Still seems high to me. Assuming you are talking solos, most of the top3 solos players pass for at least competent (able to carry themselves) from what I have seen and their top3s can be explained by varying degrees of RNG, skill, and avoiding bad queues. Some are a tad suspect, and I of course can't say for sure on all of them, but the vast majority can probably be explained without having to throw the wintrader accusation around.

Wintrading certainly happens, and some for sure get away with it, but I don't think saying "most are absolutely wintraders" is justifiable. For most seasons top3s I look at in most cases I recognize players that have always been solid players, or just players that pass for the best in a given season and/or on a given server. They may not always have been the best out of all those that are competing, but that is in part due to top three often being a significant time and effort investment. In seasons past in solos for example you could queue all the time and still be top3 due to a fairly stable skilled player base, but now its really not a good idea as there is more RNG now than ever before... there are times when you really just don't want to be in queue if you care at all whatsoever about climbing. To say those that are never in queue wintraded may be correct in some isolated cases, perhaps more so in granked, but a lot of the time (in the case of solos at least) its just players conserving their gains and avoiding the sheer chaos of mat farmers and clueless new players that solos has become these past two seasons. (Granked rarely pops anymore, hardly even considered mentioning it... but most granked players high on the boards are consistently up there because they are solid players, even if they are never in queue.)

Some of it is skill and some of it is luck... and of course some of it is probably wintrading. I doubt there are as many wintraders as most kids on the forums seem to think though... everyone that is up there with low wins high elo isn't a wintrader, and many if not most are probably legit if I had to wager. Your first 20 or so matches are unfortunately heavily weighted so many choose to do those sparingly assuming they want to climb rapidly with as little RNG as possible. The unreliability of the queues in solos due to mat farmers and new clueless players since ~Season 10 basically forces you to queue selectively to obtain high elo and low wins, otherwise you will be faced with likely hundreds or more games of RNG matches to get to your desired high point.

"You are not nearly as good as you think you are" Seems to be a common problem...

Calm down with the accusations bud. Zurules has played for a long time... he knows what hes doing, and I doubt he has such delusions. From doing ranked on and off pretty much every season to varying degrees on a variety of servers (mostly solos after the first 2 seasons), I can certainly attest to there being much better game quality on average in past seasons before 10. Season 1-9 in solos for the most part had some of the most competitive games and the most potential for you to actually be able to climb due to individual skill. (There was of course RNG to varying degrees and many compiling problems with the system in past seasons, and it varied from server to server, but overall it was a much better environment for climbing). The main problems after the first 9 seasons can likely be attributed to them adding mats and components to encourage more participation in solos towards the middle of season 9 IIRC. In previous seasons for the most part, most players in solos at least had a baseline understanding of what they were doing, allowing for teams with the most hypothetical skill to win. With the addition of mats/comps farmers that have little to no knowledge of what they are doing being added to the queue in vast quantities, the sheer lack of "skill" became the determining factor in games, not the most "skill". The ever dwindling lack of good players in ranked can in large part be attributed to ones skill no longer influencing the outcome of games. Both the previous system and this one would both work, perhaps this one better... but none of them will work how most players would want them to work unless there is a baseline bar for entry and/or a removal of mat/component incentives.

If they get rid of cross-role backfilling and remove mats, I have the opinion that this solo ranked queue system would be somewhat better than the one from previous seasons. This is due in part to them eliminating a lot of the previous issues with solos such as factional imbalance, ease of map hacking, backfilling for elo, server elo transfer, etc... but also this is due to the fact that they redesigned how the system paired players by elo. In the previous system the players were matched in a general pattern of 1st highest rated with 3rd highest 5th and 7th, vs 2cd and 4th, 6th, 8th (when players queue relative to others timing wise mattered and still does as it can shift queue position, but that seemed to be the general pattern). Highest dps in queue most often got paired with highest tank, highest healer, or both. 2cd highest dps was almost always on the opposing team from the highest dps with the lower rated tank and heals as well as dps. This design works fine generally if there is a sufficient population as the lower average team had higher potential for gaining elo, but once the queue becomes very unbalanced elo or skill wise it often favors the higher rated team, even though the higher average team got less elo from a win. The 2cd highest dps's team in certain situations could be consistently at a statistical disadvantage, especially in tank healer combo situations with great skill disparity between teams. "The rule of #2" "Curse of 2cd dps in queue" was for sure a thing, and was known by quite a few Top3/T1 level players as you could isolate elos and predict potential matches with a decent degree of reliability in higher tiers. This new system seems to have the opposite effect and punish the higher rated players, with 2 or so of the highest dps in queue + 2 of the lowest vs an average team, with the lowest elo players you have to carry that are often mat farmers being a main problem. While you can still get to the top by almost sheer luck in solos due to all the RNG, most of those past 1.4 to 1.5k+ are good players as you have to carry rather hard past that point. I find the "highest rateds having to carry hard fighting tooth and nail" type system better than the "rich are somewhat more likely to get richer" type system that the other could often be. With that being said there is far too much RNG now with mats, cross-role backfilling, and just general bad players for either system at all to be as valid as the roughly 1st-9th seasons in solos... these issues should be addressed before any system can be reliably implemented.

