This is mostly not applied to “smurfs”. Smurfs, in general, are low level/new accounts in a game performing well above their intended performance, such as showing above average mechanical skill, aim, ability/resource management, etc.
This description that you’ve listed, best fits to alts, which are not the same as smurfs.
There are some very legitimate purposes to having an alternate account. For example, my alternate account is strictly used for testing purposes to learn and re-learn about key features of Overwatch from a new account perspective. I also use it when I need to control the game from two positions (such as when I am building a custom game and need to test a few things to make sure it works correctly).
Once again, I say the term “smurf” is ambiguous. It is often perceived to mean too many different things from different points of view. Just like when I said “Anakin, the good man that was your father was destroyed” was true from a certain point of view.
So it is important to identify what is considered disruptive to the game and maintain balance in the Force.
(Sorry for the Star Wars meme, but I couldn’t resist.)
you are good, dont worryt
Some pretty easy ways to mitigate smurfing for the general player population…
In theory, this would be a better experience for everyone. New players wouldn’t be getting thrown into matches with people that have far more institutional knowledge. Experienced players won’t be getting matched with players that don’t yet understand the matchups, level layouts, abilities, metas, etc. Smurfs will have to pay FAR more for an account to get into a protected queue or invest enough time leveling that smurfing is no longer worthwhile. Players that have dedicated time to play on a single account, and authenticate it, benefit.
The problem is that a beginner’s pool/queue would negatively impact new players and discourage them from playing.
Report them for what. Again it is not a reportable offense to play with an alternate account as long as you are doing the best you can.
Not everyone has a phone, especially outside of the U.S and especially in our console communities.
Overall all of these ideas seem to intend to divide the player base and I would think that a high majority of the known 40 million players/accounts don’t put in the active time to reach the level 250 in terms of experience play. I can’t imagine what it would do to queue times on both sides.
Again, I don’t see smurfing/alternate as big of a problem as many of you let it on to be. Neither does the development team (click here). Boosting or throwing are problems and if you see a player throwing games, report them. As for Boosting, well the dev teams have insider tools to track that as well and don’t want it reported.
“As long as you are playing at your best to your known skill, you should be fine.”
Someone should tell the smurfs that, most of the ones I match with seem to use being on a smurf account as an excuse to care less about winning, I think that’s the root of the issue.
I can see some concern about not having the pressure to perform at your best vs. the main account. However, if a player is consistently being disruptive by throwing, they are likely to be reported and eventually actioned by Blizzard. If necessary, Blizzard will IP ban extreme offenders (and have done it in the past).
While your ideas in some ways are good, there are definitely strong criticisms that possibly prevent them from being viable solutions.
This negatively affects new players (yes Overwatch does get them quite a bit). It would also negatively impact the overall community matchmaking making queue possibly longer for many players. Especially those in low populated regions.
I don’t have the insider knowledge or facts (only the Blizzard Global Insights team would), but I think it would have to be carefully evaluated to see how often new players are reported for illegimate reasons (such as being reported for Gameplay Sabotage when they are just playing badly). I would also emphasize that they have done a lot of investigations to track what is defined as consistent disruptive behavior. Meaning the player is deliberately trying to throw games or is always abusive in communication, the global insights team has revealed less than 5% of our community reaches the point of needing to be actioned for such consistent disruptive behavior. Furthermore, only about 1% ever remains disruptive after the first account action and has to be escalated to a permanent account ban. (Sources of this information comes from the Play Nice, Play Fair panel in BlizzCon 2018 and the Fair Play Alliance “Common Player Behavior Myths” Panel at GDC 2018.)
Not everyone has a phone. (Insert Diablo Immortal Joke here.) Most notably console players and countries outside of the U.S. It would be unfair if a legitimate player is locked into potentially unbalanced matches indefinitely.
In the end, a lot of these ideas would very likely deter legitimate new players and I think that must be considered in any solution to deter disruptive behavior in Overwatch.
New players being placed with other new players is a negative effect? I disagree. Putting a new player up against a diamond-border Masters level Tracer is a negative effect. Putting a player who is new to the game against others that are also learning is TYPICAL. We do this not only in games, but in MOST group activities. There are almost ALWAYS beginner, intermediate, and advanced group separations.
