Spooncraft

There’s A LOT to speculate and debate over this. People are going through hell and back to figure out how exploits work in the Arena (win trading, point selling blah blah blah) and Kalgan actually showed up and crits the forums with a huge wall of text kinda getting into the fray. The tread goes on for a long while but it’s worth checking out if Arena is your bag.

We’re keeping an eye on the new queue mechanics for exploits, but there is some critical information missing from this example. If the two players in question had not been exploiting, what rating would they be capable of maintaining?

The Elo system doesn’t actually rely on same-rating matchups to work, meaning if you’re only skilled enough to maintain a 1800 rating, but you play 1600 rated opponents all day and night, you’ll still hang around the 1800 rating mark regardless.

So, in the example above, the exploit should only work if the players in question were 1850 quality players anyways, in which case their exploit didn’t actually change their chances to get 1850 (or reduce on average the number of games they’d have to play to get there), it only changed who they played against to get there.

The exploit would only work if you were able to consistently play against opponents that were actually worse than their rating said they were. So, for example, if players at 1500 rating on average were actually worse than 1500, than it might work. However, if anything I think players feel that playing 1500 rated matchups is just as likely (if not more likely), to put you up against a team that is actually much better than 1500, in which case this exploit is hurting your chances more than helping. This only becomes more true the more players attempt to use this tactic (since more high-rated players would actually be queuing at lower ratings). (src)