should have been A-nets proof of this, and I think in the beginning it was. But here we are now, A-net making desperate gambits like they are doing with the expansion and their sacrifice to the story. Or their branch out to Steam and introducing a new audience before fixing the holes that are already constantly bleeding players and profit numbers. A good portion of that bleed is from a lack of quality put towards PvP. A lack of soundness to create a more fun game type, a lack of effort to patch and balance in a way to make the game fair, and here we are now, them showing  a lack of control to even moderate their scene. Buying chairs and crap is what makes them money, but they make no money if there is no reason to stay.

A-net thinks they will get by with the few whales, and keep making these attempts to expose new players and retain them. Well PvP and WvW was half of what they needed to do to retain players and it's been neglected. There is a reason why they are rushing the narrative and pushing this last expac so hard; They need it. They need us to buy it, and they need old players to come back, and new players to check it out and HOPEFULLY give them enough to stop this game and work on something new. OR to snag enough whales to keep them afloat.

But spoilers: It wont. Not unless that expac comes with some pretty solid PvP and WvW balance solutions, along with some good moderation to make the scenes meaningful. Or maybe A-net finally figures out what it needs to do to fix the casual criteria; but I have even more doubts about that than I do PvP.

[Master Ketsu.4569]

1 hour ago, eksn.7264 said:

Is it that common though? I'm in the same MMR bracket as you and so far I've had maybe 3 or 4 instances were I had my suspicions, but outside of that I've had FAR more games ruined by toxic ragers who afk in completely winnable games for example. Of course wintrading is a serious issue but is it really ruining games at a higher rate than some other factors like afk ragers, soloqs vs 2 duoqs, team comp losses, etc?

Unfortunately it is.

 

The "Obvious" wintraded games where a person flat out disconnects to 4/5 the match aren't super common, but other forms of match manipulation happen all the time - especially if you are familiar with the alts of people in the top 50. And there is also sync queueing to try and either get a 3~5 man party when the max is supposed to be 2, or to just have the alts intentionally ignore points if they get synced into the opposite team.

 

For instance, one less talked about thing is MMR manipulation where the goal isn't to outright rig the match, but to lower your perceived MMR through alts. For instance if two people are Duo'ing, the person with the higher MMR switches to a lower MMR alt in order to hide their true rating and encourage the matchmaker to let them farm lower rated players.  You also have things like queue dodging and queue sniping. I like to call these tactics "Soft match manipulation.", they don't rig matches as outright 4v5ing a match does, but they are unfair. These methods are far more common and probably happen to at least 1/4th of games in top 250. 

Edited May 7, 2021 by Master Ketsu.4569

[Noz.4650]

6 minutes ago, Master Ketsu.4569 said:

Unfortunately it is.

 

The "Obvious" wintraded games where a person flat out disconnects to 4/5 the match aren't super common, but other forms of match manipulation happen all the time - especially if you are familiar with the alts of people in the top 50. And there is also sync queueing to try and either get a 3~5 man party when the max is supposed to be 2, or to just have the alts intentionally ignore points if they get synced into the opposite team.

 

For instance, one less talked about thing is MMR manipulation where the goal isn't to outright rig the match, but to lower your perceived MMR through alts. For instance if two people are Duo'ing, the person with the higher MMR switches to a lower MMR alt in order to hide their true rating and encourage the matchmaker to let them farm lower rated players.  You also have things like queue dodging and queue sniping. I like to call these tactics "Soft match manipulation.", they don't rig matches as outright 4v5ing a match does, but they are unfair. These methods are far more common and probably happen to at least 1/4th of games in top 250. 

 

You also have to account for match manipulation working in your favor some of the times if it's your teammates doing it.

[Multicolorhipster.9751]

Its been ruined for a long time. It started in Season 13, when the former top wintraders stopped having to actually wintrade to get even better winrates than they did before.

 

2 decent players who understand how the matchmaker works, and queuing when actual player counts are at their lowest are the worst. DuoQ metagaming is far worse than wintrading ever was.

[Trevor Boyer.6524]

1 hour ago, eksn.7264 said:

 

You also have to account for match manipulation working in your favor some of the times if it's your teammates doing it.

 

But I was gaining +8 on win and -20 on loss at 1600.

 

And if you duo queue or are above about 1550 rating, you almost ALWAYS are on the team who is being made to go against the win traders, because the win trade mains are also high rated and are also duoing.

 

All in all when you look at it, win trading might be a 50/50 win/lose kind of thing for bell curve or low tier players to run into. But for people who are seriously trying to compete for top 100 or higher titles legitimately, win trading does absolutely nothing but hurt you because you are RARELY on the team with the win traders but are rather being made to go against them all the time due to how the algorithm is sorting higher rated players in this low population community.

Edited May 7, 2021 by Trevor Boyer.6524

[Trevor Boyer.6524]

8 minutes ago, Multicolorhipster.9751 said:

Its been ruined for a long time. It started in Season 13, when the former top wintraders stopped having to actually wintrade to get even better winrates than they did before.

 

2 decent players who understand how the matchmaker works, and queuing when actual player counts are at their lowest are the worst. DuoQ metagaming is far worse than wintrading ever was.

 

Look, I like you man. But some of the things you say is as if you were trying to throw light blankets over the glaring issue at hand that ruins the game mode.

 

What you said here is simply not true. These people are serial win traders. I even heard one of them on stream the other day say this and I quote: "I think it's funny how on stream we get 70% win rates but off stream we get 90% win rates." What do you think he meant by that?

[Kuma.1503]

This kind of thing ends up discouraging lower rated players as well. If you've got a mind to improve and climb through the ranks, how is it going to affect your mindset when you learn that all that awaits you at the end of your climb is rigged matches and blatant cheating?

