The leaderboards only show activity from the past 17 days in those graphs. If the games were played earlier than that it just shows a straight line.

And what is your evidence for such a broad claim? "Just go take a look at the leaderboard" doesn't mean anything. Most people are not wintrading in solo ranked. The educated squad people that got banned were wintrading as a group in the early mornings. Sephorus queued with bots in early mornings. Other wintraders have their friends queue at the same time and when they're on the other team they purposely don't try as hard. But all of these methods are quite easy for the community to notice in action. I'm telling you, there is not a high volume of wintrading going on in solo ranked this season. As for how "easy" it is to get gold, that's totally relative. It's "easy" if you're good enough to do it. There are plenty of players much better than me, yet I have 6 gold sorcs/sages this season, including two in only 33 and 56 wins to get there. One of them took me 162 wins. Clearly there is variance involved and factors outside of one's control. But the fact is, if you have any degree of persistence, and you are a good enough player to get gold, then you will get gold. It's honestly pretty simple.

The devs are indeed incompetent. But you are also a bad person. These two facts are not mutually exclusive.

I can easily blame both. Trying to justify cheating by pointing to incompetent devs does not follow. You still cheated to get rewards that other people were trying to get legitimately, not to mention devaluing those rewards for people that did get them legitimately. It's sad that I even have to type out stuff like this.

People like this love to believe that "everyone wintrades" to justfiy their own terrible behavior. The truth is, only a small proportion of golds and top 3s are being wintraded for in solo ranked. There are still recent wintraders like Sephorus and Shalom that get away with it because Bioware has stopped banning cheaters, but that's a separate issue. Luck can be a factor game to game, because there are many factors outside of your control when you queue for solo ranked. But over a large enough sample of games, those factors even out. Everyone experiences leavers, throwers, mismatched class comps, etc. Good players are still able to get gold reliably, and elo in general still does a good job of sorting players, assuming you play a decent number of games to establish a relatively accurate elo range.

Having the right set bonus and tactical makes a big difference in performance for most classes. The item rating doesn't matter quite as much because of bolster, but having somewhat optimized stats is certainly helpful. Also, you need item rating 306 to queue for solo ranked if that matters to you. But ultimately, I wouldn't worry too much. As was pointed out, the new expansion is out in a month and the gearing will be totally different.

He mentioned it on discord on August 12, 2020, so yeah, quite some time lol.

I think they would be popular with ranked players too, because you could practice specs/classes that you're not as comfortable with. But as you say, the main benefit would be to introduce non-ranked players to arenas so that they're properly prepared when they queue ranked. Chris said long ago that map selection of some sort was coming. Maybe there will be a way to select only arenas? We'll see I guess.

The post will just be removed if I do. But I provided quite a significant clue in my post for anyone that's on theorycrafters (hint: map).

Maybe third time is the charm with this post? I'll rephrase. In the last "Arena" tournament, there were wintraders participating. If the tournament organizers are smart, they will exclude known wintraders from participating in the tournament this time. And I'll also reiterate that players that used maps to get elo should not be eligible to compete.

I don't disagree with this. But I'm sure you'd agree that after you play regs for quite a bit, even challenging yourself like you're describing here, it's still not quite the same as ranked itself. Eventually you have to take the plunge and you will still likely struggle at first, no matter how much practice you've had in regs. The rest of this is refreshingly reasonable for the forums.

And all mercs that have over 1500 elo are either trash or wintrading.

^This.

Go to the leaderboards, click all advanced classes, click on the server you want, and then manually progress through the pages at the bottom until you get to the end.

Your best bet is to talk to some experienced op and merc mains about how to survive better. Especially on merc it's all about how you rotate your dcds without overlapping them, along with kiting. Some advice should help, and then you just need to practice and learn how much burst certain classes have and when to pop stuff. Timely dps on the correct target(s) is very important in ranked, but when you're new you'll be targeted first a lot, and learning to survive will be what helps you win games more than anything else right now.

I agree, but apparently not all new players see it that way lol

I would generally agree with this, but it's hard to say without seeing OP play. There are some new people in ranked that come in with proper gear and a good attitude, and those players improve pretty rapidly even if they get destroyed at first. These players listen to advice and adjust their play accordingly. For players like that, absolutely, playing more ranked is the only way to improve and if some morons are being toxic, best to just ignore them. But then there are players that come in with no set bonus, wrong tactical, a bad attitude, don't take any advice, and repeatedly don't even play the basics of their class correctly. That second category of people still have a lot to learn from regs/guides/streams, etc, and they really don't belong in ranked to begin with. Some people still cross the line in terms of "toxicity" but telling someone like that to get proper gear and practice in regs is 100% warranted.

Solo ranked characters on Darth Malgus so far this season: 5933 Solo ranked characters on Tulak Hord so far this season: 1230 For pvp there's no question: just play on DM.

Well, I'll take on the complaining for you. There was a dev named Mike B who used to post on the pvp forums. He did a monthly pvp report to tell us how many wintraders were banned/reset and how they were looking to improve pvp, etc. He also instituted the pvpreports email, and it was a period in the game's history when there was probably the most consistent action taken against wrongdoers (and it still wasn't very timely, but at least action was taken). Everyone loved Mike B's posts, and there was nothing but positive feedback associated with them. But then one day it all stopped. Since then, Mike B has apparently been relegated to other tasks, because he hasn't made a post in years, and nobody is even reading the pvpreports email anymore. it's a sad state of affairs.

Fair point. I really hope 7.0/7.2 results in some tank variety in ranked again. Having only juggs for years on end is pretty boring, and I don't even play tank.

It all depends on what our standards are. In 5.x, mercs and maras were far above all other classes for pretty much the whole expansion. In 6.x, ap pts with powerlode, and eventually when emergency power caught on, have been fairly dominant, but not to the same degree mercs were in 5.x. Hatred sin, madness sorc, rage jugg, sin tank, pt tank, are all way undertuned in the current meta, and the dev team would understand all that if they had even a cursory knowledge of ranked pvp. So yes, I would agree that balance has actually been decent overall in 6.x, but I'm definitely leaning toward "they got lucky" more than anything else. There's no excuse for going nearly an entire expansion without addressing incredibly obvious balance issues.

Because the powers that be won't allow details, if you want any relevant info about the person that posted above me, feel free to dm me

And to push this even further, I don't think a single dev on the current team has played pvp at a high level in this game, nor do they have any understanding of what ranked pvp is like. They don't watch streams, they don't listen to feedback from ranked players. They therefore approach class balance from a place of almost complete ignorance. All they rely on are the raw numbers that they have access to. Obviously those numbers are an important tool, but they shouldn't be the only basis for nerfs and buffs, especially when the devs can't even put them into proper context.

I agree. Seasons drag on long enough as it is. Either way though, we really need to know as soon as possible whether the season is still ending on 12/14 or is also being extended to 2/15.

Not sure if you're trolling or not, but this is just laughably wrong.