Alternative to multiple accounts - DEV team please consider

Competitive Discussion
1

The current system encourages multiple accounts in many ways. Honestly its good business. But one issue this is causing, is the accuracy of SR. A lot people complain that they are stuck, and this could be attributed in part to so many smurf accounts taking up space above them.

Alternatively, you could have multiple competitive season profiles on one account. A players spot on the SR bell curve would be limited to their highest SR they achieve, while their lower profiles are merely place markers for match making. This would allow people the freedom to play with their friends and be creative with their hero selection without alt accounts taking up space. Put a $5 price tag on each extra competitive profile and you would make more money then selling alt accounts anyway.

2

An alternative to multiple accounts that I thought of could be something along these lines:

  • 1 account
  • One main SR rating
  • 26+ secondary SR ratings (per individual hero)

The basic idea would be like this (let’s assume the player in question could use work on their Sombra and Genji):

Current SR: 3450

Soldier 76 (SR): 3430
McCree (SR): 3310
Lucio (SR): 3250
Winston (SR): 3120
Symmetra (SR): 2870
Reinhardt (SR): 2535
Sombra (SR): 2100
Genji (SR): 1850

What said player could do is queue “as normal” at 3450 SR. They wouldn’t have all the heros available however, just the ones they are skilled enough with. We could have something like a 500 SR cut-off.

Soldier 76 (SR): 3430
McCree (SR): 3310
Lucio (SR): 3250
Winston (SR): 3120
<----------------------
Symmetra (SR): 2870 *restricted
Reinhardt (SR): 2535 *restricted
Sombra (SR): 2100 *restricted
Genji (SR): 1850 *restricted

This would help keep players playing their best heroes, instead of having the option to “troll/throw pick” by picking a hero they are terrible on. Could there be issues with this? Sure, but in theory it could work.

Now for the multiple accounts issue. With my idea, you only need the one account, but would have the ability to queue lower than your main SR to climb with hero specific SR’s.

So, for example you could queue at 2150 SR, to play with your friends perhaps and to practice some of your heroes that you want to get better with.

Soldier 76 (SR): 3430 *restricted
McCree (SR): 3310 *restricted
Lucio (SR): 3250 *restricted
Winston (SR): 3120 *restricted
Symmetra (SR): 2870 *restricted
Reinhardt (SR): 2535 *restricted
<----------------------
Sombra (SR): 2100
Genji (SR): 1850

It would be likely you would have more than the two options here, since I didn’t list the entire roster, but the idea still stands. This way, players could still climb on their weaker heroes and make progress without having to try to play their weak heroes at their highest SR when they might be a Pharah specialist, for example, and be below average with hitscan heroes like McCree.

4 Likes
3

How does the OP’s proposal differ from multiple accounts, isn’t it just discount multiple accounts at $5 a pop instead of $40 ?

–

With respect to WarmasterCly’s concept this could easily be built into the LFG system if you fill a support slot, the only SR that is relevant is your skill on Support characters.

Beyond that I just don’t see Bliz implementing anything, as it has taken them two years to implement LFG…

3 Likes
4

90% of the competitive community is toxic and an un-fun place to be, smurfing allows you to hush up those toxic trash talkers, smurfs are the dark knights of overwatch, huzzah!

5

Or alternatively they could just reset personal MMR at the beginning of each season, immediately solving the primary reason why people buy alt accounts in the first place.
But hey this is Activi$ion, having a system that encourages people to buy their games twice alongside a gambling system is like a dream come true.

1 Like
6

No, what I proposed would remove the need to create alt accounts! The issue lies in the bell curve. There is only room for ≅25% of accounts to be above 3000 SR, and if 20% of those players have a second account above 3000 sr that lowers the player base to ≅19%. The higher someones SR, the higher probability they will want an alt account to goof around on. So the problem snowballs on its self. Having multiple profiles would prevent most of this.

Just had a game in high plat, 5/12 players where under level 50. This is getting ridiculous. The game really needs this functionality, or comp will continue to be a joke sub 3000.

7

Resetting every season wouldn’t allow enough time for the sr to settle well enough. It took most of Anniversary for FFA deathmatch (which had new MMR) for very skilled people to move up to GM (top 500 was low diamond for a while).

Were you on the forums during anniversary? It was flooded with complaints about how unbalanced the matchmaking felt, being put against people far better or far worse with almost no good games. This is how it would be for the first half of EVERY season if MMR was reset each season. Who’s to say it would even place you accurately? What if you got unlucky during your 10 placements and versed people who previously had very high mmr, thus giving you mostly losses and bad stats so you place poorly even though it’s undeserved.

8

I just use the built in mutes to silence to toxic people…
But I guess that works to!

9

My understanding of the sr system is that it does not attempt to create an average or place people according to a curve. If it did then the average sr would be 2500, which it is not because there are more players in gold than platinum, on top of that, there are waaaaaayyyy more players in bronze than in GM, which, if the system used a curve in any way, would not be possible. Check out the tier distribution stats that have been posted by blizzard. The sr system is very broken imo as there is no way 8% of v the player base should be allocated only 1.5x more than the top 1%. Sr has no actual value to it as far as skill is concerned.

10

It is a bell curve with roughly 50% of people above and bellow 2500 SR.
overwatchtracker .com/insights/skillrating

11

Just shows that 3rd party sites aren’t that accurate.

12

Why would tracker misrepresent their own statistics. The information compiled is accurate, and with their sample size the likelyhood of them being off by 10% is almost imposible.

13

Are you trying to argue that a 3rd party site has more accurate data on Overwatch population than Blizzard?

14

It’s skewed because people at higher ratings are more inclined to sign up to those sites and the sites only have access to stats for those who signs up.

1 Like
15

I trust tracker more then a public relations post.

16

Oh you’re one of those people.

1 Like
17

I think they have everyones info tbh. Did you sign up? Because they have your stats.

20

Yeah I did - at least a couple of the big ones.

I believe the issue is that there is no official list of all battletags and the public api only allow you to request profile information for a specific battletag you supply as part of the request. So signing up might not be a correct word - it’s more about providing their database with a battletag that you know is valid if that makes sense.

Even if they would try and brute force every combination possible of numbers and letters im sure there would be some sort of protection in place from blizzards side as it would generate excessive loads over a very long period of time…

22

Those stats most likely include xbox, ps4, pc, smurf account, abandoned accounts and data from all region of play so yeah that data means nothing.
And to be honest so is the data from 3rd party sites.
They just need to reset mmr at the start of the season and make the season longer that’s it.
And they need to start tracking personnel performance because as of right now rank is an image of how many times you lost and not how good you are at the game.

23

You can see the stats from pc, xbox, ps4 or globally. They are all similar. This data proves rank is a bell curve. This is the only logical way for SR to be distributed. This is why having alt accounts taking up space negatively affects the accuracy of someones true skill rating as compared to the player base. Having multiple competitive season profiles with a single SR rating is a simple and logical solution.