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.