Indeed.
But everybody wants to be special. Recognizable. Unique.
I may have been the most recent spark:
Minky reverted to Brightwing from Tyrande.
It’s almost like a forum game, keeping track.
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Just do what other MOBAs do, make buying heroes more grindy, make leveling them more… grindy. Require an account level of say, between 50-100 in order to participate in Ranked, that would require either 5 heroes leveled to 10, or 10 heroes leveled to 10, and you can only pick characters that you have leveled to 10.
Getting a hero to 10 is incredibly easy, often within the first 2 games, grinding gold to buy a new hero doesn’t take very long either.
If you play, and win 3 matches a day you can buy a new hero in a weak, these smurfs can do this within 24 hours because they often are twitch streamers whose lives depend on smurfing for viewers (they, and you, know who they are), or no life nerds like the rest of us. We need to increase the amount of games to get a hero to 10 to say, 5x that amount. Make smurfing and actual chore. Create/Allow a growing EXP/Gold increase by 0.1% for each level your account has, this will insensitive more play on a singular account, and make rerolling a Blizzard account just to smurf in a COMATOSE MOBA OF ALL THINGS a giant chore.
Create more Gem only skins/mounts, and exclusive gold only skins, the higher your account level, the more you play, the more you earn. The more likely you are to be able to purchase those exclusive gold skins, what sort of skins would incentivise playing longer to earn with nothing gold? Sex appeal. Nothing sells a product better. Works everywhere. On everyone. You think blizzard got popular purely on the gameplay alone? Nah sone. Other games beat them on day 1, it was those T H I C C pixels bruh, everyone and their mother wanted to jump Vanilla Thralls DOOM HAMMER. More people playing longer the better.
Honestly I don’t understand smurfing, 40% winrate at Gold rank is good enough for me, I play ranked to get the mount, I get my wins and go back to QM where I belong, the disorganized Chaos that either brings the worst loses or the quickest wins brings me joy.
You know that Dota 2 give all heroes for free without restriction nor grind? And this game is the second biggest moba game out there…
That is true and I should have explained the nuance like you did.
They might get the same hero damage, but they’ll lack the finesse of timing abilities right that would lead to a kill. For instance spamming Orb Ming would farm lots of damage, but will lack the kill secure from Calamity and Q precision.
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I had a few people tell me they thought they were replying to autobusik2 for several days, so I thought it best to switch back to avoid confusion.
Good luck ever explaining this to your average QM Li-Ming player. I’ve seen so many Ming’s take Full Orb/Glass Cannon/Disintegrate vs a Dive heavy team or a hero like Zeratal who can kite the backline. Even when they get far more deaths than average they will say, “I got the highest damage” and so many times they will have exactly zero kills to show for it, only assists.
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Better think about how do we stop potatoes…
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Since everyone were a potato, when he started… this problem can only be solved over time. And we’re all still potatoes with heroes we haven’t mastered yet.
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It’s not against the rules to have a smurf account, so I’m not sure what can be done about it. It seemed like a good idea to not allow new accounts to rank any higher than Gold 5, based on their QM MMR. It had the unintended affect that ranks from Bronze to Gold are the first to be hit and infested with smurfs. In the past people would rank into Diamond or even Masters. The trouble was these could be boosted players from grouping with higher ranked friends in QM.
This change was made back in the days of HL, were you could only group solo, so those phony boosted players would have a very negative on higher ranks until they fell. That was also before rank decay, so you could have plenty of fake masters and Diamond players as they could play just 3 games a season and could potentially stay in an undeserved rank for several years.
As we now have a different system in SL, people can group as any size, two ranks apart, personally I’d prefer if we had the old system where people ranked higher based on their QM MMR rating. Before you at me, yes I know this potentially shifts the problem to higher ranks, this happens anyway as the system allows people to group 2 ranks apart and players get boosted already.
This approach also has the chance of distributing smurfs more equally through the ranks, rather than just the lowest three. I think it would be better than the system we have now.
It’s just his catch phrase, probably no need to try to break it down.
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if the ‘problem’ is a disease then people may try to focus on; detection, isolation, and prevention.
people want ‘smurfs’ to be identified, put into their own loop with other smurfs, or remove the incentives people have to smurf. the inherent issues with all these is that there are so many variables that go into the ‘why’ and the ‘success’ (how ‘problematic’ the smurfing is) that focused corrections to that are just going to make the experience even worse for people that aren’t trying to ‘exploit’ the game.
if people want to play with friends, and the friends aren’t of equal skill, then putting casual and learning players at max mmr with try-hard teams practicing for community events are going to get the new players stomped and prevent them from picking up the game.
if people want lower queue times (that tend to narrow at upper levels due to lower population availability) then you need more players, or a less divided playerbase; so any option that tries to further segment the smurfs ends up hurting everyone else more.
The overall bottom line tends to come down to two things:
- you make it less a ‘problem’ by having people care less about it. Usual concerns about smurfing tend to come from losing to smurfs, but the concern tends to come to a disparity in skill, which is pretty much any issue of gaming metrics because there isn’t a solid way to identify ‘skill’ outside of 1v1 trials.
- you increase the ability of the playerbase. better players circulate the mmr better than bad players, which improves match experience and reduces the backlash people fixate on for smurfs. if people are ‘better’ than they currently are, then they’d stop caring about facing opponents ‘better’ than they are.
In fighting games and race-mode gameplay, when one person knows they’re more likely to lose against a better opponent, then they adapt their meta-gaming to take gambles instead. for 1v1 games, someone may use off-meta heroes to try to exploit unfamiliarity in the better player (who will rely a lot on muscle memory for gameplay) while in racing games, players may try to find shortcuts the other player won’t consider because… they don’t need to do so.