I wouldn't go nearly as far as removing top rewards bud. I was just saying its somewhat more difficult to identify wintrades now due to there almost always being kickballed style matches as opposed to long established named teams that vs. each other in addition to other reasons. A lot of those that are up there are those that are always up there in rating for granked and are known for being good players... While its harder to cheat or have unfair advantages in solo ranked since they fixed faction imbalance, ease of hacking, backfilling, etc, there is always wintrading to contend with in solos just like granked... and the absurd amount of RNG because of bad players just makes identifying them even harder. The participation difference if anything just makes it harder to identify trades in solos now arguably... what goes on in solos shouldn't be used as a comparative metric.

Besides the top names of people in teams everyone knows from streamed TR and stuff, its hard to know what is a wintrade or not... and with some of the top players its still questionable. What even qualifies as a wintrade is somewhat of a gray area. Especially considering there are very few set teams of people that only play with each other like seasons long past. Many granked games now are kickball style... The argument that a lot of "kickballed" top3s are not legit is understandable. The teams are usually not completely randomized, and they often are stacked player or comp wise deliberately towards one side or the other where most players of the 8 already know the likely outcome. When done in this manner with the implicit assumption that you trade off wins on chars everyone wants to climb on, its obviously a wintrade... Its just often hard to differentiate this kind of thing from more legitly intended games.

Mostly this. Getting rid of cross-role backfilling will likely help queue quality improve more rapidly than anything else, and it doesn't seem like it would be that hard of a fix

You seem like you are new here. There usually is no way to tell from just looking at the numbers what is legit and what isn't. 15 wins, 0 MVP votes, and 1500 rating can be just as legit as say 150 wins, 150 MVP votes and 1500 rating. What do you mean "they are stupid enough to do that and think they won't get caught"? Being caught leaving a match 10 seconds early every game so they end up having no votes? High MVP votes can be seen as ELO virtue signaling for wintraders. Helps them go under the radar more in some cases. There are likely just as many if not more wintraders with high MVPs as opposed to low ones. 15 0 1500, 150 150 1500 and everything above and in between... all can be legit and all cannot be legit. Depends on the player and case in question and its usually not possible to tell from the leaderboards.

1. Some illegitimate ones may have low vote to win ratios for the reasons you mentioned, but for sure not all of them do. If you were cheating wouldn't you logically want to do all you could to make your stats seem legit? 2. Many may check stats at the end but certainly not all do, and its usually not for very long when one does. 3. Not sure what you are basing this on, can you point to some examples at least? There are people that purposely go for the minimal amount of MVPs possible just to show how meaningless they are. Some leave matches early to increase the probability they will get a faster pop or better queue placement. Some just happen to have low MVPs to wins ratios for other semi-random reasons. As I previously mentioned, very low MVPs can be reliably done by leaving the match in some fashion before the +62 valor mvp vote is applied to you. This is most commonly and efficiently done by right clicking the warzone queue icon as soon as the scoreboard pops up and clicking leave match. While some cheaters may have a low MVPs to win ratio, this cannot be used as a general rule to spot cheaters.

MVP votes mean very little if not nothing. All you have to do is right click the queue icon and leave the match early, or just leave before someone votes for you and any votes you receive are never even counted...

