Hey All,

This season started in March, so by the end it will have lasted about 8 months in total.

Until next time…

 

Concerns about Vote Kicking

 

I’ve seen a couple posts expressing concern about vote kicking being used to exploit, abuse, or harass other players in PvP. As I’m a data-driven fellow, I’ll get with our analytics team and see if we can get enough data points to analyze present vote kicking behavior, compare it to historical trends, see if there has been an increase, look at the cases where we feel like it is being used exploitatively, and try to come up with ideas for how to discourage that. This will take some time, but I will report back as soon as we have any learnings or changes on this front that we can share.

 

 

i alone sent you 6 videos of vote kick being CLEARLY abused for no reason for it... how many more evidence you need? Pls deal with first round quiters in solo ranked who ruin fights and vote kick abusers since they are causing same problems as wintraders.

H

 

Season 11 Summary

 

As I mentioned in the last report, season 11 will be ending with 6.0 on October 22nd. This season started in March, so by the end it will have lasted about 8 months in total. Some of you may have seen Dan’s Web Content Roadmap over on the General Discussion Forums, what articles have already been published, and which ones are upcoming. Look for an article early next week summarizing the season 11 rating breakdown, the rewards, and more about the upcoming season transition.

 

My next report will most likely align with when we distribute top 96 rewards towards the end of October/beginning of November. I will put together a summary of the actions we’ve taken throughout the season once we’ve investigated and finalized the top 96, as that will be our last action of this season. With any luck, I might also be able to share some extra details on upcoming changes at that point, so stay tuned.

 

Until next time…

 

Is there a chance 6.0. will be Delayed which results in delaying end of season 11 too? That might take tonnes of time to end the season to be honest....

My next report will most likely align with when we distribute top 96 rewards towards the end of October/beginning of November. I will put together a summary of the actions we’ve taken throughout the season once we’ve investigated and finalized the top 96, as that will be our last action of this season. With any luck, I might also be able to share some extra details on upcoming changes at that point, so stay tuned.

Just a reminder to pay close attention to the last few days, and particularly the very last night of the season. That's when a lot of the wintrading for top 3 spots happens.

And thank you for finally resetting a certain formerly top 3 jugg from Star Forge that I had been mentioning for months. One more wintrading loser gone from the game.

Change the way you distribute top 96. For the majority of this season, group reanked has not been active and has 1/8th of the participants solo ranked has.

Change top 96 distribution and add another tier so that group ranked individuals who are less than 1500 rating are not recieving top 3 rewards or reward top 4 participants in solo ranked and top 2 in group ranked to make up for the population disparity.

Also, a way to shut down cheating all together is to disincentivize the reasson why they are cheating. Which is the reward itself, make it so that people feel they no longer have to cheat because the reward is more attainable. Lets be honest, this games ranked population is small and ver small compared to some of the other competetive games out there like Fortnite, WoW or League of legends so many people who try to q ranked are usually facing the same people anyway. Therefore the reward in itself does not have an appropiate representation of skill but rarity. Make the rewards less rare and it will shut down cheating all together.

Not only that, the general pvper community will be more inclined to q ranked if they beleive the reward is worthwhile. By making the rewards more accessible it creates greater incentive to even partake in ranked and deal with the toxicity that comes with it. Bigger population results in less chances to manipulate matchmaking, a better and more sufficient elo system ( due to more bodies in the q), and less players complaining about low skilled players being on their team because they will have their own bracket to play against one another.

We as a community are attacking this from the wrong angle, we need to focus on getting more people into ranked instead of stopping cheating because cheating is inevitable. One way of doing so is by altering and changing the distribution of rewards.

Change the way you distribute top 96. For the majority of this season, group reanked has not been active and has 1/8th of the participants solo ranked has.

 

Change top 96 distribution and add another tier so that group ranked individuals who are less than 1500 rating are not recieving top 3 rewards or reward top 4 participants in solo ranked and top 2 in group ranked to make up for the population disparity.

90% of all team ranked participants just wintraded their top 96 and gold spots by paying/asking friends,guild mates or even randoms to queue and loose against them. I personally know 6 of such players on DM server. Those who has less than 60 wins in team ranked should get no rewards at all

90% of all team ranked participants just wintraded their top 96 and gold spots by paying/asking friends,guild mates or even randoms to queue and loose against them. I personally know 6 of such players on DM server. Those who has less than 60 wins in team ranked should get no rewards at all

I dont mind them recieving gold rewards but its not fair for them to recieve top 3 rewards because of the reasons you listed above.

