Is It Time To Get Rid of Ranked for Good?

There's absolutely no way to definitively determine that someone is throwing matches unless they make it really obvious with a large sample size of thrown matches.

This is because there's simply too many reasonable explanations as to why they tend to get globaled often, or why they seem to leave started ranked matches frequently etc.

The problem is it takes so little time to win trade proving a real pattern exists is hard with a sample size of 10-20 matches that could even be potentially mixed with multiple different toons.

Point is, without being able to prove someone is guilty, BW is not going to kangaroo court it and just start banning people that "might" or "probably" were doing shady activities.

They also have shown zero interest in supervising matches ingame, or doing any other sort of proactive ingame security/behavior checks that require actual people to perform such duties.

They are doing one obvious pattern that I have noticed. When I am up against some of the good PVPers and I see my team mates are nothing special I know its a loss. Then we go out and magically we win round 1. I am very surprised that it happened etc. Then its round 2 and one of the guys on our team gets globalled suddenly and we lose round 2. He says he is sorry etc, wont happen again etc. Round 3 the same guy gets either globalled or multiple guys get globalled and we lose. This way the game ends 2:1 on rounds, so its not obvious but game play wise it is. The guys say sorry sorry and leave the match.

Then they can swap to an alt and continue. They would have to monitor the account, not just the toons if they are repeating the same stuff over and over. If this players is on the wintraded players team he then has to play good, so in the end he will have wins and losses, so nothing obvious again. So as it was said, its almost impossible to pinpoint such wintrading.

Regarding alts, the game had sooo many events to level up toons, these people must have a minimum of 20 toons so swaping them to throw and wintrade shouldnt be an issue. Most PVPers have very little achievement points from 10 000 - 20 000, which shows that they only PVP and level up. Its all they do so even alts have the valor for ranked. They simply have all that is needed to cheat the system.

umm. I have like 8 mercs/mandos on one server b/c they merged all the US servers. nothing to do with the 2xp/12xp stuff.

But you have 8+8= 16 toons, thats the point

Just because someone has a lot of alts, doesn't mean they are involved in wintrading or cheating. That is a rather blatant logical pitfall.

I’ve 76 toon’s and I had more before I deleted 30 of them after the merge

Edit: forgot to add that’s only on this active account, I’ve 116 on my inactive account.

I am not claiming that if you have alts you wintrade. What I meant was that the PVPers are in the game for some time and they experienced the time of the game when it was easy to make alts, fun to play lowbies and gather PVP coms etc. They played during all this time and therefore have alts at their disposal. This only helps them in cheating cause you have throw-away toons that can be missused this way.

I don't want to get too lawyerly here, but you don't seem to quite understand the concepts of evidence or proof. If no one could be convicted unless there was "direct, definitive proof that a crime was committed," our prisons would be empty. There is such a thing as circumstantial evidence. Bioware has access, I assume, to all of the raw data produced by matches. They can see which toons belong to which accounts, they can see damage done and damage taken when you are on a person's team versus when you are not on a person's team. They can see the rating changes of all of the players over time. All of that information is evidence that when put together, could absolutely be enough to justify punishing someone.

There are basically two standards for determining guilt in courts of law (in the US), beyond a reasonable doubt, usually used in criminal cases, and preponderance of the evidence, usually used in civil cases. The preponderance standard requires the factfinder to determine that it is more probable than not that the person is liable/guilty (in other words, based on the evidence, there's a greater than 50% chance that the person did the thing accused of). Maybe you think that that standard is not right for determining cheating in this game, and would prefer the beyond a reasonable doubt standard. That still does not require a factfinder to "definitively determine" anything. Cases that go to trial never definitively "prove" anything. One side presents as much evidence as possible to show that the defendant is guilty, and the other side tries to introduce reasonable doubt.

It all comes down to whether Bioware is willing to fully investigate and gather the amount of evidence necessary. If I report two people for wintrading, and Bioware can only muster a meager amount of evidence, such as looking at the particular match in question, looking at the data and determining that nothing looks out of the ordinary, then clearly that is not enough to establish guilt. It would take real time and effort on Bioware's part, and maybe they don't have the desire or resources to do it properly, but they absolutely could do it.

There are wintraders active now that have various people throw for them. If Bioware analyzed all of the beneficiary's matches, they could take note of repeat accounts in those matches and measure their performance, etc. If a pattern does develop where let's say toons from two different accounts always tend to perform worse when facing someone versus when they are paired with someone, and the beneficiary is nearly always winning as a result, that would be a fairly clear pattern, and it wouldn't take that many games to establish. If all of the data was laid out before a judge or jury, who would have a reasonable doubt that it was not wintrading? Sure, there are plenty of reasonable explanations for wild swings in performance over a handful of games, but a sample size of 10-20 games would be more than enough to work with.

The point is that it could be done. It is not "impossible," it would just require a lot of work that Bioware is probably unwilling to put in due to lack of resources or just lack of caring about wintraders.

If you google "swtor season, 1, 2, 3, 4 rwards it will take you to the threads where the rewards are shown and presented on another site and you will see that in the comments people were complaining about the same things as we are know. People are cheating and were cheating back then by wintrading their way to access the unique rewards. The difference between now and then is that the que has gotten a lot smaller and it's not that obvious now. No one says that all the top spots are unfair, but it takes a lot of luck and rating management is needed to be able to climb there with so few wins.

You cannot get gold or tops spots by queing all the time every day. You simply won't... On a dps char at least.

If you roll a new dps char now and que in prime time chances are you will end up with a very low rating due to how bad the que is at the moment.

Yes this is the main problem after wintrading, but it also goes hand in hand with it. What Bioware needs to do is give the players a que system where you can que at any time and get solid matches. That really doesnt happen.

Like I said I am playing 2 times a week and if during that time there is a bot in que my time is wasted. If someone is throwing for someone my time is wasted (unless i am in the winning team). If someone is sync quing tank or healer, my time is wasted etc. What they need to do is ensure that the que is fine.

If I think back to season one, I first heard about wintrading at the end of season. The guilds were full of people so it was no issue to get 8 peiple to que together at 3 am for rating. At least back then people did it NOT during prime time and you had a lot of servers where to do it without being interrupted. You do not have that now. There is not enough people in the game and people have to use bots (which is mostly discovered now) or do it during prime time since there are pops!