Any plans in dealing with the smurf problem?

Even when I often fight with comixfan about various things on this forum, I have to agree with him on this :smile:

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smurfs are not causing you to be placed at a rank that doesn’t reflect your skill. It’s a team game, a smurf, even a good one, can only carry so hard.

Most smurfs are also not GM, but 1 rank above the elo they are playing at. So if you are gold, you will likely go vs Plat smurfs. Think of it as practice for when you will be plat, you need to deal with such players constantly so it’s good warmup.

Anyway, if smurfs disappeared tomorrow, I promise you you’d find yourself at the same rank where you are currently. Maybe 100-150 SR higher but not more.

There are no Grandmasters hidden in Gold. No Plat player plays like a Masters. I’ve NEVER seen a talented player in those SRs. The first SR where I start seeing good players is like 3800 ish, below that, nobody is good and treated unfairly by the matchmaker.

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No joke, I’m about to break my keyboard. I had 2 games in a row with the same 6 stack of smurfs. They were typing in chat how our team was dog dung even though we had a leaver, kept spamming the chat with ez over and over again. Its insane especially when my team on both those times were all solos and our overall team rating was 1600 while theres was 2000! Like what the actual flip blizzard, take care of this!

  • How many smurfs do you get every 10 game that you think it’s a problem?
  • How do you know if someone is or isn’t a smurf?
  • Game codes to games you think you’re 100% going against a smurf please?
  • Ever thought of the idea that you also get smurfs in you team?
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You’re talking alot of vague ideas with no explanation whatsoever.

Cheater? Report them so they get banned.
Throwers? Report them so they get banned.
“Smurfs”? You have no idea if anyone is a smurf or isn’t, and playing better than you isn’t an offense.
Smurfs? I mean, the real, real smurfs. Yeah, too bad. Try your best and don’t sweat about it. GG next game.

I get that there are “smurfs” that take the game lightly and often throw (aka derank) when things don’t go their way. But that’s just throwing, and you report throwers and they get banned. That simple.

Simply playing better than the opponent cannot be a bannable offense. Yes it feels bad getting roled, destroyed and utterly humiliated. But what they did is simply playing better than you, which you 100% can fix by just getting better. Making smurfs as an excuse for people getting stuck is just reaching. Everyone has had to deal with smurfs, you simply become good enough to beat the smurfs to warrant that rank.

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They is few gm in ranks from bronze to plat, I know them personaly. But you are mostly right and I agree with the rest. If smurfs are causing sonething, it is frustration in some games and prolonged climbing process. But they dont keep anyone lower in long run.

There are, but just by statistics alone, the chances of meeting a GM smurf in Gold is extremely low that you’d be considered lucky to even get one in 200 games. Those people who claim they’re going against GM players in Silver non stop have no idea what GM looks like, and are getting beaten by at most Gold or Plat players, the very rank they think “they were supposed to be if not for smurfs”.

I mean if you want to climb to Plat, you gotta play like the Plats and be able to beat them. That goes for anyone trying to climb really.

Yeah i myself faced like max 20 gm smurfs in bronze to gold in 4 years. And when I play on my alt in low ranks, I rarely see anyone who i cant destroy(the smurfs) and I am high plat/low dia.

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That’s not what he said at all. Go back and re-read what he actually posted.

Of course? No, you cannot be so certain.

Given the fact they’re putting time, money and resources into developing a solution for smurfs, there’s no doubt that whatever solution they come up with will not be console only.

Yes, you should. He was answering a question about the console problem. Context therefore implies he was talking specifically about the console problem.
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He did not say “this is a very hard problem to solve for consoles” though. He also did not say “any solution for consoles is more long term” either.

Don’t go putting words in his virtual mouth.

I respect Valve for them to fight smurfs even though CS GO received a lot of hate and playbase drops. They simply added phone attachment. And yeah, Blizzard won’t even support anything like Face-It so we will never get a good matchmaking because Blizzard only care about skins and useless PvE content

Q: can you please say something about smurfs on consoles? You know they can create unlimited accounts with one copy of the game. May be some changes specific for consoles?

A: this is a very hard problem to solve but we have some ideas. any solution is more long term, though. possibly OW2 or later. [ … ] it’s actually very complicated with the way consoles work and the rules regarding account creation.

He is answering a question specifically about console, that they have ideas that they may work on later.

