Chess.com ELO seems whack

After 9-10 years of using this website across 3 accounts, it really seems like this player pool is more underrated than most others. 

One day, out of severe tilt, i looked at what my opponent's games look like. Then, i see that their peak rating was not 1254 (the rating that got them paired with me), but 1560. Then i looked at more games I've played, both won and lost. All of the insanely hard games (CAPS well over 70+ both sides) had players whose peak rating is well over 300 points higher (1500-1700).

Seems like a large number of people tilt down to a lower rating, get paired with other people who also tilted down, and never climb back up because of the matchmaking system. This also causes these players to push down the ratings of people lower than them. It really seems like everyone from 1300-2000 is about equal, but match making prevents anyone from climbing.

Hmm. Peak rating became less reliable after chess.com started letting people choose their own initial ratings.  Everyone used to start at 1200. Starting in 2017 or so, people started to be able to pick their own initial ratings from 400 to 2000.   

I  strongly disagree that everyone from 1300-2000 is about equal.  The Insights graphs show me that as a 1600 in rapid, I have beaten a very high percentage of 1300's and 1400's and the win percentage declines through each 100 points.

/ I evidently lost to one 700 too.

I have played 2 cheaters and they both got banned the next day

I dont know what your talking about

Could also be a consequence of matchmaking. Like if you're consistently paired with tilted players who are stronger, you'll stay stuck lower, and they only play other tilted players. There's a good chance you got to play 1300-1400 players whose peaks weren't in the 1600s ever and climbed up before the matchmaking algorithm kept you down. 
As a reference, OTB I consistently draw USCF 1600s and I took a 4-year break from chess.

If this is an issue of the past few weeks then I'd say the answer is Leagues😂

Very large number of players dropped 200-300 points in the effort to collect points and advance to the next level.

Play some rated games against 2000 rated players, and you will certainly abandon this theory. You'd be lucky to win 1 game out of 100.

You're just not a very good chess player. Quit blaming everything on engine users. You have over 300 rapid games played and can't even get to 1200. Sick of you conspiracy theorists about cheating. You just suck at chess

I have done that OTB. A few people in my local club are 2000+ on this website. Games for me with them are 0.00 until I make a screw up, lower rated at all. Only 1 game won so far (1W, 5D, 8L), but I've also been away for a long time. 
Still, I've definitely played a decent number of people on this website who absolutely are not their rating, proven with a simple glance of their profile. Don't think engines are making this happen either; people just improve at the same rate and end up with a 1 :  x : 1 WDL long term.

i had ONE suspicious daily game & my opponent was banned before it ended.

I have to agree...it does get frustrating at times...

If you report an account and it's not closed it was either clean, there isn't sufficient evidence, or they haven't processed the report. The site closed almost 60,000 accounts in the past three months for fair play violations.

i didn't even report the one suspicious player... chess.com was all over it & nailed them before my game even ended.  i've played 37 other daily games & haven't had another problem.

sorry you feel like everybody that disagrees with you has an ulterior motive, since it's certainly making this conversation awkward;  just sharing my positive personal experience regarding the subject matter.

I think "The Queen's Gambit" and the pandemic are the reason this is happening. I don't know how bad it was before, but right now the 600s have this massive gravity. When I first started playing a lot my rating plummeted from around 700 to down around 300. Then it took me way longer than it should have to make it back. It's been months now that I've been hovering around the 600s. Everyone is educating themselves through YouTube videos, books, website, and of course the lessons and videos here. As one would want, there's as many options for study as there are ways to play the game. So I think we're all getting really good, as we cycle back through every time. It's like the folk music renaissance in Greenwich Village circa 1961. Doing business in the vicinity of the park was almost impossible as the noise of all those acoustic guitars was deafening. And from that cacophony we got Bob Dylan. There's probably a whole generation of genius players from all over the world who are growing up here.

Since this topic is now mostly about cheating, locking.

Chess.com takes cheating very seriously: see About Online Chess Cheating

For further insight into the work that Chess.com does in this area, see also these older articles:

• Chess.com Fair Play And Cheat-Detection - Chess.com (July 2018)
• New Tools For Fair Play On Chess.com - Chess.com (May 2018)
• Chess.com Versus The Cheats (royle.com) (Feb 2018)
• Cheating On Chess.com - Chess.com (June 2015)

However, discussions of cheating in the public forums are not permitted, nor are accusations that member X is cheating, as it tends to become very heated and results in lots of false accusations: any such posts will be locked and/or deleted.

To report a suspected cheater to the Support team, please select Report Abuse under the Help menu, or use Contact Us - Chess.com Member Support and FAQs, or from their Profile choose More and then Report / Cheating. All reports are investigated, even if there is no immediate visible action, and help the Fair Play team over time.

To discuss the matter of cheating further, or to learn more about cheat detection, join the Cheating Forum - Chess Club - Chess.com - please note that you need to have been a member for more than a month to be accepted into this club, which is in itself a cheating prevention measure.

Thanks!
Michiko (moderator)