Originally Posted by
Fendrith
To answer your question: It is a combination of boosting and people playing alts. In addition to leveling a new class, some pvpers make 2-3 versions of their main class. It's always been the case that high-end pvpers have multiple toons available to them. The addition of the covenant system has driven some pvpers to have the same class with two different covenants.
There is a larger thing going on that seems to have taken over this thread, though. If you are indeed winning more than 50% games, and you are persistently playing against people who *match* your rating, you should still climb.
The majority of people playing arena are not gladiators. You are claiming not only are there glads in the majority of your games, but that you are beating them. The nature of MMR and CR is such that what you're describing is impossible. If you are winning more than half your games against people at your rating (even if they are not at your skill level), you will climb.
Either you are not facing as many glads as you think you are - to which I'd ask how are you confirming that they are recent glads
Or you are not winning as much as you think you are against teams that are of equivalent rating
If you are losing games to boost teams that average out to have a lower rating than you, but one of the players is high skill... well that does happen. But as someone who has also played a lot of arena this season, those teams are beatable, even though it's annoying. More importantly, that's the minority of teams, not the majority.
This season is weird. 1700 is harder than it used to be, in my opinion, but I don't think that's because of what has been discussed above. I'm a 2.1 player, and when I'm on alts or when I'm trying to boost friends, the games can be much more difficult than I would've expected them to be. The gear gap is a contributing factor, but too many classes have one-shot potential without much set-up.