 

This is bad for everyone who cares about ranked PvP, not just high rated players. 

 

There's no making excuses for Anet on this. It needs to be addressed. Period. 

[Trevor Boyer.6524]

3 minutes ago, Kuma.1503 said:

This kind of thing ends up discouraging lower rated players as well. If you've got a mind to improve and climb through the ranks, how is it going to affect your mindset when you learn that all that awaits you at the end of your climb is rigged matches and blatant cheating?

 

This is bad for everyone who cares about ranked PvP, not just high rated players. 

 

There's no making excuses for Anet on this. It needs to be addressed. Period. 

 

The thing that gets me is the complete lack of foresight of what this is doing for the longevity of the support for their company from the player base. I mean this isn't just about GW2 ranked pvp mode. We are talking about any future products that Arenanet were to dish out. It is honestly a lot of money and player base to lose after 9 years of building it and this isn't even to mention GW1 player base support lost due to the overly bad impression that this leaves on people about this company.

[Noz.4650]

25 minutes ago, Multicolorhipster.9751 said:

Its been ruined for a long time. It started in Season 13, when the former top wintraders stopped having to actually wintrade to get even better winrates than they did before.

 

2 decent players who understand how the matchmaker works, and queuing when actual player counts are at their lowest are the worst. DuoQ metagaming is far worse than wintrading ever was.

 

Wintrading was a thing since the very beginning with the old leaderboards. I still have screenshots from like 2014 of people asking me to throw games, nothing was done to those players then.

 

14 minutes ago, Trevor Boyer.6524 said:

 

Look, I like you man. But some of the things you say is as if you were trying to throw light blankets over the glaring issue at hand that ruins the game mode.

 

What you said here is simply not true. These people are serial win traders. I even heard one of them on stream the other day say this and I quote: "I think it's funny how on stream we get 70% win rates but off stream we get 90% win rates." What do you think he meant by that?

 

A certain top streamer saying "ranked sucks because you feel like you don't earn your wins" when he's literally duoqing with high ranked players all the time, like no kitten bud. These people are doing literally nothing to help NA be more competitive while complaining that it's not competitive.

[Shao.7236]

I remember when I was new, I've been asked to wintrade games by a few people, ever since I've started to earn an influence. Never happened again.

 

However yes, DuoQ is the problem with MM. Alt accounts that allow to safely farm gold while not risking rating is also a problem because it can destroy other people rating.

 

Being able to change classes at the start of the match hurts possible innovation and diversity while being manipulation of who you may end up with or against as well.

[Azure The Heartless.3261]

1 hour ago, eksn.7264 said:

A certain top streamer saying "ranked sucks because you feel like you don't earn your wins" when he's literally duoqing with high ranked players all the time, like no kitten bud. These people are doing literally nothing to help NA be more competitive while complaining that it's not competitive.

 

Louder for the people in the back.

 

A surprising amount of people are like that meme with the dog who wants the ball to be thrown but doesn't want to provide the ball for throwing. They want matches to be entertaining and engaging, all while running insulated builds and stacking their teams so they mow down less coordinated, lower rated teams that the matchmaker had to scrape together to feed them. Eventually the people they're stacking against that can challenge them will either get wise to it and do it themselves, or leave. There may be some mechanical problems when it comes to Spvp but this is also an issue. 

Edited May 7, 2021 by Azure The Heartless.3261

[Multicolorhipster.9751]

2 hours ago, Trevor Boyer.6524 said:

 

Look, I like you man. But some of the things you say is as if you were trying to throw light blankets over the glaring issue at hand that ruins the game mode.

thank. I like you too 😍

2 hours ago, Trevor Boyer.6524 said:

 

What you said here is simply not true. These people are serial win traders. I even heard one of them on stream the other day say this and I quote: "I think it's funny how on stream we get 70% win rates but off stream we get 90% win rates." What do you think he meant by that?

Sounds like the truth to me, what he said.

 

If they're streaming, they aren't going to stream themselves DuoQing with their other top player pals during the off-hours, and definitely not if they're doing something shady like having their buddy queue on a low-rated alt for easier matches. 

Or maybe something even worse like being paid to play on someone's account who would normally just barely manage top 250 occasionally and boosting them to literal rank 1 NA, via DuoQ of course.

 

It's still scummy, and i'd still call metagaming match manipulation, but Wintrading is utterly pointless when DuoQ is a thing. 

Taking an L for cash, gold, clout, or keys 👀 is more what i'd call wintrading, and i'm sure there's still people that do that, but wintrading is probably the least common form of match manipulation after DuoQ.

 

Maybe i'm wrong there, but even if I am, it can't be denied that wintrading is infinitely easier with DuoQ than it was without.

[Khalisto.5780]

I'd like to see at least one mini season solo queue conquest, the drama involved would be more fun than the actual game

[Khalisto.5780]

lol, i just got a match where a known leaderboard  thief was wintrading, he was playing DE doing nothing mid, when i got closer he started using his skills, he was kneeling there and NOBODY was attacking him

 

on his alt account of course, but the toon shares main account toon name

Edited May 8, 2021 by Khalisto.5780

[phokus.8934]

As official as you permanently quitting multiple times.

[Stand The Wall.6987]

send proof to anet via floppy disks

[fluffypaws.2860]

Hi Trevor it's Mack the Berserker from the Arena. I stopped investing my time in ranked quite a while ago and have never looked back. It's a toxic spiral of frustration and definitely not good for your mental health.
I don't expect things to change and have slipped into apathy. I just 1v1 these days and I enjoy the game and leave it there.

Who knows, maybe one day they will address win trading.

 

 

 

 

[Zagerus.8675]

I've experienced like 4-5 afkers tonight. Legit sitting there and talking and laughing about it. These people are such a **** on ranked xD I hate the internet sometimes.