In teamplay, the dynamics of that are very different than just 1v1 games, but the concept is still the same: playing the meta game by making gambles. if particular heroes tend to be smurf-favorites, then picking heroes that frustrate where their heroes excel can offset smurf encounters. If the players aren’t getting what they want out of the experience, then they’d be less prone to do such behavior.
However, if people were already going to consider that approach as is, they wouldn’t be looking for something else to blame as a way of coping with their unmet expectations.
If the goal is to try to improve other players, then ‘we’ have to adopt a change in tactics to try to facilitate that as we play – but it’s not as if anyone can actually force anyone to change, esp if they explicitly don’t want to do so.
So the other portion of power in our control is to change our own expectations. Optimisms, pessimisms, pragmatism, and all those other ism-isms are perspective and opportunity wrapped in a blanket of risk/reward. If someone want to shift their perspective, then they eventually can, and they ‘fix’ the problem by not seeing it as a problem anymore.
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Why would we want to get rid of smurfs? It’s the last fun thing left in this game when not playing with friends 
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Because the OP wants to have Ranked games that feel more balanced, something I would like too. The trouble is, even if you had no smurfs, players are allowed to group 2 ranks apart in ranked, so you get uneven matches anyway.
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But a plat and a silver getting ranked in a gold game is far from the same thing as getting stomped by at least low diamond Alarak and then have the rank points at the end of the game say you were actually the favoured team.
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I wasn’t saying it was a one to one comparison, I was saying the system is flawed by design. How would you feel if new accounts could once again rank in to higher ranks as they once did? It would at least mean a more even spread of smurfs through the ranks.
As it is right now, all smurf accounts rank into the lowest 3 ranks.
Cause player complain qm needs to be balanced and fixed and such so people smurfing and destroying others is gonna be a problem.
Everyone keeps using that playerbase statement and yet fail to understand all these problem is not attracting anyone new to the game, including a large number of players who quit due to smurfs and trolls.
The problem is QM can never be “balanced and fixed”, without making it something that doesn’t resemble QM at all. I mean, if you want a mode you can pick any hero you desire and queue up, it’s going to be unbalanced.
When they first did the role changes back in late 2018, people got so upset about having to wait on average 2 minutes for QM, they complained here and on Reddit and it was rolled back. The problem is, people want “perfect” matchmaking, balance, solo queue only, team queue only and to be able to play any hero they want, and have that somehow “balanced.”
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People need to be 100% realistic and know that they cant get everything without sacrificing other things. But people treat qm like it was ranked.
People complaining about qm wait times were too long is just one thing you had to sacrifies to get balanced game but ofc its not enough. Party restrictions were also thrown overboard so now 4-5 stacks get matched up againts every party size making games a big stomp since premades rarely get a troll or a feeder to push his team down. My last game is prove of that.
5 solo ques gets matched up againts a cordinated 4 stack and my team had 3 trolls ofc.
To quote what a former dev once said on Reddit:
No matter what we added or removed our playerbase was never satiesfied with what we did. The playerbase cant be satisfied. So yes even the devs knows that the playerbase is hard to get happy.
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As much as I believe improvements can be made, some players have very unrealistic expectations and you’re right, they can never be satisfied. When I joined at launch, this being my first MOBA, I knew straight away without being told that QM was obviously the “anything goes” mode and Ranked was for more serious play. So I adjusted my expectations for QM accordingly.
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this is a good working idea too that will cut smurfs 99%
even if its tied to 1 mobile device, most smurfs wont have more than 1 or 2 at their home
Actually he wouldn’t be abusing the system. Smurfs are a problem and banning them doesn’t cause a problem since Blizzard wouldn’t lose any playerbase in the process of it. There are some exceptions to smurfing being valid, but are rarely done for such reasons, like learning to play a new hero, but in general, smurfs are typically used to boost players or to stomp low elo players to boost their ego from a recent loss streak. This is plain wrong.
Smurfing is frowned upon and by most and is considered wrong. Just because Blizzard lacks insight doesn’t mean the community will and should. The community is a the dominant voice. If the community believes Smurfing is reportable offense and if Blizzsrd doesn’t want to deal with it, then Blizzard will deal with the repercussions of inaction. It’s a loss of playerbase. So ban smurfs=no loss of playerbase, not banning smurfs=a loss of playerbase. Do the math. I’m sure one is better for business.
Believing smurfing “shouldnt” be reportable and is an okay to do means either: A. They’re a smurf themselves or B. They lack insight, or both.
Imagine if Magnus Carlson somehow changed his identity just to participate in low Elo tournaments just too mindlessly destroy them. That’s what is being encouraged. All this does is make people wants to stop playing because ppl aren’t being given a fair chance to victory nor are they being given a chance to learn.
Last I checked, HOTS’ small playerbase is a problem. Smurfing will only assist in shortening the playerbase even more. If that’s truly what you want, continue to promote smurfing.
This is very sad.
https://www.reddit.com/r/heroesofthestorm/comments/mpz11f/we_need_help/
His quote was “I can evade any bans that blizzard gives to player. IP ban,hardware bans, you name it.” His method to avoid ban is same method from “Fortnite”. (He didn’t go in details)
He made new accounts numerously with argentina server, where the currency for gems are cheap.
He runs 10 HOTS games in 1 computer, so he can get them level fast and quick. as you see in that picture, all 10 “Cat” were him doing with just 1 computer.
He has been abusing so much that KR HOTS community knows “Cat” is macro user.