I think changing the disparity to 4-2 or even 5-1 would make up for the disparity to be honest. Or for this season alone, add another tier for top 96 so that group ranked players have to q again lol

90% of all team ranked participants just wintraded their top 96 and gold spots by paying/asking friends,guild mates or even randoms to queue and loose against them. I personally know 6 of such players on DM server. Those who has less than 60 wins in team ranked should get no rewards at all

Sounds like a points system based on number of wins is needed. Remove ELO, just keep track of wins and you will have people queuing non-stop for ranked. Make it so a certain number of wins is needed for rewards.

This would encourage participation. This would also create a scoring system that would be impossible to manipulate with losses.

Also, tracking match throwers would be easier because more matches would need to be won for players to place high on the list of all participants.

I'd suggest adding a "Most Wins" category to replace the irrelevant top 3 best of the best classes seeing how every single one of these are cheated for and truly indicate nothing in regards to who is actually the best of the best.

ELO is what causes all of the cheating, match drops, win trades, and all the other poor behaviors witnessed in ranked, especially towards the end of each season when the cheaters come out in full force.

90% of all team ranked participants just wintraded their top 96 and gold spots by paying/asking friends,guild mates or even randoms to queue and loose against them. I personally know 6 of such players on DM server. Those who has less than 60 wins in team ranked should get no rewards at all

Yeah team ranked turned into a mess. Both good teams and bad teams asking randoms from guild or fleet to queue for them for free, mats or credits and those who queue literally doing nothing. I checked players who have top spots in team ranked and there are players who are really bad in ranked pvp, never performed good and barely got 1300 in solo ranked + never had any good ratings in previous seasons. Pretty hard to believe they could climb up to top spots during this season so easily.....

90% of all team ranked participants just wintraded their top 96 and gold spots by paying/asking friends,guild mates or even randoms to queue and loose against them. I personally know 6 of such players on DM server. Those who has less than 60 wins in team ranked should get no rewards at all

Group ranked has become a joke in this season, the wintrading that went on there was ridiculous. The main problem was also that as Mike said, they have no problem to make the matches look real. You just do your 10 matches and have gold for 4 people. Then they switch roles and do the same for the other group. Lastly most of the wintrading, mainly for top spots, was done in the very beginning when Mike wasnt doing his reports yet.

I dont mind them recieving gold rewards but its not fair for them to recieve top 3 rewards because of the reasons you listed above.

Its not fair to receive either. Imagine a solo player who can only que solo ranked. His chances of getting gold from solo ranked are close to impossible. On the other hand, those who have the friends, or guilds for it can get it in one night. When you see a gold tier person you do not know if its from group or solo ranked......

Concerns about Vote Kicking

 

I’ve seen a couple posts expressing concern about vote kicking being used to exploit, abuse, or harass other players in PvP. As I’m a data-driven fellow, I’ll get with our analytics team and see if we can get enough data points to analyze present vote kicking behavior, compare it to historical trends, see if there has been an increase, look at the cases where we feel like it is being used exploitatively, and try to come up with ideas for how to discourage that. This will take some time, but I will report back as soon as we have any learnings or changes on this front that we can share.

Why not just remove the feature from ranked? Its not like the feature has any real use. If the player is actually afk its still going to be 3v4 as ranked doesn't backfill. So whether the feature is there or not makes zero difference outside of the blatant abuse of it for win trading.

Hey All,

 

As the team continues to be heads down on 6.0 work, and I didn’t have much to report on at the end of August, here is a summary of actions we’ve taken over the last month and a half:

 

Throughout August and September so far, we’ve punished 2 accounts for win trading, cheating, or exploiting in PvP. One has been suspended, one has been banned, both have had their ratings reset on all characters.

 

 

Why so Few?

 

Given that this is by far the fewest number of punishments we’ve administered during any month this season, I feel like it might be worth sharing some of the thoughts that we (and I imagine some of you might) have about it.

 

 

• Players are still cheating and win trading, just less obviously, and maybe in different ways that our methods of detection haven’t entirely caught up to yet
  
• We’ve been able to gather better, more comprehensive evidence of cheating behavior with the new email for reporting
  
• Perhaps fewer players are cheating, exploiting, or win trading in PvP as a result of our actions and messaging
  

 

To be honest, I think these is some truth to each of these statements and that some combination of them can be attributed to the lower number of cheaters that we have punished recently. We know this will always be an evolving struggle (cheaters find new way to cheat, we adapt to catch them, they adapt to continue cheating, etc.), but we have seen signs of progress throughout this season. We’re hoping to build on that progress with additional systemic deterrents and other improvements in the coming months.

