Should lichess forbid this kind of behavior?

I have started to see more and more high-rated bullet players farming people 500-600 points lower than them for +0 to +1 per game. On the surface there is nothing wrong with playing weaker opponents, but if somebody deliberately avoids people anywhere close to their rating I think it becomes a problem because they achieve ratings far beyond what they should be under normal circumstances. I have edited out the names of such users, but let’s just say there is a certain untitled 3200 currently on the leaderboard who perfectly exemplifies this behavior.

For everybody who does this, you can search each user's rated bullet games and see that opponents are all an absurdly lower rated, and you'd be lucky to find anyone above 2700 in these games. While I don't think a user should have their account closed or labeled with the "violated tos" banner, I think lichess should enforce rankbans for this kind of behavior, because it's clear that people are inflating their ratings far beyond what they should be. Thoughts?

@likeyacutg @likeyacutg said in #1:
> Since this behavior is not banned I think I am allowed to name some notable examples of such users, (if I am not allowed to do so please tell me and I will edit their names out).
Public shaming is not allowed. You can report them if you think they're breaking the rules.

@AOOP09 what they are doing is not illegal yet, so I thought it was ok to mention who they are as they are technically doing nothing wrong in the eyes of lichess. Either way I have removed the names to avoid potential shaming.

At some point though there are not a lot of 3000+ players on the site and it becomes difficult to pair up with people 3000+ and even in 2900s.

farming points this ways does not really work. Even at 500 point difference players are going to lose/draw occasionally and then lose just about all the points gained.

@petri999 in theory this is true, but in practice it is largely effective when you get a weak enough opponent. Take my hint at one of the users and look how much rating he has gained by doing this

@MMaAxXxXx17 I agree but they don’t have to play people exactly their rating, as I said I think it makes sense to play lower rated people, but as a 3000 myself I can say there are definitely enough 2850s and 2900s to go around. There is not enough scarcity of decent opponents to justify farming people 600 points lower

Excessive farming can work in variants, but it only gets you rankbanned, so there's absolutely no gain from it.

@Cedur216 I have seen only one user get temporarily rankbanned for this. Then he continued the same farming strategy and was never rankbanned again

@likeyacutg said in #6:
> @petri999 in theory this is true, but in practice it is largely effective when you get a weak enough opponent. Take my hint at one of the users and look how much rating he has gained by doing this
>
> @MMaAxXxXx17 I agree but they don’t have to play people exactly their rating, as I said I think it makes sense to play lower rated people, but as a 3000 myself I can say there are definitely enough 2850s and 2900s to go around. There is not enough scarcity of decent opponents to justify farming people 600 points lower

Yes, I agree. Having that said, I also agree with your point and I often see people abort many games when they are playing higher rated players to avoid needing to play them and only play players of a weaker ability to slowly grind their ratings and be safe with their ratings. Then a lot of players end up with ratings that do not actually match their level of skill in reality, so yes I do also believe this is quite unfair . Especially for people who are fair with their ratings and earn good ratings because they actually have skill and not because they farm on lower players.

@MMaAxXxXx17 you said it perfectly