Even if cheating, running and PBing were subtracted from the equation, there would still be one cheap thing remainging: playing nothing but n00bs. There are quite a bit of players with the "grandmaster" title who are really only half as good as a
real
grandmaster, and they got their rating simply by only playing against low-rated players. To fix this, what if FoD made it so that you could only play people X many points below you in a rated game. Anyone lower would be a non-rated game for you. For the lower person they could still win points, but you can't win or lose any points. No matter how high you are ranked, you can still play any grandmaster in a rated game, so that would be the exception to the X points rule. I dont' know what the exact limits should be. Maybe it should be a 100 point difference. So a 580 could only play 480 and above for rating. But as mentioned, a 600 could play any grandmaster (including a 480) for rating. What do yas think of all this?