2v2 team hits 3206 team rating, 3585 personal rating

A 2v2 team on US-Ruin has somehow achieved an unheard-of 3206 team rating. Paper Cut Your Eyelids' team leader is Cäke, a Blood Elf Priest in three-piece Deadly, one-piece Furious Gladiator gear. His Orc partner, Kwamo, a nearly full Furious Assassination Rogue, has somehow amassed a 3585 personal rating on the curiously successful team. This is pretty amazing when you consider the highest 2v2 team last season was rated below 3000.

Red flags are going up over this one, folks.

The team has a strangely unimpressive win ratio of 82-71. If each of their losses brought the team down 0 points, (which we know is untrue from their match history), each of their wins would average out to slightly greater than ~39 points per win. As they are nearly 400 team rating above the next highest team on the battlegroup, one would assume their gains would decrease dramatically the higher they ascend.


Moreover, the team's match history is incredibly weird. Before the team's ridiculously large -938 point loss (at 1220 rating), their match history seems to be perfectly normal. As they ascend the ladder, their winning gains gradually decrease from 47 to the mid 30s. Losses count 0 against them (this is normal), as their match making rating ("MMR") is presumed to be greater than 1200.

The -938 point loss is where things start getting fun.

The armory recording a large point gain or loss "between games," or "in one game," is not necessarily rare. Sometimes, during armory updates, the match history doesn't keep track of games. If a team plays a lot of games in that period, the system will sometimes record teams as going +200 points with no real recollection of how they got there.

So, not necessarily a big deal there... except they went down 938 points from 1220 to 282. To go down that low means your MMR has to be sub-282. Attaining an MMR of those ridiculously low proportions would entail lots and lots of defeat, on purpose, to exceptionally poorly-rated teams. The time this would take would be staggering.

Of course, this wouldn't make much sense either, as a win is registered as giving the team +47 points. To gain 47 points, your match making rating has to be vastly above your team rating. Players who have an MMR of 800 are still vastly above 0, which explains why even they get 47 point wins when starting a new team.

Now, let's take a look at their losses: You would assume that for 47 points won, they would lose 0 points on a loss. Not so. They actually lose 47 points as well, giving them that very weird two point line effect that you see during the second half of their match history. They bounce from 282 to 329 and back many, many times, ending at 329 although the armory has them recorded at 3209. No, Office Space fans, I doubt this is a decimal error.

The mystery doesn't stop there, however: the games themselves are odd.

In most of the team's peculiar wins, Cäke was 1v2ing and got 1 killing blow. Cäke's rogue partner, Kwamo, was nowhere to be found in most of these games. If he entered the arena but disconnected previous to combat initiating, the Armory would show the rogue on game history with 0 damage done, 0 damage received, etc. -- but none of that appears. Virtually all of the teams are different, so it is extremely unlikely that win trading is going on, but something obviously isn't right.

Regardless of what's going on here, it will be interesting to see what happens.

Update: Armory has updated to show the team has played a few more games, and is now rated 2677 with a record of 95-94. Kwamo's personal rating is 3056, down from the 3585 armory had him at earlier.