Your friends are climping up to lose against you on purpose - most common way is with friends of friends...
That way you gain max points for sure!
(Funny part is when your friends who are trading become one of the top 10 too)

In fact you can never know if it was fair climbing or wintrading!

Square Enix is using way to less data to determinate who is "new" and RP was never a good idea in any games. The system was made for physical (real) games (card games, tabletop, soccer and so on) but its not working digitally because you do not "see" the players. In real life you can observe and see if there is wintrading but in digital games its much harder. Thats why lately it is common to use more user data to determinate the actual experience. Lets say you calculate from total games made the win/lose rato and match from that data, or what if you take the "join" date into consideration too and so on... there are nice proven formulas you can use to increase fairness, but still: you can abuse every system!

We have a lot players on the servers, first question:
Why restricting to only "servers" when we can have clusters and world wide... it will fix a lot problems with "no one is on my level"

secund question:
Is it really a problem if there are "more" 1st prizes? I mean it is common in tournaments to use groups and the winner of each group is getting a reward