Yes, it's a mafia plain and simple. If you are lucky you get to play with nice human beings who will share.
Or if you are unlucky like me, you'll eventually get bullied to the point where you abandon a 2-3 year old account and start all over again.
The best model for a competitive arena is to take an hourly snapshot and only allow the positions of players to move at the end of the hour. This would allow multiple people to reach 1st place without any kind of obstruction.
When cheaters get involved in squad chat things just become impossible. I left the "mafia" when cheaters were invited in. That's when the trouble started, since I'd been the one responsible for getting all the other cheaters banned, the ones who CG didn't ban decided to grief me.