 

 

Concerns about Vote Kicking

 

I’ve seen a couple posts expressing concern about vote kicking being used to exploit, abuse, or harass other players in PvP. As I’m a data-driven fellow, I’ll get with our analytics team and see if we can get enough data points to analyze present vote kicking behavior, compare it to historical trends, see if there has been an increase, look at the cases where we feel like it is being used exploitatively, and try to come up with ideas for how to discourage that. This will take some time, but I will report back as soon as we have any learnings or changes on this front that we can share.

 

 

Season 11 Summary

 

As I mentioned in the last report, season 11 will be ending with 6.0 on October 22nd. This season started in March, so by the end it will have lasted about 8 months in total. Some of you may have seen Dan’s Web Content Roadmap over on the General Discussion Forums, what articles have already been published, and which ones are upcoming. Look for an article early next week summarizing the season 11 rating breakdown, the rewards, and more about the upcoming season transition.

 

My next report will most likely align with when we distribute top 96 rewards towards the end of October/beginning of November. I will put together a summary of the actions we’ve taken throughout the season once we’ve investigated and finalized the top 96, as that will be our last action of this season. With any luck, I might also be able to share some extra details on upcoming changes at that point, so stay tuned.

 

Until next time…

 

Thank you Mike Bradley for the consistency on this particular issue. On the positive side - with this being a very long season, I am sure its more secure than it was before that I can say with most respect.

Its not fair to receive either. Imagine a solo player who can only que solo ranked. His chances of getting gold from solo ranked are close to impossible. On the other hand, those who have the friends, or guilds for it can get it in one night. When you see a gold tier person you do not know if its from group or solo ranked......

How caN devs check whether someone wintraded tr or not if they all make a view of a real fights...the only thing they can do is check mails, chats of those people and see them making agreements and payments between each other for queuing. Tbh i predict that in next season all wintraders will go to team ranked since they see that solo ranked is being observed and monitored pretty hard and most of banned offenders were solo ranked players yet no one got any banns in team ranked. + it is easier for them in terms of gear since for sr you need to have best possible gear to remain competetive and in team ranked it doesnt matter if whole enemy team wintrades for them. If nothing will change team ranked will be full of wintraders next season

How caN devs check whether someone wintraded tr or not if they all make a view of a real fights...the only thing they can do is check mails, chats of those people and see them making agreements and payments between each other for queuing. Tbh i predict that in next season all wintraders will go to team ranked since they see that solo ranked is being observed and monitored pretty hard and most of banned offenders were solo ranked players yet no one got any banns in team ranked. + it is easier for them in terms of gear since for sr you need to have best possible gear to remain competetive and in team ranked it doesnt matter if whole enemy team wintrades for them. If nothing will change team ranked will be full of wintraders next season

No one would be so stupid to chat in game about wintrading. They can check logs and see if the two teams who played were the only teams in game at that time. If 1 team won 10 games and then they reloged and the other team won 10 games its pretty obvious. There are many more such observations, but it all depends on the amount of time the devs have for this.

I imagine that in stead of manual control they are trying to make programs to monitor this and then they just go through results, but that certainly wont catch it all.

Look for an article early next week summarizing the season 11 rating breakdown, the rewards, and more about the upcoming season transition.

Please make sure the rating breakdown includes a WIN requirement, especially for Top 3, but ideally for Gold and Silver rewards too!

I already explained it in this thread: here

A win requirement is easy to implement and it doesn't contradict any design philosophies of Ranked as far as I can see. For Solo Ranked it rewards consistent play and eliminates fast "one night trade" Golds or Top 3s. But the main problem it fixes is the huge disparity between Solo and Team Ranked activity in S11. I even have a diagram to show you how big the difference is:

https://imgur.com/a/blN6HQr

Source and additional explanations in the spoiler tab.

In S9 and S10 Team Ranked had a boost from Charged Matter Transsubstinators, so in terms of activity (NOT matchmaking!) the best seasons we can compare S11 with are S7 and S8. Why? Solo Ranked is much more active than Team Ranked and in terms of Solo Ranked S11 is more active than S7 and less active than S8, it's actually right in between. But at the same time we not only see Team Ranked being less active in S7 and S8 compared to before, we see it being even less active in S11, with only 15 Team Ranked games played per day worldwide!

If you look at the relation of games played per day between Solo Ranked and Team Ranked by season you can see it has always been below 9, so for every 9 Solo Ranked games there was always at least 1 Team Ranked game. In S11 this relation is at 26,5!

This is how dead Team Ranked is in Season 11!

And as you know: when a mode is dead, it's easy to manipulate. You can consider a big chunk of these poor 15 games per day to be manipulated. So please don't give characters with a total of 15 wins and barely 1500 rating a Top 3 title or even Gold reward in any mode but especially not in Team Ranked. All it needs is a simple win requirement, like:

(rating numbers are just examples)

Bronze Tier - 1250+ rating

Silver Tier - 1375+ rating and 20+ wins

Gold Tier - 1500+ rating and 40+ wins

Top 3 - 1600+ rating and 60+ wins. If there aren't 3 players that meet that requirement, don't give out the title 3 times!

