Over on the beta servers, @Vexx earned 780 points in just three battles. And is in the top five. This needs to be investigated!
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Am I still on the leaderboards or did they ban my account? 
You haven’t done any PVP since the beta started, so you’re not on them. Sorry!
I appreciate your attempt to crunch numbers @Slypenslyde, and I hope you don’t take it as a criticism, but I think your calculations are a bit too optimistic. An average of 45 seconds per 3-trophy match (80 wins/hour) might be possible, but requires full and undivided attention to the game. That’s not an issue to maintain for 10 minutes, but several hours per day in far more unlikely, and in addition, every game you lose (or retire from) is lost time that you’re not taking into account… In my experience, 70 wins/hour is already very good.
PvP points awarded and gold vary a lot depending on player level: fighting ‘stronger’ (i.e. higher power level) teams awards many more points. For this reason a 3-trophy game for a lower level player (particulary without all kingdoms bonuses) in a guild that doesn’t complete guild tasks (and thus lack stat bonuses from guild statues) will regularly be worth 65-70 points and 2k+ gold. When you’re an endgamer in a guild completing all statues, there’s virtually no ‘stronger’ players in the pool, so your 3T matches award 49-51 points and 1.5k gold before bonuses at most.
I had also reported this particular player as suspicious several months back and nothing was done until today, which is a bit frustrating… I can’t speak for @awryan’s criteria, but I know if I see player with relatively low troop stats and a nearly flawless record (be it in the PvP, raid or invasion leaderboards) I go ‘hmmm’, especially if after some closer monitoring they seem to be able to consistently get 20-second wins while doing 3-trophy matches.
And I do believe the presence of cheaters in the game affects us all, and more attention should be given to it by the devs for their own benefit… It’s particularly discouraging when it comes to the sigil-gated events, if I see a person I suspect of cheating near the top of the leaderboard I will pass on spending any additional gems on the event, and I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one.
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I don’t remember if I mentioned it here. But I reported the player in April. Just cause the devs don’t catch someone immediately… Doesn’t mean they aren’t cheating. We can only hope they get caught eventually.
And even if they are cheating. The devs choose not to tell the player who reported them. So there’s really never any closure other than the player disappearing from the game. That’s the devs right, but unfortunately, also leads to constant speculation.
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The person who was banned has finished in the top 10 for many guild events as well.
OK, this is decent feedback.
The feeling I get is since most players (by definition “everybody but about 100 people”) don’t bother attempting the leaderboard, so it’s hard for anyone outside that group to have a feel for what “looks right”.
I’m willing to entertain that I’m wrong, and that awryan’s assertion cheating is rampant is correct. But there’s a visibility problem, and it’s harder to believe when the answer to “Why do you suspect cheating?” is “Just look! It’s obvious!” Because no, it’s not, really. Everything about the player who was banned looked legit to me, so clearly my measures are broken.
I don’t like being wrong, and asking questions is the only cure!
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Yes, and once the offending player is finally banned the devs won’t change the rewards retroactively, as far as I know. One of my guildmates came second in an event won by a player that was banned a week or two afterwards, and despite contacting support about it I believe he never got the orb of power that should have been his… 
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I raised that concern to the devs before. They are able to take players off the PvP leaderboards. But not able to take them off Raids Leaderboards last I knew. It’s unfortunate cause it’s a waste of a power orb. But what I’ve definitely learned from this thread is… Very few in the community really care or understand the impact that cheating has on a game.
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I’ve really tried to stay out of this, but as you keep asking here I go.
It’s not just “looks fishy” from looking at the leaderboard. You can use the API to look at a player’s teams, and when they are winning 100% of battles with only a couple of their teams set up, and those teams use weak troops, and they’ve also won 100% of raid/invasion battles, it’s pretty obvious they are using a cheat. There is software that can modify the game files to increase stats during a game. It’s cheating, and it is disheartening for anyone that is attempting to climb the leaderboard.
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I wish I was that smart. Unfortunately, I can only go by my eyes. If it looks suspect… Most likely it is suspect… Or at the very least… Worth looking into.
Every week since 3.5 was released… There seems to be an uptick of players on the leaderboards with suspect stats.
It seems, I’m the only one dumb enough to complain about it on it the forums and somehow become the bad guy for it.
Possibly. But, I don’t think that is actually the case.
But, I’ll just speak for myself. I despise the amount of cheating that goes on in the game. It made me so irritated in the past that I took a 3 month break from the game because I didn’t like the way guild collusion was being handled back then.
