**Mastery Loadouts**
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
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The war system may work, or, as someone said, something like counting the number of r4, r3 six stars and matching accordingly... I don't know... (and it's not my job to know anyway)
The team has implemented a major adjustment to matchmaking that will help prevent the use of this method of sandbagging.
They will continue to evaluate the matchmaking situation and make changes as they see fit.
And actually, I would define 2* deck loading as cheating. Cheating is not strictly about breaking explicit rules. Games don't have rules for every possible situation. That's why most games and sports have general catch-all "sportsman-like" clauses. In most sports you can be penalized at the officials discretion if they feel you're doing something sufficiently outside the realm of fair play, even if there is no specific rule to cover the actions. There cannot possibly be explicit rules to cover things like 2* deck loading, or the rulebook would be a mile long. But I would say it is very obviously cheating, and anyone who attempted to argue otherwise on technicalities I would be perfectly happy with seeing those same technicalities used against them.
Does it rise to the level of bannable or punishable offense, however? I think that's a grey area. I could go either way. If players who did this were somehow docked, I would not shed a tear. Anyone who is so ethically compromised that they honestly can't tell this is obviously cheating should not be allowed anywhere near a fair competition comprised of normal humans. If they knew it was a grey area and decided to take their chances, well sometimes chance operates against you. Either way, I think Kabam has wide discretion here.
The suggestion I gave to the devs was to match on ELO (basically, rating or rank), but use roster as a match floor. If you try to dump rating to get easier matches, the game recognizes this and prevents you from lowering your rating to some minimum value calculated based on your roster strength (that's roster strength, not deck strength which is exploitable). This also has some issues that would need to be fixed (it is too simple as stated, this is just the large framework: in particular there's a complex subject of match rating decay), but I think this does a decent job of handling the problem of ratings dumping on the low end while letting strong competitors find each other at the high end, with less opportunities for exploitable match situations.
Basically, the more you win, the more the game should "trust" the player is doing their best (since they are winning) and match them against other players that are similar in performance. But when a player loses, the game should trust the player less, and trust their roster more as a judge of what their competitive strength is, so the player cannot use loses to manipulate the match system.