Yeah, I’m venting. I’ve had enough of the crazy amounts of smurfs which are just ruining the low ranks.
Why even bother doing competitive if this is what the game is like there?
I should have taken the warning “it will take a long time…” to mean what it means on the OCE servers.
A bunch of smurfs are wrecking games, so everyone has left for the night. If you join games, then they will be full of smurfs, and nothing you do matters.
Mobility hero players - when people are angry and asking for nerfs to your heroes, it is the people doing this which is the cause.
Its not just low ranks. At this point in the game, I’m in plat, and I’ve been playing the same since it was released. I preordered it. I only have a silver border. If I run into anyone with less than one star, my, and everyone I’m playing with, first thought it “oh god, a smurf.” And they don’t care. They’re either throwing, or just don’t care about winning so if the match even has a tiny inkling of looking like it will lose, they’ll just stop trying. I once had a smurf on my team. The smurf was like 60 or so, and named “Torbbronzetomaster.” Of course, they went Torb. We started losing, so they started literally throwing their turret off the cliff on Route66. This is an extreme example, but its not an isolated one.
Yes, cause they are going to stop people who buy multiple accounts and give them more $$$ when Overwatch has been declining in sales.
Even ignoring that, how would they even stop smurfs anyway? First thing that comes to my mind is limit each persons accounts to their IP address?
But VPN’s could probably get by that so…
Ignoring that they probably don’t want to because greed.
How would they? That’s maybe why they haven’t really talked about it, cause they don’t know how themselves.
I have one idea though, what if they forced any alternate accounts to be linked onto the primary account of the launcher via IP address detection, and base the users MMR and SR of that separate account on that of the primary as that of a starting ground.
It’s one of the problems I’ve accounted for, yes it’s one of the cons of the scenario but the chances of two siblings using the same computer to play Overwatch is a tad less likely than one person going out of their way to buy an alternate account.
This is true, though I can’t think of any other way to make sure that the alternative accounts stay locked to the primary.
MMR resets each season or so perhaps would offer a solution? I know it has a lot of drawbacks, but it would get rid of one major reason people make smurfs, and would place those who are smurfing near or at their appropriate SR, and if they purposefully throw or play bad in order to be placed lower, it is now reportable as they are throwing.
I know, rough concepts with a lot of cons, but with a problem such as this, it’s all that we can really muster up.
This is one of the only just reasons to create smurfs, you can’t play at your best universally at each role, so you make an alternative to practice the other roles, it’s an acceptable way to make an alt.
Role Queue may fix this [Separate SRs for each role], but other than that there’s very little.
Why is that unrealistic? I grew up in a household with a brother and we played the same games all the time. We also went to LAN parties a lot so our accounts shifted between IPs. You cant even handle such a scenario using IP addresses.
If you’re going for a unique identifier, there are like a dozen different pieces of hardware with unique IDs in a computer that are better than locking it to an IP address. You can probably start with using a MAC address. It’s spoofable but more unique than an IP address.
I never said it was unrealistic, I merely stated it was a tad less likely than one person deciding to buy an alt or 2 to smurf with.
I was thinking towards things such as that, but even though I am being taught about networks, game balance and such at my technical school, I’m not very fluent at everything yet.
I actually dont think this is as uncommon as you’d think. I’d say there are likely more households with multiple consoles/computers/accounts than there are people smurfing in OW. I’d even wager an order of magnitude more.
Even then, what other solution can really be offered that won’t just be outright banning them?
It’s nearly impossible to predict who is playing on that computer from the game’s perspective, it could be your brother’s account, but you are playing competitive on it for whatever reason, smurfing has a lot of unpredictable and spontaneous scenarios, so fixing it is definitely no easy task.
There isn’t really a good solution, which is why they haven’t done anything about it. If you ban or prevent even a single legitimate user from playing it will cause a whole lot of problems for them.
They have no choice but to let people lose matches due to smurfs, because there is no way of telling what the players intentions are or if they are even a smurf, they may just be really good but stuck in a rough spot.
It also really skews peoples opinion on a hero, stick someone like ChipSa in a gold game and he’ll completely shred and make Doomfist seem like the most broken thing to ever exist, when in reality Doomfist may not be any of it at all.
It kind of sucks, but yeah at the end of the day there really is no good solution.
Very well possible, but if they are soft throwing on a specific role, if it is intentional, shouldn’t they be banned or punished? On the flipside, if someone is just that bad and is throwing without realizing it, it’d spark another epidemic.
![:joy:](https://d74zh8edaijub.cloudfront.net/en/overwatch/images/emoji/twitter/joy.png?v=6" ":joy:")
