Win Trading on Aether

[Gravton]

I don't understand why this is still possible. I thought ranked matches were supposed to match you to equal ranks. If one person always loses on purpose they shouldn't be the same rank as their partner. I don't play ranked, but I thought that's how it worked.

I mean I would:
Group unranked/bronze/silver then gold/diamond/plat in two different brackets. This way the most they could do is spring board a friend to gold.

Make pvp rank tied to account to help prevent an alt to help with losses.

Then have something look at the loss rate of an individual and prevent them from grouping with players on a win streak. Something like that.

[Geryth]

I don't understand why this is still possible. I thought ranked matches were supposed to match you to equal ranks. If one person always loses on purpose they shouldn't be the same rank as their partner. I don't play ranked, but I thought that's how it worked.

I mean I would:
Group unranked/bronze/silver then gold/diamond/plat in two different brackets. This way the most they could do is spring board a friend to gold.

Make pvp rank tied to account to help prevent an alt to help with losses.

Then have something look at the loss rate of an individual and prevent them from grouping with players on a win streak. Something like that.

You have two accounts, and you're a decent player. You play your main account until you hit your "wall". You play a second account and win a few and climb a bit. Then you start win trading to climb your rating "wall". Queue both healers at the same time and only accept the queue if they both pop at the same time (got the same game). Give your main account the win.

Do this a few times until your trading account can't get in the same game. Then play seriously on your trading account to climb back up. Rinse and repeat. Pretty easy because there's not enough players to give competitive games to the top rated players so they easily get in games with lower ranked players.

I think it's pretty easy to combat this - track how many games an account cancels queues for and look for trends about when they accept games against another player. Then check the win rates of those player against player combos. When red flags are thrown, lessen the chance those players get matched together, and have someone investigate to see if there's any win trading happening and punish them accordingly. It's going go take some coding resources and an employee to dedicate research time but I think the players really need this.

[Zojha]

I thought ranked matches were supposed to match you to equal ranks.

But they don't, because there are not enough players to do that. They match two tiers up and down. That means the partners only need to be within that frame - bronze/gold, silver/plat, gold/diamond.

Moreover, with the way point loss works, you can trade 2 wins for the boosted for 1 win for the booster and both will still climb if the average team ratings are roughly equal. It's not until the booster enters gold that this doesn't work anymore, but by then the boosted sits comfortably in diamond.

It's probably part of why they thought about restricting ranked queues to primetime hours at some point.