Cheating and Boosting in Blitz: The Remedy

PVP Battlegrounds
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Before I start, I’ll mention my main is 2900xp this season in Blitz with Strategist on EU.

There’s win trade discord groups with 50+ people doing queue countdowns in ranked solo bg blitz.

They press queue at the same time, when the queue pops the portion of the group that get the Blitz queue pop slowly start joining the game. They pay attention to the amount of players that have accepted and the rate of speed of the accepts. It shows 10/16 have joined then one player will accept and see 11/16 players, they pause, then another joins and confirms that they are 12/16, then another one joins and makes sure it says 13/16 etc. Once they have confirmation it’s the same game, they all accept the queue and drop into seperate discord channels to communicate. Once in the game, whatever team has the most players from the Discord group will win the game, and the lesser amount of people on the other team will intentionally throw the game. If they all happen to get on the same team they stomp the other team because they are in voice chat communicating against a bunch of uncoordinated solo queuers. If the amount of players joining the game doesn’t align with what the players in Discord see on their WoW screen, the last person dodges the queue and you’re back to searching for a game.

Go queue for a game of Blitz and count how many times the game fills to 15/16 and then someone dodges the game, this will happen 5-10 times in a row at times.

A way you can see this yourself is you can copy their queue strategy as a solo player, wait until the final seconds of the queue to join the game and when you do this… they will 9/10 times reject the queue because they think they ran into another group of queue syncers using the method.

I dare you to queue and track how many games fill 16/16 rapidly without anyone delaying until the last seconds. It very rarely happens and that seems statistically impossible. I get games where there’s 7/8 Russian on the enemy team and 2 Russian healers on my team. I’ll be running the flag and my preservation evoker (who should be the flag carrier because they’re broken) will grab and fly me the wrong direction and drop me into the center of the enemy team to die or my priest will start gripping me away from the enemy flag carrier so I can’t land the kill or return the flag. They will follow me around the map but not heal me. There’s times where I’ll be the FC (running the flag) and surviving waves of attackers, but the healer won’t heal me at all yet is next to me self healing to pad the meters. I’ll /say and beg the healer to heal me…I’ll clear waves of attackers and be at 10% health, with no one in sight but they wont respond or top my health bar…they actively follow me to the roof on Warsong Gulch while I’m evading the enemy team, and as I try to capture the flag they grip me back up to the roof so I can’t capture in time. A mage will mass invis our team while we are trying to transfer the flag from a dps to a healer, making it impossible to click the flag. These players have good movement too, strafing, not backpedaling, speed boosting themselves to keep up with me. I can tell they aren’t new or learning their class.

This is destroying the integrity of the game. The Blitz game mode is called “SOLO” for a reason. I am truly disgusted and ready to quit the game at this point because this is my main form of entertainment.

Blizzard NEEDS to remove the visual that shows how many players are ready for the game (15/16 players have accepted the game). This allows people to queue snipe and get on the same team or throw games for their friends on the other side. It’s rampant even at higher MMRs.

Also Blizzard needs to add penalties to dodging queues repeatedly in a day. They can easily track what players consistently deny queues, and this would flag their characters as potential queue sniping win traders. You could even put players with queue dodging tendencies against other players who do the same thing and see how much fun they have.

There is TONS of posts about this but Blizzard ignores it.

These discord groups already do this in Random and Epic BGs all the time and even casual players know about “premades”. There is boosting groups that get people their 1950 rating for the PVP enchants and elite sets using this method of queuing. This is a lot of people’s jobs and they get paid real life money to boost players.

HIDE THE AMOUNT OF PLAYERS THAT HAVE JOINED THE GAME AND MAKE IT BLIND.

PENALIZE REPEAT QUEUE DODGERS WHO REFUSE TO PLAY LEGITIMATELY.

Please do something about this so true solo players who aren’t in these wintrade “cartels” or rings can stay motivated to play ranked PVP without feeling demoralized and paranoid.

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Adding the stacking debuff for dropping a queue that is used for Arena would also help.

Also, remove duo queue.

These changes won’t stop them from q’ing on Discord, but will make it more challenging for them.

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You would think blizzard would just make it automated that if you ONLY happen to accept Q into the same people and decline every other one they would be flagged automatically for reviews.

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I would be happy if even 50% less games were queue snipes or boosts. I just want to play matchmaking like you find on other games like ranked League of Legends, Valorant, DotA, Marvel Rivals etc.

Legitimate games without any influence. It’s hard to know where you truly are at as a player when you have excuses like my team or the other team is wintrading or boosting.

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Thank you for posting this Pumper, it’s fascinating to see behind the curtain how these things work. Hopefully Blizzard will do something before high-rated players give up.

