PvP rankings are a joke

Gameplay Chat (PC/Mobile)
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Nice work @sdoherty14 and everyone else who legitimately worked their asses off to get where they are on the leaderboard.

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But to summarize that thread (great one @DonBoba )

  • I also don’t understand the ranking. If many people are joining, they are mostly casual, reaching 1500 seals takes already a fair bit of time, how can they finish with 200+ pvp fights? numbers don’t seem to add up. So many people high ranked, why don’t we see them in guilds? We’re talking at least 20000 people, that’s close to 700 guilds
  • as few people said, what’s the point of botting? No money to be made in this game. Also that’s a massive number of bots for no monetary reward.
  • players ranking high legitimately are impressive by the amount of time invested, kudos to you guys!
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66

Yes, the PVP rankings are a joke. But just to go back to the OP by @DonBoba and answer his question in a round about way.

Last week in our guild, we had two people do 3K trophies, four do 1.5K trophies, five do 1K trophies, and another five that did right around 600.

So some of the volume numbers (the number of players jammed into the top 20K players or whatever) are believable.

What’s questionable is that there’s 2 or 3 players that are consistently in the top 5. The difference between the top 5 and everybody else is literally over 100% many times.

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The account sharing is 100% confirmed, straight from one of the horses’ mouths.

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My thought on account sharing:

Guilds are limited to 30 accounts. So there should be also a limit of 30 players. However if in one guild members are sharing accounts then theres more people in the guild.

  • Lets say guild A has 30 players, and each player can play 2 hours a day (14 hours of play a week per member (30x7x2). Guild A gets a total of 420 hours play time a week. If on avarage 1 hour of play brings 50 trophies, guild A will earn 21000 trophies.

  • Now let’s say guild B has 60 players. How? 30 accounts, each shared by 2 players. The avarage play time of a player in guild B is the same as play time of players in guild A - 2 hours. Guild B will get 60x7x2 or 840 play time. How? Well 2 players on 1 account will both play for 2 hours (on opposite times of day) which is 4 hours per account which is obviously double playtime compared to guild A. Guild B will get 42000 trophies.

This simple example shows how huge is the difference if just 2 players are on 1 account. But what if 4 or 5 players share an account? Where should the devs draw the line?
I know that thankfuly there arent that many people sharing accounts.
But how long will we pretend its not a huge problem?

And do you want to tell me its hard to detect account sharing?
If account logs in at 6 AM from IP from 1 country, at 4 PM from another country, tomorrow at 6 again from the first country and again around 4 PM from the second country - thats account sharing. Stupid example, but account sharing has been delt with in many games, i cant accept its unsolvable here.

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Not a stupid example at all, just probably the easiest to spot account sharing that will ever occur.
In all cases where it is not that obvious, no absurd distances involved from different IPs, you just can’t prove account sharing in those cases.

Account sharing in other games has never completely been “delt with”…there have been bans sure, mostly due to people being too obvious like in your example or being right out ratted out with visual proof from streams/chats etc. but Devs can’t just start banning accounts of Players that apparently have no lives.

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I don’t know how reliable source IP would be but it’s at least a starting point.

I’m with you - I’ve been complaining about account sharing for a long time and the standard answer from other players is “they can’t do anything about it”.

Unfortunately, the Devs have been completely silent, which to me implies that they maybe don’t even care…

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I dont find a huge problem if a couple (married or not yet married) is playing on 1 account. They are awake in similar times, they play on same devices so play time of that account wont be drastically higher compared to a solo player.
Problem appears when we are talking about coordinated account sharing. 1 player plays from 1 AM to 7 AM, next player plays from 8 AM to 4 PM. Third player plays from 5 PM to 12 PM.
They cover the whole day or a large part of it and trophy and gold income never stops.
Is it hard to detect this one? No. If an acount is active 20+ hours a day every day - you know its account sharing (or botting). If there are multiple IP adresses conecting to 1 account and they are all used for loging in at similar times day after day - its account sharing.

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72

The problem isn’t really account sharing, it’s that account sharing leads to a distinct advantage. And since account sharing can’t really be dealt with by the Devs (nor do I think it should as sometimes couples like to share accounts or parents and their children, which I think is their right if they want to do that), then it is the advantages gained by extreme account sharing that need to be dealt with.

