What people are discussing here I believe is not earning your alt points by having him tank games on your main's team, but using 2 teams to artificially inflate your main's rating.

1. Make a team and level it to 2200 rating.

2. Leave your first team, start a new team and level it to 2200 rating.

3. Have some friends log on and play your first team and queue it against your second team and hand you wins.

People are doing this at off peak times to trade wins and essentially cheat their way to gladiator or merc gladiator.

I don't think anyone cares if people lose 3 games on their alts each week, but blizzard needs to do something to stop win trading.

He's not beefing up his own character through his own effort. Multiple players are cohorting together to exploint the rating system so they can beef up their own score against their OWN team to gain weapons and ratings that they probably may not ever get.

Farming your own team is just as bad as buying into a team, IMHO.

You aren't putting forth much effort, if any, to have YOUR team lay down against your OWN team. There's no effort required there.

Cheating is cheating, no matter HOW you do it. The rating system was not meant to reward people for farming their own teams.

That's not what I am talking about. I'm talking about alts on different teams using one team to boost another team's rating.

I'll stop here because you have apparently misunderstood what I am talking about.

Bingo.

And it's not just 2200 rated teams. It's two middle of the pack teams at 1700 that pushes one to 1850-2000 rating. This way they can get the S3 weapon and shoulders even though they really haven't earned it.

How would two middle-pack teams manage this? I thought that you'd have to reach a reasonably high rating (2.2k+) to be sure of coming up against your 'alt' team.

You do it at off peak hours say 6am when no one else is queuing near your rating. It seems Blizzard is taking a stance against some of the more well known ones however which is good.

To kind of take it back to the multi-page derail, does anyone else find it ironic that in the same thread people are complaining about being forced to PvE for a cloak because they prefer to PvP and yet also complaining about items that cost honor because they do not like BG PvP? I also find the attitudes toward PvP EPIC rewards quite hilarious after my 5 month break right after the xpac. Does anyone else remember a time when the average player would NEVER be able to get the PvP epics? The PvP epics are easy enough to get now, if they make them any easier they might as well just charge gold for them. Put in the time, or dont use them. Simple enough.

As far as AFK'ing in AV - I admit I've done it before. Grinding honor for alts after 2.0 I had a pretty solid system set up for it actually. At that point in my BG it was very easy to tell if Horde would win or lose the AV match in the first minute or two of the match just based on how much defense/offense was present and which locations the offense/defense were challenging. I would submit my two cents for strategy, attempt to help for the first 5 minutes or so, pull up the map, evaluate the odds, and decide if it was worth it to continue or just "guard SHGY". But to be honest even then I would usually go in thinking I'd just AFK and end up getting in the thick of it. I guess the competitive streak got into me a little too much. I will say that I encountered the worst AFK situation possible today in WSG where I - as a holy pally in sub-par gear - lead the charts in KB and was 3rd in damage for my team, and lead healing on each side in a single game (we also had a rogue that did a grand total of 300 damage in a 40 minute WSG, and a mage that did 800). It's games like that where its so close that either of those players could have easily ended the turtle and ended the game quicker that really pissed me off.

Now as to how to fix it - I agree with a personal BG rating for WSG/AB/EotS. Leave AV exactly the way it is. Tweak the ratings for WSG/AB to be roughly similar to the average reward from AV, but allow for significantly higher rewards for having a "good" rating. This would also help with the excess marks of honor that inevitably accumulate well before you get close to the honor acquired. The good teams would win more often, get marks faster, but also accumulate honor faster.

With extreme prejudice I hope. Its aweful to know that dozens of teams won't be getting their rightful gladiator title this season because teams pushed ahead of them using an extremely lame method of cheating.

Seconded. Although I was slightly neutral on the subject at first mainly because it seemed to be a pretty 'creative' way to skip ahead of legitimate players (although I'd never do it myself), I then realised it goes against everything the Arena is supposed to represent, and eventually it would evolve to the point that to compete everyone who's serious would have to do it, regardless of ethics.

I hope as many 'feeder' teams are disciplined as possible, and many teams who would have just missed out on gladiator rankings to get their just rewards.

I don't know about that anymore. They didn't speak up about it for a very long time. I imagine a number of the teams boosting now are teams that are only doing it to counter those who did it first and figured Blizzard doesn't mind since they ignored it so long.

I don't believe that for a second, for every one who use that reasoning there are ten who started doing it because they figured out how and that Blizzard wasn't going to do anything to them.

While it is unfortunate that some legitimate players may miss out on their title, I suppose I have a rough time understanding the basis under which Blizzard can reprimand the "feeder" teams. At very worst these folks violated the "spirit of competition", they did not violate any plain meaning of any rules. Given a structured system they devised a work around without breaking the rules set forth in the system. If people want to be angry at someone be angry at the creators of the system and rules structure.

For comparison's sake let us look at college football for a second in the BCS system. Does it behoove a traditionally strong program (SEC, Big Ten, etc powerhouses) to build a very tough schedule excluding weaker MAC teams? In essence schedules are built to farm these teams in order to ease ranking burden because strength of schedule weighting is insignificant relative to the downside risk associated with a loss.

Call me strange but I don't see the basis for the anger towards the teams that optimized the puzzle given to them without breaking the rules. The "farmers" devised a creative solution to a poorly designed puzzle with few rules. The really only thing these "farmers" are guilty of is highlighting yet another large hole in Blizzard's design.

Blizzard I believe failed in not creating a rule/law/stop against this behavior, and without the initial creation they have no basis to enforce said rule/law ipso facto.

Every cheat, exploit, whatever in this game has been possible because of a design flaw people are working through. That's the nature of cheating these games. If WoW was perfect there would obviously be no way to possibly exploit it. By your logic there is no such thing as cheating in WoW, as you place the blame solely on blizzard for making a game that isn't 100% bulletproof.