MVP votes mean very little if not nothing. All you have to do is right click the queue icon and leave the match early, or just leave before someone votes for you and any votes you receive are never even counted.

Mostly this

Mostly this TBH. The new system fixed a lot of problems like factional imbalance advantages, backfilling, server elo transferring, ease of hacking, etc. Removing the cross-role backfilling would be the only major thing I would suggest to make the queue more tolerable. Removing mats to limit the amount of farmers in queue would be nice also, but I doubt they will do that at this point.

When they added mats in TR it was very active on all skill levels and arguably healthy at a level not seen in a long time. Solo ranked queues were arguably fine for the most part up until ~S9 when they added mats (minus the problems with queue syncing/factional imbalance, backfilling, lack of hacking control, etc... most of these problems were addressed in S10... wintrading and botting could still use some work). The queue quality has never been the same since. In TR you have a team that has the same intentions when queuing (be it mats or rating/competition). In SR you have mat farmers that usually don't want to be there and are often clueless beyond belief. They are placed on the teams of those who want competitive games. This doesn't work well to say the least. Ideally they should add mats to TR and regs. There should be no mats or they should be very hard to get in SR.

I mean I think I might actually hack or wintrade if they gave out titles like "The Win Trader." "The Hacking Loser." "The Hacking Win Trading Loser.".... those are some epic titles. They are more original than the lastest Top3s at least. Like brainstorm for 5 minutes and you can come up with a better title than Genius and lolExpert.

Why were so many wintraders/cheaters restored shortly after they were banned/wiped? I mean I'm not surprised. Expected there to be a lot more that got away with it tbh, usually how it goes... but like especially the blatant repeat offenders, seems like a no brainer to just perma ban some of those legends

Mero hinting that Picaro or anyone isn't legit... come on bud Like dude your glass house doesn't even need a stone to knock it down

The majority may not, but a large quantity left just because of the addition of mats in solos... I wouldn't completely discount it.

I mean B and C could be seen as equally deserving. The lower wins can hint at how swiftly you are able to climb due to skill, this was more the case in previous seasons though when there was less RNG. The more games you play the more likely you are to eventually streak... high wins can just show you kept trying until you got a lucky streak. C could have put in more work and not nearly been as good of a player as B The sports analogy is good. Its just that the sole deciding factor between players of equal skill in theory would be time available to play, which isn't exactly how one might want it to be. I do see your point though, especially about negating A to some extent... like I said I'm more open to the idea at this state in the game.

Nobody likes the 20 win top3s from last season... you should have to work for top3s. But wouldn't a win/loss system likely just reward those who played the most, even if some of the better players don't have as much time to play? I mean that kind of happens already, but seemingly not to that magnitude. I would be open to seeing a win/loss put into practice... at this point most of those that always end up on top will likely be there regardless of the queue system.

For granked I more agree with you, solos not so much. All of these systems for sure work better with a larger population... but you have to consider the quality of the population. Speaking about solo ranked... in previous seasons for the most part, the majority of those in queue could at least handle themselves. This allowed the side with the most skill, if you will, to often win. This made rating a somewhat more valid measure if it ever was one. Now with the current state of affairs the lack of skill is more the deciding factor in solos because many players are so bad compared to previous seasons ones individual skill is often not enough to win (especially with the queue system redesign implemented in S10). Removal of queue incentives would likely decrease the overall population, but the quality of the queue would likely increase. Eventually more solo ranked vets would likely come back as well due to it being more competitively valid. I personally would rather have more people in queue that knew how to play well, or can at least carry themselves... even if its at the price of less players and somewhat longer pops. I doubt I am alone in that notion.

Such sarcasm, much wow. I mean in theory you want players that can at least contribute something. The influx of those who actually want to learn and try isn't bad, its just the excessive amount of dudes incentivized by mats and crap that don't even want to be there that are more the problem for everyone else. Solos were mostly fine until ~S9 when they added mats

Very few veteran players would want to go to a "participation award" style win/loss points system... those who no-lifed it would just universally come out on top, seems worse than the ELO system by that fact alone. ELO is mostly fine. Its not hard to get T1 in group ranked at this point if you can actually play your class. If they limit how many bad players can queue it wouldn't be as hard for T1 solo ranked either, but it is still doable now...