Today we faced a squad that is obviously manipulating the ladder by playing with 2 smurf accounts. So the squad consisted of 3 TL masters and 2 gold smurfs with a ~80% winrate in TL. It’s kind of normal in TL to boost with a smurf I know, but this was next level boosting.
Is this ladder manipulation something that can be reported to the game masters? I mean there is no difference between this and cheating.
Technically no, But it is frowned upon
If you look at the top Person in Team League (named GGG)
You has 13 k more points than 2nd, that’s because he plays with like 4 bronze smurfs just to boost himself up more.
Blizzard is trying to prevent Smurfs with the new ranked mode coming this next patch.
I think it is technically allowed to smurf (I don’t know any rules against it) but it is a shameful act to take advantage of a smurf to increase your rank
Boosting is discouraged but as noted above they are taking steps to minimize and discourage it further with the upcoming season.
They steps they are taking are not good enough. It will still be too easy. Plat 5 which is afaik the lowest a master can queue with is still way too low. Should be Dia 5(only 1 league difference and not 2). Boosting will still be killing the game in the new Storm league.
They already mentioned they’ll be keeping a close eye on the matter, as there are obviously a lot of concerns here (especially since we’ll having the inflated TL MMR utilized). So we can only hope they really do pay attention and adjust accordingly, because I agree there is still a lot of room for abuse.
The issue isn’t Master’s players with Platinum – it is smurf accounts that are legitimately in Silver League that are the problem.
The steps they are taking will remove the incentive to make smurf accounts for “boosting”. Some people who play a bunch will still have multiple accounts so they don’t sour their main account stats, but this will eliminate all the smurf boosting that was going on.
You can easily boost master accounts when you queue up with Platin smurfs. Especially when you have two of them. But it’s much harder to get those accounts which might sort of solve the issue for a lot of cases.
However this only works for parties <5. In a party of 5 you can queue up with who you want. My example was 3 masters plus 2 gold smurfs. I’m not sure how this will the tackled. If they just average the party MMR the issue will still exists without any change and hope.
They know about it already. Its been a constant complaint since they lifted the team comp limits to allow singles and 4 person groups in TL.
The new system coming in tuesday will do 2 things:
You must be within 3 tiers of team mates if less than a 5 man group. This means bronze cannot be tiered with anybody higher than gold, silver can’t be higher than plat. etc…
The exception to 1 is if you are a 5 man stack you can have ANY RANKS you want but the MMR used for match making will be the highest players on the teams MMR so if you are a GM with 4 bronzes your team will be treated as if you are all GM. and will match you against GM’s so hard to boost.
Will this fix everything ? probably not but it will be better.
It’s much slower to obtain a Platinum smurf than it is a Silver, since all new TL smurfs place in Silver 5 now. It takes tons of grinding.