Some of you may recall this thread and this thread that I made last season outlining the major issues with GBL using Glicko-2 as their rating system which leaves it open to being exploited by manipulating volatility to artificially increase your rating gains/losses between sets, allowing high skilled players to essentially "slingshot" their way to the top of the leaderboard.
Well, despite several Reddit threads, YouTube videos, Twitter posts, and Support Tickets, Pokemon announced that they would start awarding Championship Points on the Play! Pokemon circuit for GBL leaderboard placement beginning this season.
Since the announcement was made *after* this issue was discovered and publicized, I had wishful thinking that Niantic/Scopely had identified the underlying cause of the issue and had fixes in place to prevent this from happening this season since leaderboard placement actually has tangible rewards tied to it, but unfortunately that doesn't seem to be the case.
9rasho_ recently made a twitter post from this season showing that the volatility exploit is still fully operational, using it to climb over 1400 points from 1900s to 3300s in the span of only 30 battles. This will likely be good for #1 on the leaderboard once the boards update later today.
Obviously this isn't a pressing issue for the vast majority of the playerbase, but it is unfortunate and depressing to see no regard for this issue by Niantic/Scopely, especially in a season with real stakes for leaderboard placement. It turns out that the announcement for Championship Points to be awarded for the leaderboard was just another half-baked idea with no concern for competitive integrity.