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Point Selling Soon to be Extinct

Posted in: News by Tyveris, 15 April 2008 - 06:00 PM

100 Comments

In an interview Tom Chilton had with Gamespy, the question of point selling came up. The response is that it will be fixed once and for all in a patch that is a few weeks away. Here is a snippet from an interview containing the relevant information.

GameSpy: Have you looked internally at the distribution of players doing arenas on the live realm, separating those who are playing competitively with those selling teams or just tanking games to get gear?
Tom Chilton: We don't really have any way of knowing that. We can't distinguish what the intent of a given player is, whether they consider themselves to be competitive or whether they're just doing it for the gear or whatever. Certainly as far as players who are trying to exploit the system through loopholes, we have some changes coming in a patch just a few weeks away where we'll close a lot of those loopholes.

GameSpy: Are you able to talk about those changes yet?
Tom Chilton: Not just yet.

GameSpy: But we can expect the changes will be targeted at the point-selling teams.
Tom Chilton: Point selling, personal rating selling.

GameSpy: The two big things that players seem like they're against are the point-selling teams, since you can face highly skilled and geared players at even the low ratings, and those who bring alts or friends on a team to tank a team so that they can then get a high personal rating on the real team.
Tom Chilton: Exactly, that's what we'll be addressing.

You can read the full interview here: http://uk.pc.gamespy...t/866456p1.html

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Comments

#1 Isai

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Posted 15 April 2008 - 06:11 PM

awesome. good to know. still, I wouldn't be surprised it they messed it up somehow, but we'll see.

In my opinion: bring back the dropping queue penalty when games pop, and to get points for a week, you must have won at least one of your 30% games played. apply the last one to teams above 1500 because some teams start at 1500 and do nothing but go down. problem solved.

#2 syztem

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Posted 15 April 2008 - 06:15 PM

That 1 win idea is actually a pretty good idea. I like it.

#3 tristantio

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Posted 15 April 2008 - 06:18 PM

I still don't understand how they will be able to remove personal rating selling and distinguish it from a legit team that's formed.

For instance, I had a druid pay me 1000g for an 1850 personal rating.

I joined his newly formed 2v2 (with both of us forming it, so no additional teammate invites needed).

Then we played and got to 1850 with a 27 and 2 win rate (1 loss was a disconnect).

After this he bought his weapon and I left the team.

Now how exactly can they fix that?

I didn't miss out on points myself because I get them from 5v5...

http://www.ahungry.com

#4 syztem

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Posted 15 April 2008 - 06:21 PM

They can't and won't fix PR carrying like that because whose to say he's not your real life friend and you played with him for fun?

I think it's more directed at win trading boosting and the like.

#5 tristantio

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Posted 15 April 2008 - 06:22 PM

syztem said:

They can't and won't fix PR carrying like that because whose to say he's not your real life friend and you played with him for fun?

I think it's more directed at win trading boosting and the like.

Ah yea, I'm all for removing win traders.

I work hard at powerleveling my point buyers ;)

http://www.ahungry.com

#6 Veilsixx

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Posted 15 April 2008 - 06:23 PM

Well Xenow they cant really fix that aspect of it since you really didnt abuse the system to get your friend, or customer or whatever the PR. You played the games fair and square.

What they are referring to is the people who take 2 2100 rated teams and they fill them up withs crubs and then synch up Q' to get each other and just go 30-30 alternating wins thus getting everyone 2k PR and keeping the teams perfectly at 2100.

#7 tristantio

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Posted 15 April 2008 - 06:28 PM

Veilsixx said:

Ah yea that's no good.

I'm just hoping the method of having point buyers (not personal rating) play 30% while I play 70% still works, as thats some easy cash also.

http://www.ahungry.com

#8 Veilsixx

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Posted 15 April 2008 - 06:31 PM

Yeah but I just have this wierd feeling that they are going to put some BS in that says the moochers will have to get 1 win to get points for the week.

That will devistate even the most "legitimate" way of point selling.

#9 Killamf

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Posted 15 April 2008 - 06:37 PM

Point selling is good. They are never going to fix it because they don't need to. Assuming one more season before next expansion why fix something that will be completely different so soon? Not buying it.

#10 Latham

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Posted 15 April 2008 - 06:37 PM

I have no problem with personal rating selling like the warlock above who helped out a druid by actually playing real games. It's when I que for 2's and get 15 empty arenas in a row because theres teams trading wins at 2100. All blizzard needs to do is give a penalty for leaving ques or put a cooldown so if your arena team leaves a que more than 3 times they can't play for a certain time period. I think it's fair to allow people to leave ques at least once or twice since disconnects do happen but they usually won't need to legitely leave a que more than once or twice. It's the people who chain que and chain leave que leaving teams with empty games all night long that piss me off.