The question is about consoles, specifically unlimited accounts. The answer is about consoles, specifically account creation. There is no reason whatsoever do believe that this will be a system could be applied to PC since PC doesn’t have unlimited free accounts.

It’s not a question and answer about smurfs in general, it’s a question and answer about unlimited console accounts. Any notion that some grander and more general antismurf system is being considered is not supported by the comment.

In general Jeff is careful to say what he means and mean what he says. If he says we have some ideas about unlimited console accounts that are difficult because of the rules on console account creation, then he means exactly that. He is not signalling a bigger smurf system.

Does that mean there isn’t a bigger smurf system being worked on? No, we can’t know that. However, the claims they have made are that duplicate accounts on PC (where they are paid and limited) are not a problem, and that they already have systems in place to detect boosting and throwing. They have given every indication that they are satisfied with their current systems on PC with regards to smurfs.

They could be working on better throwing detection, but they have given no indication that they are doing so. For them to work on anything to counteract rules-abiding duplicate accounts on PC would be a sharp reversal of policy and they have given no indication that they are doing so.

Any notion that they are working on anti-smurf for PC is purely built on hopes and imagination, with nothing in the public record to support it.

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As much as I hate smurfs, in my opinion you can never solve a smurfing problem. There will always be people who will buy lower level accounts for easier games. Smurfing in Overwatch is something I have just learner to accept. If you were too ban smurfs,
A. How would you know that player is a smurf?
B. What kind on punishment should be given out?
You will never know if someone is a smurf, they could just be a new player who has played comp for the 1st or 2nd time

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A. Well looking at their profile (provided its not locked) and seeing that they have 12 different heroes, all with at least 5 hours of play time on each and 100% winrate on them is an indication.

B. A ban from the season at minimum, permanent for repeat offenses.

It gets tiring trying to get back to a rank you were once at, working your hardest but have all that effort be easily tossed out the window by your own team alone. Why add yet another thing on top of all that frustration? I remember a game I had in the past against a smurf hanzo, he was literally killing me and my whole team by himself, keeping us all at spawn and if we somehow got past him, the other 5 would be there to kill that person. This hanzo was getting his ult around every 15 seconds and none of us could get rid of him.

You could say that we were just bad or feeding or tilted, sure. But when I looked at his profile he had about 7 heroes (hanzo being in the top 5) that have all had 5-7 hours playtime, all ranging around 93-100% winrate, the next 7 had around winrates of 72-89% with about 3 hours playtime each, the next 8 had about 32-65% winrate with about an hour of playtime, then the rest had like half an hour of playtime, all at 0% winrate.

Then there was another game I had where a duo was on my team playing as a genji with a mercy pocket. They played really bad and we ended up losing, but on the next game when they were on the enemy team, they were suddenly unstoppable. No one could kill the genji because of his mercy and no one could kill her because of how much he protected her. This duo went from playing like people who were new to the game, to experienced veterans in a single game.

Its not hard to tell who is a smurf. Even if the profiles are locked, its easy to tell who is throwing and belongs in a higher rank, and who actually belongs in the rank they’re in.

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The smurfs know that the reporting system in the game is piss poor.

I’ve seen smurfs in games carry with 80% kp, then type in chat, “you’re all garbage, f*** the lot of you!” then proceed to throw the match. They had open profiles.

On Overbuff they had played over 100 games, with 33% win rate, but top 1% elims, damage, etc.

So they get to pwn scrubs, but still lose games. Takes “good” timing, but definitely possible.

Heck, there’s even streamers crushing bronzes with purchased accounts in front of thousands of viewers and they don’t get banned or censured.

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But, but… it’s “E D U C A T I O N A L” though!

-EDIT-
I know there’s content creators who actually put some effort into the educational part, but many times out of ten it just feels like a buzzword.

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Even when they are educational they could get the same if not better educational stuff from PUGs or coaching low ranked players instead of playing there themselves.

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100% agreed.

TWENTY CHARACTERS REQUIRED

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Here’s one. Note the comparison of bronzes to primates.

But it gets views.

The Victorians used to tour mental asylums to gawk at the patients. I suppose this isn’t as bad as that.

As he’s a gm player, he’s clearly bought a bronze account or hard thrown to bronze.

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Yup. Uploading a (or several) “x to GM challenge” vods to youtube is probably one of the best ways to attract an audience to your Twitch stream. I mean, even tho I partly look down on them I’ll admit that I’ve gobbled up a bunch of that content, so I’m a bit hypocritical.

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