Problems and Cheaters Curb Stomp Emergence Day

The Emergence Day tournament, in my opinion, was a pretty big FLOP.

I had visions of playing for 12 hours, so I obviously wasn't going to win but I expected to get in some good game play. I was more looking for the 100 kills per weapon achievements and the ones for wins on each map and each game type.

My day quickly turned to boredom and frustration. First, I tried to join a few matches. After 45 minutes of waiting to connect to ranked games, I just gave up. I didn't get to connect to one successful game either doing quick match or custom search. All I received was the dreaded "lost connection" pop up each time I tried. So I switched gears and decided I would host the match instead, at least this way I get a little bit of control.

Well that was just as much of a waste of time as connecting to games. I setup the first match, Warzone on Gridlock and waited... and waited... and waited... a good 20 minutes later I had six people connected in the lobby and soon after two more people joined in! So finally I got one match in, which lasted all of five minutes, since my team rolled over the other team twice in a row. For 20 minutes worth of waiting, I got in five minutes of actual gameplay. I gave it another shot and setup an Execution game on one of the other maps. I had various people one at a time come in and then leave due to the wait. One guy stuck it out for 10 minutes before deciding to move on. I finally terminated the game at 30 minutes of waiting. This is on Emergence Day, the day I would have thought most people would be playing ranked matches.

I eventually found a friend to play some Co-Op with and did that for the rest of the afternoon. Later on that day I jumped into some player matches. Both options offer much more play time per hour than the ranked system.

Where is everyone and why aren't they playing ranked matches? Well, the number one reason is, most likely, the fact that there's no ranked game support with friends. Microsoft told Epic not to put that in the game because it encourages cheating. Cheaters, being the creative folks they are, have figured a way around that barrier.

You setup a ranked game with a more rare setting for number of matches and IM the game/rounds settings to your buddies. They can then do a custom ranked game search and, most likely, find yours and connect to you from the list. Then, they proceed to own the group of four that connects afterwards since any organized group of people are going to roll over a group of rag tags any day.

This exploit encourages even more cheating of a devious variation. The team of friends can have one guy be a "spy," of sorts, and connect on the victims team. He can pickup weapons to try and prevent real players ("the victims") on his team from getting them. He also help his team by not playing seriously or with any skill level - so it's really five on three.

Unfortunately, if you are able to quick match into a game, you have no idea if this activity is going on or not... until you've become a victim of it yourself. Don't try and quit the match up if you become annoyed by this activity. More than likely they'll be quick to give you negative feedback!

So if ranked play is so painstaking, how do people have so many points on the leaderboards? They're "boosting," which is a moral form of cheating. You get points for downing an enemy. The team of friends on the one side have a friend on the other side. The team of four wipes out the three quick connect players leaving just their buddy on the other team alive. Then the team of four take turns shooting their buddy on the other team to the ground and then letting him get up, then shoot him again.

In an Execution style match, you get up after the bleed out timer runs out rather than dieing like other match types. The bleed out timer can be changed to the shortest amount of time: five seconds. So your buddies will beat on you until the timer runs out or one of the four finally curb stomps their buddy on the other team. The result is a very elevated 'boosted' points total by the time the game ends.

A lot this game is focused around ranked matches, especially if you're trying to unlock achievements. I totally understand the TruSkill requirement by Microsoft which does not let you game with your friends. This does help prevent boosting for leaderboards. However, there needs to be a second requirement for TruSkill ranked games: dedicated match hosting. Players shouldn't be able to host their own ranked matches if they're worried about cheating the leaderboards because as we see, with Gears of War, they may as well let you game with your pals.