Strange Player cards in leaderboards

Since I last posted earlier this evening I have checked my remaining two games and developed a theory, which is not as worrying as I had first thought.

I think these are placeholders put in the game by King. That would also make sense with regards to your weekly race. I have read the Terms for Warcraft again and it states quite definitely that players will be in groups of 55 in the finals. Usually with specific numbers in one leaderboard they get filled one at a time, which is what usually happens in the qualifiers. But this time I found the groups I joined were already full. I also noted in the Terms and Conditions that King state players will be randomly assigned to the groups, including the qualifiers. This made me really think, as I was sure the opposition in my qualifying group was not random. (See my other post "Is anything still random in Candy Crush") It may be that King are getting around the issue of filling groups evenly by putting in fake placeholders with a score they guess that will be challenging for us to compete against but who then never actually play and whose score never changes. We would not normally notice this. But something went wrong this time and real players' pictures got duplicated. I got two versions of my Poppy photo as well, but the second Cornflower image has now disappeared. That is what makes me think it was a placeholder. Maybe some other player replaced it on the leaderboard so they threw the fake player out.

This is all pretty weird and manipulative, but then manipulation is King's middle name, so it's not surprising to see. It may be that they do it all to even out the boards and give players a fair chance. Maybe….. But it does also mean that those that claim King put in fake bots into these competition might be right.

I'm surprised no one else has spotted these strange duplicates. But then it's only a 200 gold prize event, so people don't really care that much I guess.

Thanks for letting me know! I was beginning to think I was the only one. Those blank faces probably won't increase their scores, so try to just play your game and hope you do well in your leaderboard. Good luck!

They are definitely placeholders rather than cheaters! The duplicate photos have now permanently disappeared in all my games. Someone at King must have fixed it now. So far I'm the only one who managed to get past the decoy. But we'll see, it's early days. The real Asran might put up a fight. It's a shame we'll never know if he saw his own fake avatar at the top of the leaderboard like I did on my first screenshot.