#11 tristantio

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Posted 15 April 2008 - 07:45 PM

This probably wouldn't be a popular idea with a lot of people, but I think it would be intense enough to prevent people from getting a selling team up to 2100 rating:

Adding or removing a teammate causes a 150 point rating drop to the team rating and all personal ratings.

Similar to the situation on the official tournament servers, but dropping rating when people leave the team puts an added burden on the team to keep the same roster and not farm up multiple teams.

Also because the people buying the 2k personal would be coming and going when they got their shoulders, even removing one person to add another would cause a 300 point rating drop.

This would also mean that if the 5 good players farmed a team up to 2100 rating and then all left to start raising their 2nd team, they would lose 750 rating, setting them back down to a 1350 team rating.

http://www.ahungry.com

#12 frst

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Posted 15 April 2008 - 08:40 PM

lewl

#13 Deeta

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Posted 15 April 2008 - 08:48 PM

pvpers need a way to make money, god forbid we would ever farm anything. I know i sure as hell didnt, before point selling i ran around with no more then 20g on me. To be honest the market is huge as well, ALOT of people are willing to pay good money for 1000 points a week.

#14 Ultimecia

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Posted 15 April 2008 - 08:55 PM

PvE players can still make obscene amounts of gold from selling raid items. Why shouldn't we be allowed to make money from PvP?

We carry people to high ratings for points, the problem people have is the people being carried (and paying the gold) aren't truly worthy of said arena rating. If the whole team was made up of people with equivalent experience/skill and they played all of the team's games, they wouldn't attain the needed rating.

On the other hand when PvE guilds sell items, they take people into their raids who may not fully understand a fight's mechanics and are hence also being carried: they don't really deserve to down the boss, 25 players of the buyers experience skill/level wouldn't be able to kill the boss.

Conclusion: PvE players being favored, how is this justified? We pay the same monthly fee as them.

Oh, and I can't resist the jab, but come on PvE takes very little skill, top PvPers will (with the right gear) be really good at PvE too given the chance, the opposite isn't true, most people in high end PvE guilds are awful at PvP though there are of course exceptions.

#15 tristantio

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Posted 15 April 2008 - 10:55 PM

The problem doesn't look like it's players legitimately boosting other people's ratings, or even letting them play 30% for the week.

The problem appears to be actual players getting two different 5v5 teams to 2100 rating, then holding each of these teams with an alt.

Following that, they invite 5 scrubs onto each team (promising to sell them a 2k personal rating).

Scrub group 1 and Scrub group 2 both get in vent and Q at the same time.  If they have Qs pop at exactly the same time they say so and then join the game.

They then alternate wins, so scrub 1 gets a win (gaining 15 team rating), then scrub group 2 wins, taking that 15 points right back.

While the team ratings stay at 2100 and they never risk fighting actual opponents, the personal ratings keep going up way more than 15 points, and down way less than 15 points.

This ends up getting 10 people to a 2k personal rating in however much time it takes to do this (probably less than an hour).

Player who set up these teams then proceeds to collect some phatty cash.

http://www.ahungry.com

#16 tristantio

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Posted 15 April 2008 - 10:57 PM

And the main problem with this method is that if their Qs don't pop at the same time (and they risk fighting actual teams) they simply don't enter the game, since players no longer lose rating for failing to enter a game.

This inconveniences the team who waited in the Q to play a game with 0 opponents and also is gaming the system to the point that its a joke.

http://www.ahungry.com

#17 Latham

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Posted 15 April 2008 - 11:55 PM

tristantio said:

Exactly, the win trading for personal rating is retarded since it creates a ton of empty games for all the teams that want to play. On saturday we seriously had 15 instant ques that had no players on the other team.

#18 Guntt

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Posted 16 April 2008 - 12:27 AM

Quote

Tom Chilton: Yeah, I'd absolutely say that that's true. I always get feedback from different players that are pretty well respected in the arena community. One of our class designers is the guild leader of probably one of the most well-known PvP guilds in the world. I'll still keep him anonymous, though. So we definitely have those kinds of links in the community and we get feedback all the time. We definitely use that as a point of evaluation for all of our changes

trolls inc

#19 Hirim

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Posted 16 April 2008 - 12:54 AM

I bet he doesn't play a Hunter, Mage, Pally or Shaman, thats for sure.

:hunter: Hirim

#20 buriito

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Posted 16 April 2008 - 01:39 AM

[quote name='Hirim']I bet he doesn't play a Hunter, Mage, Pally or Shaman, thats for sure.[/QUOTE]

He's clearly a Warlock.

Edit:

Anyways, I can't wait to see what Blizzard implements and if there'll be a way around it..Until then I'll make the best of it =P