Just to give some detail for the above picture, we played one game where the enemy team came into the game naked and basically rolled over and died. Then we get the display that I've been looking out for since this thread popped up, and I checked their rating - 2,000 with just 1 loss this week. We then encountered another team from Uther, which was a pushover fight (the above screenshot). Their rating is nearly 1,500 and very poorly geared. So by this point at 1800, we'd played a 2,000 rated team and a 1,500 rated team that didn't count as matches. While the second one was believable for a skirmish mistake, the first team was playing rated matches as we ran into them later again. This time, well geared they beat us and received points for their victory.

It was very suspicious of the first team, and after talking to a GM it sounded like they are aware of an exploit and at this time are/can not do anything about it. He flat out told us no repercussions would occur to teams in which the scoreboard glitches.

This exploit really must be fixed, otherwise it's difficult for any claims of making this a serious PVP game seem credible.

We've definitely had this happen with our 5v5 team as well. Once vs. a high-rated team, twice vs. seemingly low-rated teams (though I never checked; they just fought like scrubs so I assumed they were low-rated). I'm of the belief that it has to do with the last person alive forcibly leaving the match just before they die. We're playing this weekend so I may try it if the chance comes up, and will confirm here if that is what causes it. I don't think there's any use hiding this. Better to get it fixed as soon as possible, or at least force Blizzard to temporarily halt arena play till it can be fixed.

What if a person who is in the 5v5 arena, leaves the arena either via a crash (either real or forcued) then when out of the arena they group que for a skirmish. This would require a macro that changes leader of the party to someone that you can't see (since the leader may be in the arena and the guy that crashed be out of the arena)

My team had a weird event occur at the start of the week. If you check out my 2v2 profile and notice that the "team" has played 11 games. However the only 2 players (myself + Klinar) have only played 10 games with a 4-6 win/loss, but the team is a 4-7 win/loss.

We have no idea how this happened, but this is the sequence of events that occurred;

1. We played 2xskirmish games, losing the first, and the second one the other team /afk'd out (or exit somehow)
2. We joined the queue for a rated match, but as the dialog came up, my pally realised he had his PvE gearset on, and we quit the queue rather than accepting the match.

We then played 3 games (1 win/2 loss) and I noticed that the record was showing a 1-3 result for the team, but a 1-2 for both players.

Now here is the interesting thing, the point status was at the "correct" result for the 1-2 results (we were down about 15 points, not 30 as you would expect).

So, I'm deducing there could be an exploit in playing the 10 games for the week if a team manages to get 3/4/5 wins first up - they could then do whatever we managed to do and get the remaining 5 games "counted" for the week without risking their current standing.

If you don't enter into the arena if you have the pop-up available, it will count as a game on your team's record, but not as a game played. It's been like that since arenas came out.

What you're describing could theoretically be done, but you'd have to be convinced you got incredibly lucky with your first handful of games to make that desirable.

Thanks for that information Caladein. I'm a complete PvP newbie, and am only doing it for the gear so I can PvE (500 ping vs 50 ping is pretty much a losing proposition for melee in PvP).

In my position, at the start of a week, if we won the first 3 or 4 games, this makes for a great way for us to keep our current point standing (especially if we are 1500+). I'm not sure if this counts as an exploit or "creative use of game mechanics", but I'm not PvPing because I really want to (I'd rather level my alts) but because it's the best path to getting weapons.

That would mean that I could (in theory) take my 30 mins per week down to 10 mins per week for my 250-300 points which is a major win for me.

Someone should really test these in the arena:

A. Kicking a playing member off the team
B. Kicking arena team leader
C. Kicking a player to make your team have less players than the bracket requires

IF it's a reproducible bug it's probably due to some team management BS like this.

Found something that at least seems to work to counter this. Generally people seem to try it when they are down 5-3 or 5-2. When you see someone 'drop' out of the game just pull back and do not kill the last person for about 20 seconds or so. Since we've started doing that we've gotten points for every game against decent opponents.

We do get tons fo 0pt or ---- games but those are always against people 5-800pts below up.

I've vs'ed a few teams who openly knew they were screwing something up, spamming emotes, being silly, playing naked. Unlike winning vs a lower rated team however, it was not counted towards the total played games however.

