Let’s say a player is leading an event (faction or others) by more than 3x the number of points of the 2nd ranked: would it be appropriate to report such situation so that the Devs have a look see?
What is a reasonable threshold so that the Report feature is not overused?
It’s a double-edged sword, the “Report” feature. From what I recall, if a player submits too many fake reports, they are docked honor for wasting the devs’ time. So by all means, use the report feature—that’s what it’s there for! But know that if you use it too often, and you’re rarely right, there are in-game consequences for doing so.
(Edit: I can’t find the quote I was thinking of, so the struck-through part may not be correct.)
And I remember hearing that the top of the leaderboard is routinely checked by the devs on general principle. So theoretically someone takes a look at these sorts of things.
Thanks: don’t wanna go overboard, nor underboard.
It would be great if we could have an indication of whether a top score is legit, or if something was irregular and acted upon.
Gracias!
Score isn’t enough to determine if someone is hacking/cheating or not. You can just buy extra tiers to raise the score as much as you want.
The top score isn’t a problem if you have enough gems and time. The current delve event leader doesn’t look suspicious at all for me.
However, I have reported 3 players from leaderboard during this event - usual cheaters with maximum renown in Sea of Sorrow, Hall of Guardians, All-Seeing Eye, etc factions while maintaining hoard level no higher than 100. One of them I’m reporting since January in multiple reports to devs with very strong arguments - I don’t know why devs don’t ban him but I will be persistent with reports. And one of them cheating on his second account (the first one was banned).
If you see something that you think is suspicious on the leaderboard of an event, there is a big chance that other have found it suspicious too and have already reported the player. So there is a great chance that the player will be checked, even if you did not report the player yourself, as he/she likely have been reported a numerous times by others.
My hope is if the devs punish “false reports” then what they mean by false is you don’t really have a reason to make the report. to me, your best defense is laying out your case each time.
“The player has a lot of points!” isn’t a good enough case, though. It needs more data. Some people just like to show off, so it’s worth doing some calculations to figure out if it’s even possible. How many games would they have had to play? If you assume 1-2 minutes per game, how many hours is that? If it’s more than about 10, things get suspicious, but keep in mind for stunts people can play 14+ hours daily.
Sadly the devs have a very strong “we don’t discuss bannings” policy so it’s hard to get feedback. It’s possible a poster above is exaggerating something about the people they have reported. Or, it’s possible the devs simply didn’t look into it. We don’t know because we don’t have all the information.
The bad advice here is “make a thread if you think there’s cheating”. You really shouldn’t. The forums have a pretty strict callout policy so you risk some form of discipline. But my opinion is you should be able to ask, “How do you do this without cheating?” I mean, maybe you want that many leaderboard points for yourself, right? And if nobody can come up with how a human pulls off the feat… you sort of accomplish the same goal, right?
The only way we can confirm or deny a perception the devs don’t do a lot is to talk about suspected cheaters. Unfortunately, “talk about cheaters” is against the rules. 
Where did you see this be said by the devs?
When in doubt. Report… If you’re wrong no harm done. If you’re right… Then you did the community a great service.
The devs don’t want you reporting every single player. But as long as it doesn’t seem that way by your reports. Then there shouldn’t be any blow back.
The players that get reported the most will be looked at first… So it could be days or weeks before they check out a player. But if you’re right. You’ll receive something like this in the mail.
I can’t find the post. I thought it came up in one of the pre-4.3 streams Salty did, but darn if I can find the quote now. I am editing my post to reflect this.
Actually I got really confused here because now “report a player” means two things:
I think there’ll definitely be some way to get punished via the honor system. Some yahoo out there is going to figure out they can report the #1 position on the leaderboard easily and start doing it multiple times daily every week on principle. That’s just wasting the devs’ time and is a really strong pattern. I’d hope any punishment would warrant a “Stop doing this” message first, but I don’t think the game has a DM system so they kind of can’t.
(Also I’m pretty certain I could write a program to report a player multiple times per second. I’m not testing that theory. Some activity so obviously deserves a ban you don’t try it.)
So maybe we should all start reporting the top 10 every day for cheating. They won’t ban all of us, and I reckon if we’re all doing it they’ll have to either implement a DM system or fix this reporting system. Win-win.
I really really want a DM system.
How great would it be to reach out to other players directly, especially if recipients could opt in to a “Do Not Call” list?
The possibilities for guild recruitment, friendship-making, and the like should be enough to make one’s mouth water…
…etc…
I think the reportbuttons were added, to make it easier for players and devs, also to save time. But it would be useful, if you add a textbox to each report you want to submit, so you can explain in short sentences, what you are want to report exactly. If you found something strange and you can’t explain it, then I have my doubts that it will save time for the devs, when they have to do a full account-check first, especially when there are some troll-or false reports included.
I think recruitment can go the other way, too—people don’t always try to take good players from the top (and if they’re in a good guild, why would they leave?) but also try to save people toiling in obscurity in semi-dead guilds.
I’m thinking mostly of low-to-mid- tier guilds. Often two guilds will go head-to-head in Guild Wars that have 15 or fewer players. What if those GMs could PM each other and negotiate a merger? It would clean up a lot of garbage, l think.
And we might finally see fewer people striking off on their own to start new guilds with no chance to thrive because their ability to reach out and be recruited into guilds with requirements to their liking wouldn’t be limited by the current crap-shooting that is global chat (or even forum threads, for that matter).
Because people make mistakes. 
(I’m joking, but yeah)
I’m not familiar enough with the top of the GoW leaderboard (6 months in, top10% but never really top10 
), but in every other game I have experienced, a x3 gap between 1st and 2nd is not normal.
I will of course take onboard the advice of the seasoned players here, so thanks again!