This argument of "it's not cheating because the game mechanic lets me do it" just doesn't fly.

Except in this case the 'powerhouse' Arena teams are actually chartering and fielding the teams they are 'farming'...so its not at all similar to what goes on when a big name college football team plays a lesser program to fill out their non-conference schedule.

You have seen the abusers and the evidence to know they do not involve other people? (I highly doubt it). The "farming system" is simplified by actually involving other people. Consider that they are farming some teams merely through the means of an agreement. The larger schools farm the small schools providing the benefit of large financial windfalls to the smaller programs. The smaller school facilitates the BCS ranking for the large school in exchange for financial gains to their athletics program.

Ratings systems will always be gamed it is their nature, it is why you comparatively see simplicity and effectiveness in playoff ladders with single or double eliminations. Playoff systems remove a large portion of the meta game that is ratings maximization. One method is inferior and leads to you feeling cheated like apparently a number of you feel you have been the other one does not.

Ratings are easy to implement, playoffs are harder and more time consuming, if you take the easy way out from a design perspective you reap what you sow.

Look around some at ratings systems you will always find some form a mutual agreed upon "farming" it is a known liability of the design. However, if Blizzard now explicitly states they disapprove of this behavior and consider it a punishable offense going forward, I really have no problem with punishing on-going offenders. Simply put though they have no basis for doling out retribution ipso facto.

Blizzard pretty explicitly stated years ago that cooperative honor farming was against the rules, even if it was never terribly effective. Removing farmer teams from the gladiator pool would be a reasonable extension of that

That's exactly my point. If Blizzard had said a week ago that they will ban you for this exploit then let the bodies hit the floor. But as of a couple days ago everybody basically figured that Blizzard isn't going to do anything about it, and it's a bit harsh to all of a sudden say "Oh btw, that thing you've been doing the last couple days? Yeah it's bannable now, cya!" Taking away titles I don't have a problem with though.

I don't understand how this related to the problem on hand? I'm not familiar with the College basketball system but I really don't think you understand.

3 people decide they want a 3,000 3v3 rating:

1) They form a 3v3 and get it up to 2200. They invite an alt on that team as a placeholder. Everyone else leaves the team.
2) Rinse and repeat this several times over
3) The last team they level up, they stay on so they have 100% games played and receive arena rewards
4) At 6AM when no one is queuing, all of the teams in step (1) queue up against the team described in step (3). Since it is 6AM the chances the 2 teams face each other is almost 100%. Teams in (1) intentionally lose to (3) over and over and over. This can be 6 individuals or 1 individual with access to 6 accounts, it doesn't really make a difference.

Stop saying "ipso facto," it hurts -- you mean "ad hoc" if anything. Or just say "without notice" and be less pretentious.

Anyway, a 72-hour suspension is pretty standard. Use the Geddon debuff to blow up the AH? 72-hour suspension. Not against the letter of the rules maybe, just using ordinary game mechanics, etc. But it's still exploiting a loophole. I see feeding as completely analogous to instance cascading (you get your alts/friends to start new instances and give them to you for free so you can get an in-game benefit) except it actually hurts people because titles are a finite resource whereas instance IDs are not. Anyway, Twelve Prophets got 72-hour suspensions for cascading and claimed that "Blizzard never said we couldn't!" Tough. That's what the catch-all clauses in the EULA are for. You can't deny that feeding isn't exploiting the arena ladder, and exploiting mechanics loopholes is against the rules.

As for the 3000pt team that was allegedly permabanned, who knows about the circumstances of that. As I've said in the past, and as I think most of us know is true, "MMO ethics" aren't the strong suit of a lot of the high-end PvP community. It's quite likely that upon investigating the players on that team they discovered that they had been powerleveled, or purchased/sold the accounts, etc. We don't know the facts.

I think that even all this 'feeding' would not be a problem if: Arena queues were instant, teams had to play 50 games a week at 2000+ or else they would fall in rating.

Apologies on the word usage there, not my intent to cause harm with poor usage. I like the analogy to cascading as I am familiar with how that was policed and enforced. I guess my difficutly is simply I don't see that they broke a hard rule and they didn't even have to go to large lengths of organization or planning to actually do this. Very low hanging fruit was left unsupervised and someone picked it, I can't really see the basis for absolving the designer here and bringing down holy wrath of punishment on the farmers.

Yes it very much sucks that people who played their way to the top legitimately are being hurt by this I definately agree. I just see that the designer of the system bears a relatively significant portion of the responsibility in this as it was a known issue, not adressed, and very easily worked around. Bearing a significant portion of the responsiblity, I have a hard time with someone I feel was lax in preventing the problem in the first place handing out significant punishment.

It just feels strange if the designer decides to really bring down the punishment hammer hard here, they messed up pretty significantly in their own right.

One thing I hope they fix for Season 3 is the damn queue system. Give it more processing power or something, I don't have the time to sit in 13m queues to up my rating. It really stinks of the old days when I had to wait in a queue just to log into my character. When you're in the arena queue you can't queue for BGs, the only other option to PvP if that's your focus, and you can't do instances. So you can choose to farm something near the queue area or sit there and wait. That's bad design.

The fact that Blizzard is also at fault for designing a poor system does not forgive the people who abused the system. If their actions did not affect others, I don't think anybody would care too much, but those that abuse this are robbing legitimate teams of their rightful titles. Their lack of willpower/sportsmanship/whatever you want to call it does deserve punishment because it has implications beyond personal numbers.

Blizzard might have screwed up themselves, but it's not as if any members of the playerbase have the ability to dole out punishment.