Of course, that brings up its own can of worms: the easy solutions like time limits and the such are either ineffective because they don’t lower the bar far enough or they rub some people the wrong way because they no longer play as much as they want to.

Ultimately, I think the solution is switching the emphasis over to a different rewards structure and my guess is that is partially what the Devs are hoping Guild Wars does.

Edit: I do agree that the easy to spot and extreme account sharing @DonBoba mentioned above should be taken care of by the Devs but IP spoofing and the like can make that very hard to detect if someone is really to stay under the radar so my larger point still stands.

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I play a couple of games from work most days, now and then i play from a friends home aswell. If you were a Dev i would be banned now, thanks for that! :stuck_out_tongue:

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I agree that Guild Wars should help to do that. Which of those account sharers are going to get the honour of playing their 5 daily battles?!?

Still, the thing that really puzzles me is why, given the existing reward structure, would people bother with coordinated account sharing in the first place?

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The resource gains are crazy.

We had one person in our guild do 3000 trophies and he completed 5 or 6 legendary tasks all by himself. Even 2 account sharers in one guild collecting resources practically 24x7 starts to build up fast.

I mean right now, I’m doing about 1500 trophies a week. I am collecting resources at about the same rate as I spend them. So people doing 3 and 4 times as much as me are raking it in…

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if the speculations are correct, the question is why did they do it?

the game didn’t have player to player economy.
the game is not in the international competition league.
the rank reward is almost negligible.
you can’t buy “real money” stuff with diamond/glory/gold.
among other things.

it just doesn’t add up that people jump through all the hoops to cheat a casual puzzle game with cards. this game is not exactly in the popular ring (sorry).

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Yeah, but to what end? They’re doing this to get their collection maxed out as fast as possible? Or just for the pride of appearing at the top of a free-to-play gem-matching game leaderboard? I mean, it takes all kinds, but I just don’t see the point.

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I think this is a primary motivating factor.

And if they read these forums and see the complaints, it might be straight-up griefing.

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Account sharing may be a “small” issue, but it does not solve the issue of 20k+ accounts that are basically in no guild but get more than the average and even more than the highly active players.

I have a feeling that there are 1000’s of simulated users run by the Dev’s and we the players are competing with these false players. Even when I played 40+ hours a week on this game and was getting many trophies, 1000’s of games in pvp, I could still never compete with the top.

Something just seems a little fishy with it.

Also with the IP restrictions and supposed account sharing, there are people whom must use a VPN for work/business and also might use mobile with different ip’s even from different regions. Or people who work in different locations, play at home on others and maybe login to from a starbucks or mcdonalds wifi somewhere else even on a daily basis.

If there truly were 20000 active players, why wouldn’t they be in the top guilds, and if they are earning trophies at rates faster than the current top guilds why do they never rise? Many questions that are probably unanswerable.

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The highest I’ve ever finished was 17th. I was playing probably 15 hours a day that week.

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I actually worked for a large gaming company (400 mil registered accounts across all their games) on banning players that harrased others, sent real life threats, and used account sharing or playing on multiple accounts. So you wouldnt be banned but you might be observed for a period of time for suspicious activity :slight_smile:

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The thing is account sharing is no difficult hoop to jump through. The payoff may be small but the effort involved is basically nothing. Small game or not, some people just do anything to get get an advantage or to get to the top, sadly that is the reality. Geez in real life there are people murdering others for some bucks, worth less than a days playtime worth of GoW gems.

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  1. I don’t believe account sharing is quite as common place as it appears some of you think. YES it occurs but also involves hassle and coordination. (I’ve personally communicated with a number of different people in the past that could do it: (family, children, spouse all play) yet all but one individual has their own account they play on. That one “Sharer” let his child play on his account.

  2. I think its not that they don’t care about sharing but as Sirrian said: They only ban with conclusive proof. Account sharing is difficult to conclusively prove. What if some one travels for work (IPs in different locations with a short time gap) What if they are a consultant and work at a different location almost every single day (IPs all over the place).

  3. Looking at the console Leaderboard vs. PC leaderboard I personally believe the big culprit is bots and exploits on the PC side.

  4. Sirrian chimed in above, they have obviously been busy. Once the entire game is on one platform and nearly synchronized in terms of content that should cut their work load near half. Allowing them to refine things and get this problem straitened out.