As many already know, boosting is the practice of acquiring rating or points in a way that is unsportsmanlike or simply illegal. We already know it goes on in some shape or fashion, but most of the time we have no context. Today I'm going to give you that context.

To comply with the rules, all relevant names in images will be blocked. It won't take but a moment of research to figure it out though. I'm sure it will still somehow be considered a violation and I'll be OF banned but oh well.

It began when we noticed this:




Eight players of the same server, same FCs, and similar names suddenly and rapidly appeared on the board together with a substantial gain in one day along with average 50% winrates. This raised a red flag as wintraders and/or esoteric farmers. This occurred near patch's release. We made our reports and kept an eye on the board as well as the queue.

Yesterday we queued and caught the same 8. Only this time, one of them was boosted to Platinum, which you can now see in the leaderboard today. A whopping 800 points gained from boosting.

During our encounters, the team with the boosted all ran to the middle, took minimal, bot - like action and promptly lost.



Second round was their losing team, who ran to the middle and took no action before eating it.


Third round was the boostee's team again, only they woke up and attempted to disconnect and leave the game to avoid point loss.


They ceased queuing, but not before the damage was done.



You can see this change today on Aether light party's board. Tomorrow you won't see the change.

To other players, this is for your awareness and for you to know the things to look for to detect this type of behavior, especially on other datacenters.

To Square, this is a question. Are you going to let 8 legit players be put off the board by this kind of nonsense? Or are you going to let it slide and let it be the example? Since the season is not over yet, you need to be monitoring this. I doubt this will be the last instance of it.

Final disclaimer: the Faerie team associated with Blubbers Ubbers has NOTHING to do with this. They are another legitimate and skilled team affected by this.