They impact the PvP 3s ladder pretty heavily. Every boost starts with 3 characters at low rating. The run up rips rating off of every team on the way, on average 45 (3 players x 15 pts on average) points per match. Glad requires 50 wins, so they sit at between 2500-2700 and absolutely throttle everyone, ripping (-45 x 50 = -2,250) 2,250 rating out of the system just in glad wins alone. The push is likely another 2,000.
The person boosted then sits on their rating a lot of times and it never gets fed back into the ladder. The boosters drop for the next boost, but they lose continuously on the way down so the drop is quick and almost no inflation is fed back in. At most they feed back 45 x 10 = 450 if the drop takes 10 rounds. Even if they go really low and it takes 20, that’s still only 900. Then, they rip 4x the inflation back out again on the way back up.
The WoW team can tell by looking at ladder behavior exactly who is doing this, and if we’re ever going to have a healthy 3s ladder it needs to be stopped.
If they comply with the TOS rules for the bracket then that’s true. Unfortunately, they drop all the losses in at once and the inflation they provide back is much less than the inflation they take out on the way up.
Blizzard actually did a HUGE banwave on NA and EU just this past season for anyone who intentionally dropped rating. Knocked out some AWC teams as well.
If the point is that someone reaches 2250+ (or 2500), gets 50 wins to qualify for Gladiator, and then immediately starts losing on purpose… that’s trackable. It’s easy to spot an account that climbs to 2250~2500+, wins 50 games, and then suddenly drops to ranks below 900. That behavior is actually pretty easy to algorithmically detect and flag. Especially if it happens in sequence — like, in week 1 they reach 2500 and stay there, get 50 wins, and by week 2~3 they drop to 900… then in week 4 they’re back at 2500. That’s clearly a booster.
And Blizzard probably has way more data than that… so…
If they could read it and understand that would be great. Actions based on those data would be lovely. In reality wow devs dont even set foot into their games, let alone playing it on a decent level. That way is kind of hard to realize what the actual problems are.
Pvp is a mess. Full of exploiting and bad balance. Blizzard won’t do anything because they simply don’t care. People denying it at this point or either willfully ignorant and/or paid off.