I wonder if it perhaps if one member leaving the team doesn't have an effect, what if during the game the whole 5 players (or 3, 2) left, rejoined another team, or something similar. Probably does nothing, just throwing ideas out there.

I'm not convinced this is an exploit more than just a bug on Blizzard's part. Last week my 5v5 team was trying to get a few games in after a raid, queues were pretty much instant. We played 6-7 games in a row, and none of them ended up counting for our score. The matchups seemed pretty random, as well. We're at around 1800 rating, and we were matched against some competitive teams, winning a couple and losing one, none of which counted for points. However, we also kept running into a prot war / fury war / holy priest / rogue / pally team with a rating around 1400. Beating them, of course, gave us -182875902 points.

We tried changing group leaders, reforming the group before we queued, and we still continually got games that didn't count for our record. Unless all the teams we played were somehow exploiting (which can't really be true, since we lost a game for 0 points during this time and we weren't doing anything), I would blame this on some sort of arena server bug. Both us and them were queued for rated.

I honestly think it's a little of both. Grailyn, how can you tell if someone who has died has left the game? Will their corpse turn into a skeleton? You can't use the numbers up top, because those count the number of people alive...

This happened to us tonight in our 3v3 BG. We killed their healer very early and their mage died shortly after that. Their last member left the BG and we saw some random numbers in the Points Gained section.

We saw that the first member that died had released early. This is total guesswork, but I am guessing what happens is that the first player gets out of the arena (while the others are still inside) and queues for a skirmish. The last player then leaves the arena and no points are received/taken.

I really can't see as this being a bug. This always seems happens when a player leaves the arena early. I've seen this happen (the last player leaving) countless times before and we've still received the points.

It is also worth noting that we have never had this happen on our 2v2 team (that I can recall)... 2v2 queues are typically 2-5 minutes in our BG, depending on the time/day.

We had this happen for the first time on a loss (we got ---- for wins plenty of times) and no one left early or did anything like that. It just played out like any normal game would.

Generally it happens when someone drops arena when they are not the last person to die. when it's 5-2 and someone 'poofs' ala BG /afk it's an attempt to bug the game and not lose any points. The cure is pulling back and not killing the 5th for 15-20seconds. If the 5th guy drops game also that seems to be fine, just don't kill him right after someone drops.

This is all completely unconfirmed but has kept us from getting bugged games against good teams for the past few weeks.

I think that this is not a bug but an exploit. A week ago we encountered a team from Nightmare's Asylum, we beat them and received zero points. We q'd again, got them again and beat them, for points this time (like 10). We got them again and lost like 20 points. Could be coincidence?

The exact same thing happened later in the week. We q'd, got the same NA team, got zero points... q'd again and traded points barely coming out on top. To me, it really looked like they were using this exploit to scout. Still could be coincidence, but seriously, same team, getting zero points for the first match while the refresh their memory on our comp/play-style.

Its possible that this team is just the "victim" but has anybody seen this happen when their team was losing? It has never happened to us. It really feels like the odds of this event going down the way it did for my team and being a bug are just low. Its so infuriating to be legitimately better than another team who has far superior pve gear... and then have circumstances force you to suspect that they are still cheating you out of points.

Yeah, the problem is that all the stuff on this problem is just anecdotal. I have seen exactly what you described happen too, and that would explain it pretty well. It seems pretty much impossible to say anything for certain other than that this problem is persisting :\

Yes and if your playing a skirmish yourself its normally only if you play a 2nd game against the same team that you find out they they are queueing rated.

Having said that it appears that virtualy all of our skirmish games have been against rated in last 2-3 weeks.

Is it possible that when its searching for teams that once it opens up far enough that they are unlikely to get any points anyway it also opens skirmish?
This pattern has now repeated itself 3 weeks in a row. First game of week often 4-5 days since our last game so we start with a skirmish. We get beaten soundly , check them out and they are high ranked. We play again and get the same team. Often the queue is 3-5 mins btw for these games, as compared to 10-30 seconds normally.
All 3 weeks the other team has later or ingame asked if we are queueing skirmished as they were playing rated- We are.

We start queueing rated and end up yet again with playing the same team, and losing 0-2 pts to them because of the massive points differential. I am talking about 2100-2200 rated teams playing our 1700.

In case it hasn't been answered yet, I'm fairly certain this is a known issue and is slated to be fixed soon.