I’ve heard their stance on “smurfs” before but people like Jeff Kaplan seem to confuse smurf accounts for alt accounts.
Alt accounts they try to win and climb with. Smurf accounts they intentionally lose to stay in a lower elo to boost accounts and carry friends in their matches.
While one smurf can potentially ruin the game on console its not uncommon to see a stack of smurfs with 3 or more and the game is so massively one sided that it was over before it even began.
On ps4 this is a huge issue that ruins the competitive integrity of at least 30% of the matches.
I doubt they will ever do anything about this but it’s very frustrating.
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It’s a huge problem on PC with cheap accounts… I can’t even imagine console… or why there is even a “matchmaker” since there aren’t any real people playing real levels.
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If I’m playing against a zero star bronze border player with the name of an overwatch character I just accept it as a loss. Mid masters playing against a player named “GMsmurfTracer” (not an actual name to my knowledge. Just an example) means they’re definitely a smurf with a very high SR on their main account. There will be games where the enemy has five smurfs and that’s just normal on console.
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It shouldn’t be a norm though. Its frustrating how you can’t climb to your full potential because to do so you have to beat people who are higher than that in your own elo lol
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Yea it’s really bad on ps4. It also prevents smurfs from climbing too though. Like I’m technically a smurf on this account and I don’t throw, but I also can’t climb because I play solo and there are too many other smurf stacks throwing or tryharding.
It’s problematic yeah… but what can we do? Blizzard just hands out free PC accounts like candy so they’re not safe either
that’s because on console you dont need to buy the game again like on pc. I can go to gmail .com and make a new email address, then go to Microsoft .com and use said email to make an xbox account, and bam new acc ready to go free of charge. this is why you run into people with 30+ accounts on xbox.
idk about ps4 ive never played it but I would imagine its similar
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This morning I was in a situation where 2 smurfs with the most obvious smurf names were jumping off the map right outside spawn. They repeated this so much that the others on my team gave up and started jumping with them. Ugh.
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Outside of playing in full stacks its just safer to assume ladder play is dead in the water. And based off blizzard’s own action, or inaction, this is exactly what they wanted.
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