As to reporting; I’d wager a new player is FAR more likely to be reported for “playing badly” by experienced players who are frustrated by being paired with them, and far less likely to be reported for playing badly by other new players who are also just trying to learn the game.
As to phones/SMS Protect; I’ve advocated multiple times for a PROPER 2FA unique identifier for Blizzard accounts. I would LOVE to protect and identify my account with my Yubi-Key hardware authenticator. Unfortunately, I can’t even BACKDOOR protect my Blizzard account via hardware token because Google Voice numbers are blocked! (My Google account is secured via hardware token which invalidates SIM swap and MIM attacks against SMS auth).
https://www.yubico.com/
As to low population areas, the standard fall-backs apply. Queues would simply be combined IF ABSOLUTELY NECCESARY.
I’m on a bandwagon of dropping comp for a tournament comp system like fortnite. That way lower levels are going to be hard handicapped with the nature of new accounts in a tournament: time.
So you can have 3, 10, 25 accounts and the only person harmed would be you
I don’t understand this at all. If we raise the level cap to 100, it’s considerably further away for an alt account, but level 100 is nothing for a main account. IMO players shouldn’t even consider competitive before that because they won’t probably even learn fundamentals of the game by that point. Thinking that players would get “annoyed” sounds extremely far fetched to me. I don’t even know how one could come to a conclusion like this.
When it comes to existing alt accounts, that’s also a non-issue here. If they keep playing normally on their alt accounts that already exist then they’ll simply be in their own MMR bracket where they belong which means no harm. If they’re not then they’re most likely engaging in gameplay sabotage and will most likely get suspended in the long run by the time they reach level 100. In other words I fail completely to understand how it would effect current accounts
I think it’s just absurd how it’s not obvious that getting a new account for 11$ and then having it competitive ready in less than one session is a high incentive to buy an alt account especially if you’re incentivized to get one due to the matchmaking experience or something similar that is a big issue in the game right now. If it took players 3-5 sessions more it would highly deincentivize them to get an alt account without an actual purpose
Tell ya what.
Once we stop all smurfs, we’ll stop all the smurf threads.
Fair?
But I don’t want to stop smurfs. I enjoy playing against people that are better than me. That’s how you get better at the game!
If you have a gaming console and especially a gaming PC (which is definitely not cheap), you have a phone. In fact, gaming on your phone is the primary source of video game entertainment in much poorer countries.
h_ttps://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2020/07/24/2067205/0/en/Outlook-on-Africa-s-Gaming-Industry-2020-2025-Mobile-Gaming-Will-Hold-a-Major-Market-Share.html
And people have access to phones at a much much higher rate than they own consoles.
h_ttps://europeangaming.eu/portal/latest-news/2020/10/26/80165/could-smartphones-take-over-consoles-in-popularity/
Like the argument that people don’t have access to phones is just silly.
Remember when we all laughed at blizzard 2 years ago for asking people if they had phones
The Answer?
Overwatch Plus™
There are a lot of people who buy/got multiple accounts at skill levels they don’t belong in, ruining the game and making it extremely unfun, while Blizzard does nothing about it.
People don’t care if you’re doing it intentionally or not. You’re making the game suck by simply doing it.
I have multiple accounts and am equally bad on all of them.
So, stop making smurf threads except me cos I have another account cos reasons therefore no one should anymore threads… 
Ok 
There’s plenty of reasonable explanations people come up with for they want more accounts, I just think that problems caused by this outweigh the slight benefits multiple accounts give, and that solving this personal problem shouldn’t come at the expense of screwing the game up for others.
I don’t see the value of being killed by the flanker 1000+SR above me cos my teammates aren’t able to hit the AD spam crouching Tracer/Genji, being picked off by the grappling widow cos I got didn’t predict that they would step out at that time and we don’t have shield/dive tanks to inconvenience them enough to miss a shot.
I just want to play against people about as good as me plus or minus, say, < 500ish SR this way I actually have an impact on the game at hand rather than simply be present 
I don’t care about winning or losing (I prefer to win though), I just want a close game. The game that we win cos our smurfs/alts is completely trashing the opposition is actually more boring than getting spawn camped cos at least then I can just go widow and take pot shots at things from spawn.