Gamercraft's Quarterly Fair Play Update: Q1 of 2022

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Happy New Year and Ranked Season 2022, summoners!

Welcome to Gamercraft’s 2022 competitive season and quarterly fair play update. This year, our goal is simple: to become competitive gaming’s most social and rewarding ecosystem, where champions are born and where they can really earn money from their talents at all skill levels.

To get closer to that vision, we’re starting the year with major updates to our anti-cheat algorithms, tier system, and fair play guidelines to ensure we are delivering the best experiences to all of you.

These changes will go live on January, 9th, 2022

Cheat Detection Updates

Cheating is a serious issue in competitive gaming. And for us, cheating is not merely an issue. It’s fraud. We’re taking fair play and cheat detection to the next level in competitive gaming by releasing our new algorithms, our new pre, during, and post-game checks, and the introduction of new fair play guidelines.

Faster, more comprehensive cheat detection at every stage

We know that some cheaters and smurf might make it through the first check. So from today onwards, we’re conducting reviews at every step of the competitive journey (signup, pre-game, and post-game) to ensure we minimize the impact of cheaters in our competitive ecosystem.

If our anti-cheat system considers your gameplay to be suspicious after a game, you will have certain temporary restrictions applied to your account. The objective is to protect the teams and players competing fairly as much as possible.

True Skill Detection + Max Historical Rank

The goal of our algorithms is to detect the true skill of an account. To do that, we utilize the data we get from League of Legends and our own datasets to most accurately verify and place players in the correct competitive division. This includes looking at the entire track record of the account and max skill level.

Competitive Statuses

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Our previous approach created a lot of unnecessary friction for new users, especially those who do not play the game that often. With the introduction of Competitive Statuses, we plan to make it easier for users to understand what they need to compete in our tournaments.

Accounts with the Unmet Requirements status will be able to see the minimum activity and games required to be considered for paid tournaments (Disclaimer: account verification does not depend entirely on these two factors. An account can still be prevented from playing if there are other suspicious factors.)

Leaderboards Anti-Cheat

We’re expanding our cheat-detection system to leaderboards. Our system will gather all the data from the games played in leaderboards to get the probability that a given player is playing cleanly, without any signs of account sharing, elo-sitting, or smurfing.

Tier System Update

The next evolution of our tier system is more advanced, fair, and stable. It was to guarantee fairness and be resilient to abuses. Because it cannot be abused by design, there is no reason to keep its inner workings secret.

When players join Gamercraft, they will be assigned a division corresponding to the highest rank ever reached on League of Legends. It prevents elo-sitting and some types of smurfing. Plus, we’ve learned that the actual player skill does not decrease harshly over time, and this is a good initial estimate of someone’s level. Fear not being stuck in too hard a division. You can always go down the ladder after losing a few games.

We then have two separate systems:

• The first one is updated with all of your games at our tournaments and your movement in the game’s ranked ladder. After a fixed number of games, we are confident in this estimate of your skill (think of it as your placement games in League). You can then move up the ladder if you’ve won a lot, but not down yet.
• The second system takes into account your results at cash-paid tournaments only. Those are high-stakes games where everyone should give his best. For this reason, this is our most trustworthy indicator of a player’s skill. Given enough games at cash-paid tournaments (again, placement matches!), we use this skill rating to determine your division, and forget everything else. This is the only way you can move down a division.

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There are now 6 instead of 7 tiers (Goodbye, Wolves 👋) We decided to unify all the Iron and Bronze ranks into the Wolves tier. And rework the rank distribution towards higher skilled players, with Masters and Diamond 3 now part of Baron and Herald, respectively. Here are some additional notes and considerations:

• You don’t have to be currently ranked to enter a division since we use your highest ranking ever reached.
• Players who were never ranked are placed in the Poro division, restricting them to play in low-stakes tournaments. The only way out is to get ranked on League!
• How you win and how you lose matters. Beating a team with higher average skill than yours will make you get out of the division faster. For instance, a Platinum team that constantly wins against Diamond players might very well end up in Baron or Elder, competing alongside Masters and Challengers (this will also help us catch outliers.) Similarly, a team made of Grandmasters could move to Baron after losing a lot at cash-paid tournaments. Is it unfair? No! They’ve lost many games and money, and they might not be that good after all. Else, they’ll move back up pretty quickly.

And while this is all for this Quarterly Update, this does not mean we will not introduce new measures and updates to our fair play and cheat-detection algorithms. We will be closely monitoring the performance of all tournaments and leaderboards to ensure we maintain our fair play standards. We might even also release and adjust minor requirements to achieve that purpose.

Let’s make this year a good one! See you all on the climb and in our leaderboards and tournaments!