How is PVP in this game?

[Shinklet]

I wouldn't suggest listening to the main opinion from people in the category on the forums, because whereas they arrive at a similar conclusion, they lack the nuance.

Cheating in PVP is as follows;

Frontlines and rival wings cheating:

In frontlines and rival wings, you may have afk bots (like on SB release, when it had huge xp gains) and still kind of does, from farmers. It's annoying and happens a little bit but nothing game ruining.

The actual hacking of flying mechs in rival wings is something that has happened a few times, but happened a fair bit recently and has been dealt with.

Across all PVP modes there have been speed hackers and SE have been inconsistent to ban them. Sometimes getting them, sometimes never.

Rival wings community:

The pvp community exists in rival wings and is fairly healthy. https://discord.gg/sYgdUv5nFM

They get games going every weekend and are quick to form parties and advice, not overly competitive, lots of people want their Monke or title.


The Feast Community:

Now feast is a troublesome child.

Ranked modes bring out the worst in any games as we know, se have no party chat so if anyone is going to be toxic, they have to do it after, via pms, which you can report and I know of flamers that have been banned.

There is the pvpaissa community https://discord.gg/7yAnAHX which is for pvp as a whole, but mainly for ranked and considering the nature of a ranked game mode that has a terrible matchmaking system, it's pretty healthy too. Yeah you might get the annoyed passive aggressive comment in there, but a lot of feasters are depressed people who spend way too much time playing this terrible game mode because it's the only thing they're good at, so you'll need to forgive and understand them.

The Feast and cheating:

Now cheating regarding feast will usually have people tell you

"Feast is all wintraders and boosters"

Which is far from the truth. I'd say on any given top 100 board, 90%+ players are legit. And if someone is being boosted or wintrading, the average pleb that tells you it's all cheating isn't actually good enough themselves to notice how cheating is done.

I believe primal had a boosted Rank 1 in season 14/15 and nothing happened to that player.
Again, there have been boosts on Chaos and Light and nothing has ever happened to these players.

Wintraders, when they're caught, usually get removed from the board, it's happened already on light. However SE doesn't remove their rewards, nor do they retroactively remove rewards off them from previous seasons (which they absolutely should). A wintrader on chaos, that got mad and flamed everyone once a GM caught him and banned him for a week still uses his top 10 title and season 9 armour glam :/

So tl;dr
If you are being boosted you won't get caught, SE don't care, however if you wintrade or hack, you will be caught eventually, just you probably won't receive too much of a punishment for it.