It's already pretty prevalent on Tourney Realm # 1, and I assume on 2 as well. I have a few questions about this, as I'm sure many other players do.

1) How should we handle it when we think we see cheating? Should we ignore it, and assume the cheaters will be removed from the standings after week 6? Open GM tickets to report it? Send an e-mail someplace?

2) Is anything being pro-actively done to prevent this behavior?

3) Should we just start doing it ourselves and compete directly with the win traders?

I realize #3 sounds like an idiotic question, but when there's $75,000 in prize money on the line, I'm planning to stay as competitive as possible. I abhor the idea, but I'm not going to let some low-life bag cash I might have won because my morals prevented me from succeeding.

I really hope we see some heavy-handed action doled out to these cheaters so the tourney doesn't dissolve into a cesspool of 4AM win-trading mayhem.

Edit: I'd like to offer part of a solution: Disable the ability to leave before the match starts without penalty. If the Queue "pops", you are in it, for better or worse. If you leave the match or queue after you're able to enter, you should take a loss, with ratings going down accordingly. that would at least prevent Que and Map dodging.

I'm guessing people have multiple accounts registered in order to do this win-trading? I was under the impression that the general method of win-trading is ranking a team up, giving it to friends or alts, ranking a second team up, and having the second team beat up the first team for rating. You wouldn't be able to organize that very well here unless your friends spent $60 for registration, or you did. I'm sure some people would do that to try and exploit the system though.

In either case, I'm highly interested in the answer to question #2. It generally goes without saying that you'd want to try and report cheating that's going on, but whether something will actually be done about it or not is the big issue.

6. Tournament Rules.

All matches that take place in the Tournament shall take place in accordance with the World of Warcraft Arena Rules, which are available at http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/pvp/arena/index.xml. In the event of any conflict between these Official Rules and the World of Warcraft Arena Rules, these Official Rules shall prevail. "Cheating," as determined in Sponsor's sole discretion, and specifically including, without limitation, "win-trading," shall result in disqualification of the Arena Team and all of its Team Members. Third party user interfaces compatible with World of Warcraft, and which do not violate the World of Warcraft Terms of Use may be used during the First and, if applicable, Second Qualification Rounds of the Tournament, but will not be allowed at the Regional Qualifier or the Finals. At the Regional Qualifier, and the Finals, Team Members will have fifteen (15) minutes prior to the start of the first match with each opponent Team Member to prepare the computer on which they will use to participate in the Tournament match.

quoted from official competition rules

Easiest method to defeat this exploitation is using unique identifiers like you would to save raids. Tie these identifiers to Arena Team identifiers. Make it impossible for anyone to join another team until a set period has passed (But since the whole event is only 6 weeks long, why not just make everyone ineligible to join any other team once the allowed practice time has passed?)

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Q u o t e:
Easiest method to defeat this exploitation is using unique identifiers like you would to save raids. Tie these identifiers to Arena Team identifiers. Make it impossible for anyone to join another team until a set period has passed (But since the whole event is only 6 weeks long, why not just make everyone ineligible to join any other team once the allowed practice time has passed?)

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I thought I read somewhere that that is whats going to happen, i may have misread though.

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Q u o t e:
Disable the ability to leave before the match starts without penalty. If the Queue "pops", you are in it, for better or worse. If you leave the match or queue after you're able to enter, you should take a loss, with ratings going down accordingly.

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This is the only way to do it. Players can win-trade very easily and still have the match look like a real fight. The only way to counter win-trading is to implement what Nermal has suggested and hope that the sheer amount of players queueing will keep win-traders in check.

If this is NOT implemented, win-traders can queue for 6 weeks straight against their own teams and never risk losing a single point.

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Q u o t e:


If you think a team is win-trading, please report it to our GM staff by using the in-game reporting button (the red question mark on the bottom center-left of your UI).

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I really hope you guys are gonna be proactively policing the tournament.

Don't wait for reports, step up and assign a few guys to look over the game records at the top end.

Its IMPOSSIBLE to win trade at 4am as the que times are less than 10 seconds. The way of a win trader is to have an entire guild on queing at the same time when the ques are long, they are on vent and if it pops at the same time they enter and throw in the game. Think of the movie 21 - its like counting cards, except this time you are counting ques....

All blizzard would have to do to monitor this would be to take a look at the losing teams with 0 damage done if they keep logs of that stuff.

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Q u o t e:
It's already pretty prevalent on Tourney Realm # 1, and I assume on 2 as well. I have a few questions about this, as I'm sure many other players do.

1) How should we handle it when we think we see cheating? Should we ignore it, and assume the cheaters will be removed from the standings after week 6? Open GM tickets to report it? Send an e-mail someplace?

2) Is anything being pro-actively done to prevent this behavior?

3) Should we just start doing it ourselves and compete directly with the win traders?

I realize #3 sounds like an idiotic question, but when there's $75,000 in prize money on the line, I'm planning to stay as competitive as possible. I abhor the idea, but I'm not going to let some low-life bag cash I might have won because my morals prevented me from succeeding.

I really hope we see some heavy-handed action doled out to these cheaters so the tourney doesn't dissolve into a cesspool of 4AM win-trading mayhem.

Edit: I'd like to offer part of a solution: Disable the ability to leave before the match starts without penalty. If the Queue "pops", you are in it, for better or worse. If you leave the match or queue after you're able to enter, you should take a loss, with ratings going down accordingly. that would at least prevent Que and Map dodging.

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How can you even say that win trading is prevalent right now? It's practice and nothing counts atm. Who in their right mind would win trade when the rating is getting wiped.

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Q u o t e:
one quick fix to make it much harder to win trade is to cause rating loss if you have your arena queue pop but you choose to not take it. currently its so easy to win trade since you can just not take the queue pop if your partner team didn't have a queue pop at the exact same instant that yours did, and suffer no penalty while wasting other people's time

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Yea I don't know why blizzard changed this since it used to be like this in S1/S2.

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Q u o t e:



How can you even say that win trading is prevalent right now? It's practice and nothing counts atm. Who in their right mind would win trade when the rating is getting wiped.

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A lot of players didn't notice this :) I've even been asked to confirm if "this was a practice period" and usually get disappointment when I told them nothing for the first two weeks is being counted towards the tournament just yet. :P

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Q u o t e:


A lot of players didn't notice this :) I've even been asked to confirm if "this was a practice period" and usually get disappointment when I told them nothing for the first two weeks is being counted towards the tournament just yet. :P

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True that. I've been sort of piping down with specifics now that I realize how many people charged in uninformed, intending to trade their way to the finals.

To the previous poster, I do suspect several teams have already been win trading, pointless as it may be. I'll definitely be reporting anyone who I think is doing it once next week begins.

Thanks, Ordinn, for your reply.