Alt Accounts and their effect on the matchmaker

General Discussion
1

Just for the sake of simplicity, let’s say each league, from Bronze to GM, has roughly equal representation (~15%) of the player base (I know this isn’t the real stats):
Bronze: bottom 0-15%
Silver: 15-30%
Gold: 30-45%
Plat: 45-60%
Diamond: 60-75%
Master: 75-90%
GM: top 90-100%

Now what effect do you think Alt accounts have on the match maker, when the highest level players make multiple accounts, sometimes 2, 3, or even more accounts?

Yes, they may “end up where they belong”, but what does that do to a player who may “normally” fall in Gold, but is now forced to Silver, because of a percentage of the player base that Gold is supposed to represent?

To keep it simple, let’s take the example above, and then make an exaggeration to show the point. Let’s say nobody but players in GM created an Alt account. And each GM player created 10 alt accounts (extreme example). Now the GM players are GM still, but their Alts are in Master. Some who were master before are still in Master, but some may now be Diamond. And so on and so forth. It pushes the players who would be in their respective league, downwards.

What are your thoughts on this?

2

If this happens then a would be silver on their team could hit high gold or plat — balancing it.

3

No. It’s because if 15% of the player base is supposed to be in X league, and all the players in all the leagues higher than them make alt accounts, the distribution of leagues will get skewed downwards.

This is because the higher level players will hold all the higher level slots, plus the slots lower than them, forcing everyone downwards.

It’s like the top 500. If the best 100 players make 5 alt accounts each, only 100 players will end up in the top 500.

The other 400 that truly deserve it are pushed downwards. My point is that it doesn’t just affect the top 500, it effects every league all the way down to bronze due to how many alt accounts there are.

4

It seems like the bigger problem is that it stays top 500 even though more accounts are being created so it gets harder and harder to be in top 500 (both statistically because of number of “players” and because of the high level people having more than one account.)

I’m not really convinced the actual distribution shifts though. I’m not completely convinced only high level people make other accounts, and I’m not sure them having high level accounts stops me from ranking up since sometimes they may end up on my team (either while they’re ranking their new account or if I get up to plat+).

5

I think you are highly exaggerating the effect of alt accounts yes there will be some rank effect but there are not enough alt accounts to cause a big shift.

6

I would disagree. In every game I play I pretty much see at least 2+ alt accounts. Many people have said they have more than 1 alt account and I float around between Gold and Plat.

I would bet the higher you go, the more likely it is the player has an alt. If everyone in Master and GM had 1 alt account, their alts alone would basically fill up Diamond if lower league players didn’t also have that same number of alt accounts to keep the distribution the same.

The fact is, if more higher league players have more alt accounts than lower league players, the SR of the average player would shift downwards. It only wouldn’t have a real affect if all leagues equally had the same number of alt accounts, but I sincerely doubt Bronze/Silver players have equal number of alt accounts as Diamond-GM players.

7

On PS4 there’s a one trick Solider 76 in top 500 at 10th place. Over 23 hours and it’s a smurf as the account is only level 65 and was created in Season 10. Season 10, the person one trick Tracer to 4200s SR. Still top 500 but low.

The Solider 76 Season 11 is at around 4500s SR. He seems to do a lot of damage with him as I checked his profile and he has about 30k as his best damage. I think he does 20-30k a game.

8

I’m gonna do some maths here.
Do we like maths?

Of course not! But we’re gonna do it anyway, to prove a point.

Blizzard said they reached 40 million copies sold.
How many actual players do you think there are?

Your theory only works with the classical paranoia of “There is at least 1 smurf in every game omg”.
For the record, that requires

You also assume equal distribution of ranks… this is not true. And this weakens your argument as well.

Let’s say that… 1% of the playerbase (1 in 100 players) has 2 accounts on average. This is 400,000 people.
Assuming that these 400,000 people follow the same rank distribution as the rest of the game, means these amount of people per rank have two or more accounts:

  • Bronze - 8% (32,000 out of 3,200,000)
  • Silver - 21% (84,000 out of 8,400,000)
  • Gold - 32% (128,000 out of 12,800,000)
  • Platinum - 25% (100,000 out of 10,000,000)
  • Diamond - 10% (40,000 out of 4,000,000)
    - Master - 3% (12,000 out of 1,200,000)
    - Grandmaster - 1% (4000 out of 400,000)

(those rank distribution percentages are taken from a thread made by Jeff Kaplan back in February: Competitive Mode Tier Distribution
Assuming that the percentages do not change radically)

At this point, the effects on the matchmaker are ridiculously low.
See, someone in Gold can have an alt account. Chances are not likely that they will suddenly be GM with that account. So it all goes downwards to maybe silver/gold/plat. But there are already a huge amount of people at those ranks anyway. The influence of those few thousand people from Master and Grandmaster are negligible.

In my example, let’s say that these Master and Grandmaster players have alt accounts somewhere in Gold or Platinum. The player pool for these two ranks alone is 22,800,000 players. And then somewhere among those 22,800,000 players… there are 16,000 Master/Grandmaster players. This is 0.07% of the players at those ranks.
That is a very low number, isn’t it?

As for T500… Yes, it sucks that people at T500 might have an alt that is also T500, meaning that #501 won’t get the #500 spot, but to maintain both of them at T500 requires twice the effort and twice the wins as compared to keeping a single account on there. Seems unlikely to keep this going for long, eventually resulting in #501 getting into the T500 anyway.

But the argument of it “pushing down” at all the other tiers except for T500 (which has a population limit), saying that people who might be Gold will now be Silver… is wrong. The only thing it will do is increase population of that rank. (ie: instead of 22,800,000 people at Gold and Platinum, it will be 22,816,000 people or something)
The chance to have your match influenced by a smurf is so low that you have plenty of opportunity to earn it back normally.

9

So you think that, % wise, the same percent of players in Diamond with an alt account, that the same % of people in Bronze have an alt account as well?

That’s what I am arguing against. I would say the higher up you go in rank, the more likely that player has an alt.

Like maybe 1% of Bronze players have an alt, but 30% or more have an alt in Masters.

10

Okay. Let’s go with that.

30% of masters have an alt account.

There are 1,200,000 Master players in OW.
30% of that is 360,000 players.

Let’s say ALL of these are somewhere in Silver/Gold/Plat (unlikely. But I’m not gonna argue).
Either for throwing (the actual “smurfing”), or for learning a hero they have not mastered yet… (which is IMO okay and doesn’t make them better or worse than an actual player at their respective rank)

There are 31,200,000 players in total at silver/gold/plat.
Then we say that 360,000 of those are actually smurfs from Masters.
This is 1.15% of players that COULD be an alt account from someone in Masters.

Now you could think “well that’s a pretty big percentage!”

Except… that differentiation between “alt accounts” and “smurfs” seems to be a blurred line, and everyone assumes that alt accounts are bad and will skew the 50% win chance that the matchmaker makes for you just because they are not someone’s main account.

If the player behind the alt account is playing fairly, just learning a hero for competitive that they do not play at master-rank… do they actually skew the matchmaker?

The actual percentage of people throwing to derank, or people pwning nubs with their Master/GM main… is probably much lower than the 30% you provided.
And with that, the chances of it affecting the SR of people at silver/gold/plat is much lower as well.