1 more thing Liam Neeson is an actor
he is actually quite soft in real life.
Devs have said this time and time again: They are not taking action against smurf accounts. The game plays so that smurfs will get placed at the rank they deserve, providing they are actually competing. Throwing and getting in a lower rank on purpose is another story.
Finally somebody who realizes smurfs aren’t the reason they’re not masters or higher. Saw a post complaining about golden weapon farming and it makes me wonder why people always have a reason for their that has nothing to do with them
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People actually do this, btw.
I have a smurf account and I think that idea wouldn’t work at all, for one I BOUGHT the account and should be able to play whatever rank I want to play on the account that I BOUGHT, secondly VPNs and many other tools can spoof someones IP, hardware IDs etc, this would never work and people will always find a way to bypass these sort of things.
costing somebody 40$ on average, yes sales exist, when they get perm banned is pretty bad punishment in itself
I think they should hardware ban people who name themselves Plumbus. Neither smurfing nor naming yourself Plumbus are against the rules, so it makes sense.
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It’s not an offence that would cause a ban, Blizzard already mentioned it last year. Response from Jeff:
cant this also affect shared computers or even households?
I have a smurf but it’s for learning dps heroes (low-mid plat) and I’d rather not derank my main account (high dia-low mast) where I play tank and main healer.
And that’s what makes them smurfs.
You think that level 65 account with 72 wins and 22 losses played normally to get where they are?
The VAST majority of accounts that people are complaining about are Grand Masters down in Diamond, Diamonds in Gold, etc etc. These players ABSOLUTELY manipulated the matchmaker and did not “play normally” at any point in the stretch from levels 0-25 or their first ten placement matches. They INTENTIONALLY trick the easily deceived matchmaking system that their skills are 1000+ SR below where their main is, and then it’s off to the races for a couple of seasons of easy games.
The competitive matchmaking system should see a player with an insane winrate on specific characters after a certain amount of playtime, or across the account as a whole, and automatically adjust the SR to something that reflects reality.
Instead these players get to ruin games for hundreds of people before giving up that account and buying another account the next time it goes on sale or gets Humble Bundled.
And as an FYI, Blizzard absolutely knows who the smurfs are from a technical standpoint. Any major software provider uses a combination of IP and hardware component ID to track users of an application. ON TOP OF THAT, Blizzard ABSOLUTELY have main accounts and alts linked on their end anyway – you think the Blizzard application isn’t reporting back which separate accounts are logging in under the same application system install? Come now – they have more metadata than you can imagine.
Blizzard absolutely could give competitive bans or SR re-rankings to 95%+ of these smurf accounts in no time at all, and would be justified in doing so because these players did not “play normally,” thereby allowing themselves to be ranked correctly.
Instead, greed takes the place of decency.
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They won’t do a thing about smurfs unless there’s a mass exodus of the playerbase who are fed up with them.
Sadly, a significant drop in player numbers would be the only thing that would make them do anything. And I mean significiant, like 90% of all “original” accounts just stop playing altogether.
Smurfing is bannable.
Well smurfs aren’t banable so now what? Throwing to smurf is but buying a new account to smurf isn’t.
Obviously not because a bunch of people have been banned but keep playing with alts right?
It’s fine to have multiple accounts. It doesn’t say you can’t and it’s your money to buy a new account so as long as you play like normal (the match maker will place you quick into your proper rank) it’s fine.
I’m not in favor of banning smurfs.
What I’d want from reporting a smurf though, would be this :
instead of being reports that stacks until the system go “ok, he got xx reports, time to ban”, after a certain time, I want the system to compare the IP of the reported smurf and see if it finds another user with the IP, then try to adjust the smurf’s mmr faster.
It already does it quite fast, but I understand it gives them enough time to stomp real low levels.
My problem with that though is that I’m not even sure the latest laws we got with RGPD and all allows them to do that.
If I get a refund for 6 of my 7 accounts
smurfing isn’t against the rules so
doesn’t matter what you think
I’ve had smurfs on my team as well and I’ve asked them why they smurf and the simple reason they’ve given most of the time is “I just want to wreck bad players because higher is too stressful” which I take issue with and made sure I let them know I hate it and I usually leave if there is a smurf on my team because I dont want to play with them. (I would not and will not do this in ranked however).
As for “acting” upon it. You grossly underestimate the ability for human beings to be a lazy low effort species.
If they have to pay more to bypass it a majority just wont bother because its “too much hassel”. There will be people of course who dont give up but yeah not nearly as many who just could not be bothered and will just play on the accounts they have.
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