The part about waiting till the last second to accept scaring them out of the queue is really interesting, but I don’t fully understand it, can you elaborate a bit more on it?

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Team - this isn’t a DEI issue, it isn’t a raid bug with the purple foot lady, this isn’t feedback on how to improve housing. So what are we doing here? You think Blizz reads any of this?

Queue syncing has been an issue from the start of BGBs and, like any bracket that dries up and numbers dwindle to a certain level, it only becomes more prominent (e.g.: prot pallies in SS). The most valuable thing here is where you articulated how they work so that people have a chance at avoiding it. Mind you, this isn’t a sustainable strategy - it felt like 85% of all teams you fought over 2k in RBGS in SL were Russian WT teams and this feels like where this is going.

This is one facet of many that Blizz needs to tune into and police or PvP will die for real. TBH, I think Ion has already braced shareholders for a 20% sub drop as they’ve initiated a controlled burn on PvP (what?! we’d never! we lov- er like PvP so kinda). It’s baked in so I wouldn’t be surprised if anything is really fixed under his watch, if ever.

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Your example was fixed so idk if that really works in the Blizzard does nothing column. I agree they dont do as much as they could but they do things sometimes

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You know what you and everyone needs to do to stop it right? Its very simple and extremely annoying for the cheaters. Just have everyone join que when 1 second is left on timer.

Its funny that they do this and other exploits and still barely end up winning some games. If they are so good at this game then they wouldn’t have to go through these lengths just to win lol

Playing the game would actually make it more difficult tho right? and no one wants things to be hard

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No fair point and thanks for correcting - to me it seemed like the ‘prot syndicate’ reached a level of excess that couldn’t be ignored (?). Maybe that should be the hope here: that queue syncing GETS SO MUCH worse that Blizz can’t not do anything.

I mean, isn’t there an Akuza-like arena triad thing on China servers where you literally need to pay real money to climb past a certain rating? If there is anything to that and Blizz hasn’t stopped it yet I really think we are p*ssing in the wind here.

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I heard that it is a much bigger problem in EU?

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If they are looking at other countries im pretty sure taiwan had a 190-0 shaman that was never banned in shuffle.

exciting times we live in for this to be the hope of the player base but ur right.

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and they will say that he was a great player to pull that off! :joy:

The masses much rather assume no foul play with a positive win ratio. Negative tho? Somehow its a win trader. 50/50 is considered fine :joy:

Boost a few people, get straight wins. Then find your partner to lose the games so the ratio goes back down to near 50-60%

That’s exactly how it gets pulled off and undetected

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My assumption is most legitimate players are ready to play and accept the queue relatively quickly and rarely wait until the very last second. When there is less and less time on the clock for the coordinating cheaters to accept the queue, they have less time to react and verbally make the decision to join the game. When they are trying to decipher with their friends if they are in the right match, and you decide to click “join” late, they no longer have the time to communicate to everyone and ask them if they are in the “14/16 game”. Typically when there’s random late queue accepts, they panic and dodge the queue because they weren’t given enough time to communicate with their group and they don’t want to risk being matched against another group of players who are equally coordinated/cheating/wintrading. Their MMR/Rating gains are based off win streaks so to them having one player drop out and wait another 10 minutes for a new game, as the rest get pushed into the priority queue is very much worth it. They want full control of the outcome, so it’s safer for them to dodge a queue to make sure everything goes to plan in the next game.

With the limited amount of healers and tank players, it makes it even easier to line these games up because often when you’re waiting for a queue, the game isn’t starting because healers haven’t queued yet at that specific MMR.

Some of these players have 10-20 alts at every MMR bracket and can boost people from 0 MMR to 3k MMR and be hopping to different characters the whole way up. Taking losses when the paying boosting client is on the other team and trying their hardest when they have the “boostee” on their team.

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That wouldn’t shock me. The Asian countries take gaming far more seriously than we do.

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All for prestige in a 20 year old game that no one including their family or anyone they could possibly receive oxytocin from, would ever care about.

They’re killing the game that they so badly want to be cool in. It’s actually ridiculous.

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I had to read this part with my heart, and it made me sad.

edit: thank you a ton for the further explanation, especially the part about having various alts at different MMR levels.

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I know this thread is about Blitz, but I remember Russian teams RMT’ing wins in epic battlegrounds. :rofl:

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Thanks for posting about this. When blitz was still unrated people were raising concerns about the potential for cheating but were poo-pood or laughed at. It’s funny-sad in that all these people would need to do is duo queue and play well, and they’d do fine without ‘needing’ to sync/dodge/whatnot.

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its almost like blizz gets a kickback from all the booster sites….:joy:

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Was very obvious, and some are from some well known named pvp groups we used to see in AWC. Sad.

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