However, my time in GoW has shown me that you really aren’t going to get any traction when it comes to discussing cheating in any meaningful way on the forum. You can’t address specific people or guilds that are cheating because you’ll get smacked down from above for callouts. You can barely discuss the ethics of cheating because someone is waiting to be offended that you even mentioned that cheating is happening. Or, god help, you get people that come in just to state “who cares! This is just a match-3 game and not a sport”.
I mean look what happened in this thread when someone just suggested they do a cursory check of the top 5 players every week to make sure all is legit. There is post after post of miscommunication for a reasonable request.
Anyway, the devs always give the same response to these kinds of threads. We will never know exactly what they do proactively to deal with cheaters on the leaderboard. So for my sanity, I try not to focus on the cheating and just enjoy playing the game. I’ve long since considered all the “competitive” modes in GoW a joke.
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I’m, actually going to apologize. I wish the people who have explained it differently to me had popped up sooner, so I didn’t get to go on for so long.
You can’t explain it to me because it’s intuition. You don’t describe intuition. It just is. The other people are describing tools that can help guide it, but maybe you just innately recognize the patterns.
Either way, I jumped on the wrong wagon and made some wrong accusations. I’m not going to go on about thinking I was right or whatever, it doesn’t matter. Next time I’ll leap to a different conclusion.
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Honestly I just don’t see why people care about cheaters. It doesn’t impact 99% of players. Like I will never be on the leaderboard so I don’t mind what other people do.
Like this doesn’t severely effect more than the top 20 people on the leaderboards… maybe could stretch it to top 100.
This is primarily a single player game except for leaderboard rewards, but a majority never see a single reward from that.
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Cheaters affect a lot of people. If a guild has someone cheating it will affect all guilds. It’s not just the PvP leaderboard. Trophies boost guild ranks, and not to mention GW and the other weekly events
Once again you have missed the point. It’s not that I don’t care about cheating. My stance against cheating is as strong as it ever was. What I object to is you appointing yourself sole arbiter of what constitutes cheating and what does not. Allow me to relate a story you may remember:
At one point several months ago, you came to me and asked if I had any reason to believe my former guild was cheating in guild wars. When I told you no, you insisted that something was not right. You refused to accept that I was telling the truth because it didn’t confirm your preconceived notion of what simply had to be going on. The next day, you posted a thread claiming that I and my guild simply had to be cheating because there was no other possible interpretation of what you called evidence.
In short, you called me a liar to my face, said I was too stupid to know what was happening in my own guild and went your merry paranoiac way despite eyewitness evidence to the contrary.
This is why you don’t get to determine who is cheating and who is not. And it is also why we are no longer friends.
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That’s the problem with any obssession: the colateral damage, what is lost and who is hurt. It barely matters how many “infidels” a crusade put to the sword when they burn a whole city of innocents…
It won’t stop here, i see you all next week folks.
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We are no longer friends because I came to you about a concern I had. Privately in a DM… That you now have decided to make public. Classy as always. And then you cussed me out for it.
I have always made it clear that I don’t decide who is cheating and who isn’t. The devs do.
I dared to make a suggestion that they do it automatically for the top 5 players in PvP. Absolutely no harm can be done to legit players. Only the ones cheating.
This week that I made the request. A player was banned that I had originally reported 4 months ago. That’s relevant now because I and many others had to devs look into your former guild. They felt like nothing suspicious was being done. So it was settled. Many, and my self will think that collusion was done. But the devs didn’t so it is what it is.
As @Ashasekayi said in her posts. Many have the same exact suspicions that I do. But aren’t allowed to raise the concerns due to backlash or punishment directly from the devs.
I myself have been warned for raising my concerns about cheating that it could result in a ban from here. Not because I’m saying anything overtly negative or calling anyone out specifically. But because others can’t act like adults and blow any topic about cheating into their own narrative. As you just did. You took one conversation that we had out of 100 that happened to do about cheating. And brought it up here to indicate I have a history of what? Not liking cheaters… For always wanting the game to be fair for everyone? Only the devs actually know how correct I am about the cheaters I report. But they won’t say anything to come to my defense on the matter. Yet, even if they did, you’d try to look for something else to find fault in me about. Because you’re still upset that you lost me as a friend. So any chance you get to attack me on a subject. You take it.
As much as it’s not up to me to decide who cheats an who isn’t. It’s not up to you to tell me what I’m allowed to say here and what I’m not. It sucks that you’re too prideful for us to be friends. But get over it… Cause trust me… I got over it months ago.
I bet you took a psychology class in high school so you’re now a trained psychiatrist. Good luck with that in life and on here.