This doesn't solve all our problems. And it doesn't prevent rating manipulation. But it gives the whole community a better feeling about their rewards, when they get them via mail 2 weeks after season end!

Thank you.

Please make sure the rating breakdown includes a WIN requirement, especially for Top 3, but ideally for Gold and Silver rewards too!

 

I already explained it in this thread: here

 

A win requirement is easy to implement and it doesn't contradict any design philosophies of Ranked as far as I can see. For Solo Ranked it rewards consistent play and eliminates fast "one night trade" Golds or Top 3s. But the main problem it fixes is the huge disparity between Solo and Team Ranked activity in S11. I even have a diagram to show you how big the difference is:

 

https://imgur.com/a/blN6HQr

 

Source and additional explanations in the spoiler tab.

 

 

Data about played games is taken from https://torcommunity.com/de/database/arena-stats

 

This page hasn't been updated since the last server merges and it can only read the official leaderboard data, which means when somebody transfers a character with above 1200 rating or when somebody receives a rating reset their played games basically didn't happen. It still should read the accessible data correctly and thus it is the best data we players have.

 

Because of the big difference in Season length the best data point to compare one season to another in terms of activity is "Ranked Warzones played per day". As we can see Solo Ranked has always been more active than Team Ranked, with the exception of season 9, which is due to Charged Matter Transsubstinators being necessary for 236 augments and the only source to get them at the time was Team Ranked. Season 10 saw a healthy Team Ranked activity for the same reason until the Ossus patch 5.10, where the Ranked weeklies were changed from 20 to 50 points. After that change Team Ranked has been pretty much dead up to date.

 

 

In S9 and S10 Team Ranked had a boost from Charged Matter Transsubstinators, so in terms of activity (NOT matchmaking!) the best seasons we can compare S11 with are S7 and S8. Why? Solo Ranked is much more active than Team Ranked and in terms of Solo Ranked S11 is more active than S7 and less active than S8, it's actually right in between. But at the same time we not only see Team Ranked being less active in S7 and S8 compared to before, we see it being even less active in S11, with only 15 Team Ranked games played per day worldwide!

 

If you look at the relation of games played per day between Solo Ranked and Team Ranked by season you can see it has always been below 9, so for every 9 Solo Ranked games there was always at least 1 Team Ranked game. In S11 this relation is at 26,5!

 

This is how dead Team Ranked is in Season 11!

 

And as you know: when a mode is dead, it's easy to manipulate. You can consider a big chunk of these poor 15 games per day to be manipulated. So please don't give characters with a total of 15 wins and barely 1500 rating a Top 3 title or even Gold reward in any mode but especially not in Team Ranked. All it needs is a simple win requirement, like:

 

(rating numbers are just examples)

Bronze Tier - 1250+ rating

Silver Tier - 1375+ rating and 20+ wins

Gold Tier - 1500+ rating and 40+ wins

Top 3 - 1600+ rating and 60+ wins. If there aren't 3 players that meet that requirement, don't give out the title 3 times!

 

This doesn't solve all our problems. And it doesn't prevent rating manipulation. But it gives the whole community a better feeling about their rewards, when they get them via mail 2 weeks after season end!

 

Thank you.

I fully support the need of having minimum 60 wins as a requirement for geting top 3 in team ranked. The amount of payed/agreed games there is enormous. Literally everyone there have asked some friends/guildies/randoms to loose for them. This is pure wintrade and can't be rewarded

Literally everyone there have asked some friends/guildies/randoms to loose for them. This is pure wintrade and can't be rewarded

This is indeed true, I have experienced this "asking" over the weekend in my community where people simply gathered to wintrade group ranked. I dont wanna mention names, but I did see it with my own eyes and that is very disappointing for me. Group ranked this season is a total fraud.

here lies

3-6 month seasons

2019-2019

 

"can't believe you fell for this"

This made me laugh, and I quit doing ranked PvP after Season 6. HaHaha

This is indeed true, I have experienced this "asking" over the weekend in my community where people simply gathered to wintrade group ranked. I dont wanna mention names, but I did see it with my own eyes and that is very disappointing for me. Group ranked this season is a total fraud.

I mean you should no. At least not here but why not send it to BW.

I mean you should no. At least not here but why not send it to BW.

I do not need to send anything cause it is totally obvious what occured there. If Bioware does not see it then I guess their meassures are on amature level. That is what I wanna see, I want to see if it all goes through and if people from group ranked simply get their top 3s for 10 wins and less than gold tier.