"Fair play" as you imagine does not exist in MMO games at all. Even on consoles as some peasants might think.
Finally! But in bronze district noobs don't have fun playing against maxranks too. Fair play, blah-blah.
Because to get gold all you need is just walk/drive to objective and press F or at least TRY to assist your team with a gun. You can drop to silver ONLY while intentionally ignoring objectives or feeding enemy. If you aren't gold with nowadays threat system, you either have bad PC/connection or dethreating, simple as that :)